Here’s a riddle for you (readers not familiar with Australian politics are forgiven for not having a clue). What do Amanda Vanstone and Claudia Roden’s Orange Cake have in common?

Answer: In her opening remarks at the recent Adelaide Writers’ Week session called “Food for Thought or Thought for Food“, (at which Claudia Roden was to be the guest) the moderator, Amanda Vanstone, said she’d wanted to ask Claudia how it felt to endure 55 years of being asked how to make the orange cake. “The damned orange cake,” Vanstone said. “Here is a woman who has made a fabulous contribution during her life and everyone says, ‘I like your orange cake’.”

Unfortunately, she didn’t get to put the question as Claudia Roden (now in her mid-eighties) wasn’t able to make the planned livestream from London.

Amanda Vanstone described herself as an enthusiastic and adventurous home cook, of cakes certainly, but also of middle eastern food, which is of course Claudia Roden’s speciality. Amanda told us she’s not however very impressed by celebrity chefs, apart perhaps from Yotam Ottolenghi, whose book is on her shelf (and everyone else’s it seems, although not mine). “Some cookbook writers,” she said “want to be celebrities so they can sell books …”. A foible common in fiction writers also, I’ve noticed (not pointing any fingers). 

Claudia Roden, who is a cultural anthropologist as well as cook, published her first book “The Book of Jewish Food” in 1968, thereby establishing her career long before anyone thought of celebrity-hood in relation to chefs.

At the time Claudia Roden’s first book came out, I was newly married, penniless and bereft of all domestic skills. (Forget “Barefoot in the Park“, I was barefoot in the kitchen and pregnant). This meant I became a home cook through force of circumstance, struggling to knock up something semi-edible to sustain the breadwinner plus the unplanned new life inside me. The previously mentioned Green & Gold Cookbook comprised my entire cookbook library. Needless to say I’d never heard of Claudia Roden or her book. 

When, a few years later, I found a recipe for Orange and Almond Cake, I was excited to try it because of the (at the time) novel method of boiling whole unpeeled oranges prior to pulping them in a blender. It sounded exotic and also like a scientific experiment, the outcome of which promised to be unexpected. (It also sounded a lot more exciting than sponge cake).

However, I didn’t know the recipe came from Claudia Roden or, for that matter, who she was. (I was ignorant of most things in those days, apart from getting pregnant.)

My initiation into the world of stewed oranges proved triumphant, as the resultant cake was delicious, aromatic with the flavour of oranges and almonds, one of the moistest cakes I’d ever tasted and decidedly exotic. So much so that it whetted my appetite to venture beyond the safe confines of the good old Green & Gold and forge ahead into new frontiers of flavour. This is the authentic recipe, taken from Claudia Roden’s book “The New Book of Middle Eastern Food“. If you’ve never tried it, do. With a gloss of orange syrup and a generous dollop of thick cream or Greek yogurt, it’s to die for.

Back to Adelaide Writers Week. The program guide for the session states that Claudia Roden “…  introduced homecooks around the world to the delights of cumin and coriander from Syria and Lebanon, pomegranates from Iran and harissa from Africa”. Although I’m part of the one in five proportion of the population who can’t abide the taste of coriander (which, to such people, is said to taste like soap, but to me tastes like putrid pond weed), I love all the other herbs, spices and flavourings that give Middle Eastern food its enticing and unique appeal. 

Acclaimed by Allan Jenkins in an article in The Guardian as “perhaps our finest food writer”, Egyptian-born Claudia Roden has been creating her signature dishes for over fifty years, has published 20 books and changed the cuisine of Britain, and many other countries. It was however a hard apprenticeship, as Amanda Vanstone explained. Food writing wasn’t her first choice of career. As an aspiring artist, she enrolled at St Martin’s in London to study art, but her studies were cut short when her family was forced to leave Egypt and became refugees, as a consequence of which she had to earn a living. It was then she turned to food writing. However, the only way she was able to collect recipes was by seeking out people on the train or in local shops to ask them what they traditionally cooked at home. This must have taken a lot of bravado, not to mention tact and diplomacy (if local commuters and shopkeepers in London at the time were anything like their time-pressed counterparts of today.) For more on how Claudia Roden defined a cuisine, an article written by Aimee Levitt in Eater.com, gives a definitive account.

The website Sheerluxe.com has put together an excellent condensed biography based on an interview with her conducted in September 2022, called “Chapters in My Life: Claudia Roden“. The following quotes are taken from that article.

“Cooking has been my way of enjoying life and learning about the world through food and making friends through food.”

“For me, there is always a feeling of conviviality around the table, a place of fun where I am happy”.

“So many younger chefs have been influenced by my books but now I’m influenced by them — because I go to their restaurants and I see what they’re doing.”

While it was disappointing that Claudia wasn’t able to join the livestream event at Adelaide Writers Week, those of us in the audience were given a thorough introduction to her food and her life, which in my case has sparked an urge to make “that damned orange cake” again, as well as try some of her other wonderful recipes.