Claudia Roden - Egyptian culture (2/155)

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Claudia Roden (b. 1936) is an Egyptian-born British cookbook writer and cultural anthropologist of Sephardi/Mizrahi descent. She is best known as the author of Middle Eastern cookbooks including "A Book of Middle Eastern Food", "The New Book of Middle Eastern Food" and "The Book of Jewish Food". In this unique interview for Web of Stories, Claudia Roden is talking to her granddaughter Nelly Wolman about her life in food. [Listener: Nelly Wolman; date recorded: 2022]

TRANSCRIPT: Our life was very, very much about entertaining and visiting, and seeing each other. We had this really huge, huge family. For instance, one aunt had 18 children. And on one side, my mother... my father was one of ten, maybe 11, I think. They were all girls. And then, on my mother's side, there five girls and the last one was a boy. But life for most people in Egypt was about visiting, seeing each other, and food was very important.

It was a society... where hospitality was one of the most important part of its culture. There was hospitality, sociability, conviviality. I'm saying conviviality because you were supposed to, when you entertained, really entertain. It means people had to be happy. When they were in your house, you had to joke, you had to laugh, you had to say things that were going to be fun.