One great cookbook: ‘The New Book of Middle Eastern Food’

Anyone who tries to capture the breadth of Middle Eastern cuisine usually spawns a bugbear. Claudia Roden, the preeminent scholar and cookbook author, instead inspired confidence and relief when she republished “The New Book of Middle Eastern Food” in 2000.

Roden debuted a version of the book in England in 1968, revised it for a second publication in 1985 and modified the text yet again on the cusp of the new millennium. That most recent edition, now 25 years old, remains a landmark text. You can read it as a scholarly plunge into the foodways and geopolitical maneuvering that shaped the countries of the Middle East, from Egypt to Turkey to Albania. You can wield it like a comprehensive 528-page road map to the cooking of those various countries. You would be wise to do both.

Holler for the scholar

The introduction to the “The New Book of Middle Eastern Food” is a sprawling treatise on the movements and conquests that shaped the region and, this being a cookbook, its cuisines. Roden reminds the reader of the Arabic influence on, for example, Italy: “Sicily is famous for her granite and sorbetti (the Sicilian dialect term sciarbat is the Arab word for a sorbet).”

Roden’s historical contextualizing continues across the recipe chapters. Mezze were “developed as a way of soaking up the drink arak.” She then explains that what we know as mezze in the West from Lebanese and Turkish restaurants was “born in the mountain resorts in the Lebanon where arak is produced, and in the old-style meyhane — the taverns or drinking horses of Istanbul.” Could you savor a collection of mezze without knowing these details? Certainly. Does this stage-setting make those mezze all the more enticing? Absolutely.

Theme and delicious variation

Full-bore cooking covers the bulk of “The New Book of Middle Eastern Food,” across 16 chapters. Grape leaves, served warm, stuffed with ground meat and rice and seasoned with tomato and cinnamon, include both a Lebanese and Greek variation.

This theme-and-variation approach occurs frequently across the book. A simple shakshouka with bell peppers, tomato and garlic presents a battery of optional tweaks, including the addition of preserved lemon peel, capers, harissa, sauteed onion or fried zucchini. It is a way to explore the concurrent sameness and difference of the cooking styles across the region’s countries. Cook what suits your tastes; recruit what you already have in your pantry or fridge. “The New Book of Middle Eastern Food” feeds both belly and brain.