The food writer discusses her new book, Med, while Yotam Ottolenghi, José Pizarro and Sam Clark pick their favourite dishes
Claudia Roden wasn’t sure that anyone would be interested in her writing another cookbook. “I kept telling my agent, ‘Nobody will want a book from an octogenarian!’” she says on a video call. Roden has just turned 85 to be exact, and she knew she wouldn’t have the energy for her usual process: travelling across countries and regions, painstakingly collecting recipes and stories from food lovers and chefs. But she is still a formidable home cook and relentless entertainer – for friends, for her children, now in their 50s and 60s, and their children – and, with a nudge from her agent, Roden wondered if there might be something in that.
“I was thinking, ‘What do I want from my life now?’” she says. “And I found that having people for dinner was what I enjoyed more than going to the theatre or to a concert. To have them just around my kitchen table was my idea and it will be what we cook. So I cooked hundreds of dishes and when we thought, ‘This is marvellous,’ it went in the book. I didn’t plan it to be Mediterranean. But it just was Mediterranean. Because that’s where I went.”