To listen to more of Claudia Roden’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Claudia Roden (Food writer)  

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: Paul's mother had come over from Russia. I didn't know which city, because... or which village. I keep asking her, and she said she didn't remember. Or she remembered, but she didn't say. And she had come with her mother and sisters and brother, and she went to work straight away in a fish shop, which was her father's. But when she could, she had started a business of her own. And during the war, I think, she did children's clothes. And she couldn't drive, but she would go to some women who did cutting. Because a lot of people that she knew were in making clothes. It was the trade of most of them who came. And they would cut from patterns, then took the cut cloth and brought them to embroiderers, who did smocks for instance. And so, she specialised in special girls' dresses with smocks. And then she would go and fetch them, she was always with a suitcase, going from one place to another. And she made quite a good business.