Spice Routes.(Claudia Rohen)

Some years ago, Claudia Roden was walking down a hall in an apartment house in North London, on her way to a friend's, when she smelled a soup that reminded her of home. Roden was born in Cairo. She has lived in London for more than fifty years, and she carries a British passport, holds respectably British left-wing views, owns a big house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, and has written ten cookbooks in the English language, including "A Book of Middle Eastern Food" and "The Book of Jewish Food," and is finishing an eleventh, about the food of Spain. But if you ask where she's from she says "Cairo" and if you ask her about the soup she says, "Melokhia, a soup no one but we Egyptians like"--which, she also says, is why she followed the smell to a stranger's door that day, rang the bell, introduced herself to the Egyptians inside (they were not at all surprised), and was promptly invited in for lunch. She describes the soup in a discouraging, or perhaps proprietary, way: "It's made with a dark-green leaf, like a gelatinous spinach. You find it in all the Egyptian tombs, and now, through DNA, in the mummies' stomachs." But she's wrong about no one except Egyptians liking it. I tried my first melokhia at a wonderful London restaurant called Moro, in Exmouth Market, and it was so good that I nearly cancelled the rest of dinner and ordered more. "The melokhia? That's Claudia," Samantha Clark, who, with her husband, Samuel, cooks the food at Moro, told me. "Her 'Middle Eastern Food'--when we opened the restaurant, we soaked it up like sponges. There was so much there, and we wanted to learn as much as possible from it. Some of our first menus were written with Claudia in mind, and the soup stayed."

Roden, at seventy, is one of the most revered writers in what the British call "cookery." She is the youngest, and last, of a triumvirate of hungry, highly literate, and ethnographically indefatigable women who helped transform how Britain cooked, and what it cooked, persuading the domestically challenged bourgeoisie of the postwar years that the taste of a good soup held a world of history and culture, and that the pleasures of the table did not stop at the shores of Albion but, in all likelihood, began there. The first of those women was the well-born, fragrantly libertine Elizabeth David, who had discovered the South in the course of a peripatetic wartime love affair, and then, with her books on French and Mediterranean food, produced a culinary revolution in a country where the sale of olive oil was mainly confined to pharmacies, as a balm for earaches, and where saffron, eggplant, and zucchini blossoms had barely entered the vocabulary, let alone anybody's local market. The second woman was Jane Grigson, a modest, amiable translator who had studied at Cambridge and, with her husband, the poet Geoffrey Grigson, spent her summers in a village in the Loire Valley. She put the flair of the French into English cooking, and under her gentle instruction the overcooked Sunday joint became a juicy, garlicky leg of lamb and the leached vegetables got back their flavor. But Roden didn't have to discover the South. She was born to it, at the heady end-of-empire moment when the British controlled Egypt but the markets of Alexandria and Cairo belonged to the Arabs, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Copts, and Jews who lived there, and meals, for the upper classes, were a serious, almost erotically exhausting pleasure. She left Egypt at fifteen, for a boarding school in Paris, and, after a few years of returning for summer holidays, didn't eat in Cairo again for a quarter century.

Most people meeting Roden for the first time would find her very British. She has peachy skin and a smooth high brow, and at home she wears good, comfortable English country clothes: floppy skirts, pastel cashmere cardigans looped over her shoulders, and sensible shoes. But she is often told that she has an "Egyptian face," and when you look closely you begin to see the East in the upturned curve of her smile and in the dark hair falling from a center part and in the almond eyes. When she is dressed for a party, wrapped in the silky rich blues and reds and purples of her evening clothes, Egypt is unmistakable. Everyone notices her eyes then, because they are rimmed with kohl. She can tell you how the women in the Middle East prepare their kohl. ("In Morocco, you burn a cloth with oil and keep the soot that collects" is one recipe.) But, like her recent attachment to vacuum-packed fish stock and frozen artichoke hearts, her own kohl recipe is updated and efficient. "I turn a Pyrex dish over a candle flame," she says, "and within fifteen minutes I have enough soot for a year of powder."

She comes, in fact, from an old Syrian Jewish merchant family, or, more accurately, from two old Syrian Jewish merchant families, the Doueks (her father, Cesar) and the Sassoons (her mother, Nelly), which had moved their operations to Cairo in the eighteen-nineties, following the cotton trade that opened with the Suez Canal. Two generations later, Nasser seized the canal and began expelling Jews and foreigners. The family today is scattered through Europe and the Americas. The Doueks and the Sassoons, like many Jewish traders in the Middle East, had grown prosperous over the centuries by dispatching their sons to the caravan stops of the silk and spice routes and the shipping ports of India and the Far East; and the most successful had kept their money (and their debts) in the family by marrying off their daughters if not to a cousin or an uncle then to the sons of like-minded and equally prosperous Jewish merchants. The family's business base and, you could say, its reproductive center was Aleppo, where, as Roden will tell you, with a sweet smile, "there have been Jews since Abraham came through Syria with his sheep." Her paternal great-grandfather was the chief rabbi of Aleppo during the last half century of Ottoman rule and, in line with his status and his family responsibilities, had sired an enormous brood--twenty-six children--most of whom multiplied as energetically as he had. Roden has hundreds of cousins and appears to know them all. Her daughter Nadia, an artist and animated-filmmaker who lives in New York, says that the three Roden children grew up convinced that everyone they met besides their classmates and teachers was a relative, or might marry a relative and become one.

Nelly and Cesar Douek arrived in London in 1956 (after a year in Sudan, whose only tangible benefit to the family was a good new recipe for ...