100 books like A Book of Middle Eastern Food

Fatima Mernissi was a Moroccan feminist. This book is her memoir of growing up in a harem (an enclosed all-female space) in Morocco in the 1940s and 50s.

It dispels many of the stereotypes and prejudices that many Westerners hold about how Islamic society treats women. The harem Mernissi grew up in was a warm and loving space. One of the elderly women living in it had been a slave, but was now cared for by the family. It was also a space where women could talk about their condition and consider ways of rebelling against it.

I assigned this book to a class on women’s human rights in the 1990s. It was very popular among the students, including the one man, whose background on his father’s side was Palestinian.

In this autobiography, Ahmed describes her childhood growing up in a Muslim family in the 40s and 50s in Cairo where she witnessed many of the formative events that transformed Egypt—the end of British occupation, the changes wrought by Nassar’s reforms, and the break-down of the largely peaceful coexistence of multi-ethnic and multi-religious groups after the establishment of Israel. Ahmed goes on to school in England and then later to a life in the U.S. where she has difficulty resolving the contradictions of her comfortable Islamic upbringing with a growing sense of feminist identity. Ahmed is professor of women’s studies at Harvard Divinity School. Although not veiling herself, she supports Muslim women who wear the veil as a symbol of their own version of feminism.

During the sixties, Atiya collected life stories of five Egyptian women from the lower and middle classes, ranging in age from twenty to mid-sixty. The stories show how to them, life starts with marriage. If they mention their childhoods, it is as preparation for marriage. Parents invariably arranged the women’s marriages or gave permission to potential husbands attracted to their daughters from a distance. Once the excitement of their weddings is over, however, most face an endless stream of difficulties. They recount experiences as co-wives, being forced into acrimonious divorces, family conflicts, and problems with children. They discuss witchcraft, female circumcision, poverty, and health issues. The book is unusual in that it conveys in their own words, the thinking of people not usually heard from in Middle Eastern writing.

Offended by the government’s destruction of ancient parts of the Damascus bazaar, Tergeman decides to record the Syrian traditions she experienced growing up in the city before they are lost. In somewhat idyllic form, she describes the celebrations and feast days, traditional foods, colorful characters announcing Ramadan hours, café storytellers, and the proverbs and sayings that were part of everyday life. Best of all, she conveys the warmth of family and community life. With a wealth of detail that only a Syrian can describe, the book gives us a glimpse into the values and beliefs that until recently were an integral part of the culture. Although many traditions are lost now, they still serve as a model for the way life should be in normal times. 

When Maria Lourdes, a popular tv chef, invited her audience to send in their household recipes, the response - at a time of political turmoil after the death of Portugal's dictator, Salazar, in 1968 - was overwhelming.

A fragile democracy and proposed membership of the European Union led to fears that the nation would lose its identity. Portugal's geography has led to historical isolation from her neighbours: on the one hand, a stormy Atlantic coastline, on the other a barren, mountainous interior. 

Portuguese housewives have always known how to make the best of what was available: out of some 8,000 contributions, half were for a left-over bread-dish, açorda, never found in restaurants. As a sea-going nation with strong culinary ties to her former colony, Brazil, Portuguese cuisine is surprisingly exotic.

A first-person account of the culinary habit of rural Britain gathered in the aftermath of WW1, Ms. Hartley set out to collect rural recipes at time when the countryside had been emptied of their young men, leaving young women without hope of a husband. 

Resourceful and independent, Dorothy travelled the length and breadth of her native land, sleeping under hedgerows, huddling round peat-fires, always with pen-and-ink and paper in hand, notebook at the ready. The finished manuscript complete with evocative illustrations didn't see the light of day until ten years after the end of WW2.

I well remember post-war rationing and terrible school catering in the 1950s, source of the nation's reputation for inedible food. Ms. Harley's recipes prove the reverse (particularly the baking). 

Ada Boni's culinary bible, Il talismano della felicità, first saw the light of day in 1928, six years after Benito Mussolini had succeeded in uniting Italy's quarrelsome regions under the banner of fascism.

Specifically targeted at the nation's housewives - ordinary folk on whose support El Duce rose to power in 1922 - this collection of nearly a thousand simple, practical traditional recipes for regional dishes became the dictator's favourite cookbook, as it did for generations of Italian women (still does). 

I first came across it on an Italian friend's recommendation while researching European Peasant Cookery and attempting to unravel the complicated traditions of a land that remains as fiercely partisan in the kitchen now as then. 

Unusually for a non-native cookery writer - and particularly so for the Catalans - this encyclopedic work by one of the US's most distinguished scholar cooks has become the go-to in restaurant kitchens throughout Spain's least-conformist region.

Publication in the Catalan language of its predecessor, Josep LLadonosa's El Gran Libro de la Cuina Catalana in 1992 (translated into Spanish, but not into English) was only possible after the demise of General Franco ended a fifty-year dictatorship that followed a particularly bloody civil war.

In spite of all efforts by Spain's central government to suppress Catalunia's language and culture, her spirit lived on - not least in a very distinctive culinary habit. It's no surprise that the iconoclastic genius of Ferran Adria surfaced in the land of Guadi and Dali. And no accident that Spain's gastronomic revolution started in Barcelona.  

Rose from Washington DC’s Maydan also takes a deep dive into her cookbook, from growing up in Lebanon and the recipes she grew up with to opening the restaurant and watching it grow.

It’s cool to see that whole journey represented in a cookbook and Lebanese food on display in another beautiful cookbook.

Sixty years ago when I first started cooking in Sicily, local ingredients were of topnotch quality but very limited variety, so my American cookbooks and food mags were useless. The discovery of Claudia Roden’s book opened up a whole new world: recipe upon recipe with Mediterranean ingredients and delicious results, and fascinating notes on the origin of the dishes, notes that made me want to know more about culinary history.