Claudia Roden was born and brought up in Cairo and went to school in Paris for three years before going to London to study art. She was joined by her family when the Jews left Egypt in a hurry in 1956 after the Suez Crisis. She was drawn to the subject of food at first through a desire to capture a lost heritage and continued to write about food taking a special interest in the social, historical and cultural background. She has written about the cooking of the Middle East, North Africa, the Mediterranean, Italy and Spain and about Jewish food.