Claudia Roden's definitive guide to Middle Eastern cuisine reflects decades of research, travel, and personal heritage, presenting over eight hundred recipes that span the region from Morocco to Iran while explaining the historical and cultural contexts that shaped each tradition. Roden, who grew up in Cairo in a Sephardic Jewish family before the exodus of 1956, began collecting recipes as a way of preserving a vanishing culture and expanded into comprehensive documentation of the broader region. The book covers the four major Middle Eastern culinary traditions—Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and North African—while tracing how ingredients, techniques, and dishes traveled along trade routes and migrated with populations. Her recipes range from the mezze that begin any proper meal through main courses of grilled meats, rice dishes, and stews, to the pastries and sweets that culminate in hospitality rituals. Roden writes with warmth about the social dimensions of food: what dishes mean for celebrations, how cooking varies between home and restaurant, what flavors signal comfort or festivity. This revised edition incorporates recipes discovered in continued research and reflects how Middle Eastern cooking has evolved while maintaining its essential character. Home cooks will find both accessible entries into the cuisine and challenges for more advanced skills, while anyone interested in food history will value Roden's synthesis of scholarship and personal knowledge.