In more than 800 glorious recipes interwoven with stories, reminiscences, and history, Claudia Roden traces the fascinating development of Jewish cooking over the centuries. The recipes - many of them never before documented - are the treasures garnered by the author during almost fifteen years of traveling around the world, tasting, watching, collecting recipes, talking to cooks and food sellers, and gathering the stories that spice this remarkable book. During her travels Claudia Roden wrote down her affectionate memories of the people behind the thousands of recipes she collected. She presents to us only the finest of her myriad dishes and leavens them throughout with tales of her travels, with intriguing history, with jokes and stories shared in communities all over the globe - in tiny villages and in such once-great Jewish cultural centers as Aleppo and Salonika.