Our President, Claudia Roden, has long been a guiding light of the Oxford Symposium. Her books, among them the ground-breaking The Book of Middle Eastern Food and The Book of Jewish Food, have inspired food historians and sociologists as well as home-cooks and professional chefs for more than five decades. But it is her skill as story-teller – meticulous recorder of treasured memories – that makes her books irresistible.