Rooza, by Nadiya Hussain

Is there such a thing as 'Islamic cuisine'?

I’ve never really watched Bake Off, so can’t claim to know Nadiya Hussain from the show, but I’ve long had a soft spot for her through ambient exposure on daytime TV. She just seems to have a good vibe, y’know?

So in hunting around for a cookbook to try out, her new release Rooza stood out, and not only for its unusual pitch: a book dedicated to Islamic food. There is, of course, no such thing as ‘Islamic food’, and Hussain knows that too. So maybe this is a better, albeit less catchy, pitch: a book dedicated to the food of Muslim communities from around the world.

Like most of the book’s offerings, this is a full meal in a bowl.

There’s a loose connective tissue around Ramadhan, which started recently, and the book’s name itself comes one of the world’s many terms for Ramadhan fasting, but I have my suspicions that a marketing team may have been behind that. Beyond a final chapter suggesting dishes for an Eid-ul-Fitr feast, the dishes here aren’t specifically those typical for breaking a fast with or eating at this time of year, so the Ramadhan hook is a little tenuous to my non-expert eyes.

Nadiya herself is British Bangladeshi, so naturally there’s a spread of south Asian food included here, but the book’s contents range from north Africa to east Asia, capturing a spread of communities along the way. With such a wide remit, it’s understandable this is in a sense shallow: most countries are afforded just one or two recipes, so you’re not going to come out an expert on Somalian cuisine, but you will pick up a smattering of Iranian dishes to follow up with Mauritian fish curry or Cambodian chicken thighs.

The book is a little geographically challenged.

That said, the organisation is… eccentric. The book is chaptered by country, but the chapters aren’t listed in alphabetical order, nor are they sorted geographically, by overlapping cuisines, or for whether the included recipes are savoury or sweet. Then there are the chapters that aren’t for countries at all. Algeria, Libya, and Egypt all get chapters, but there’s still a separate catch-all for North Africa. There’s similar double-counting for the Middle East and South Asia, yet the West & South Africa chapter is the sole nod to that part of the world. Stranger still, Syria gets its own chapter, but so does ‘Aleppo, Syria’. It’s the only city to get its own section. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book is also cautiously apolitical: don’t look for chapters on Palestinian food, or China’s Muslim Uyghur cuisine, or attempts to unpick the complexities of different dishes’ national origins.

The ‘Contents’ page doesn’t make for a great first impression then, which is a shame because once you actually start cooking things get an awful lot better. Thin sliced lamb, coated in sumac, is grilled and decorated with a punchy green sauce. A chicken tagine is pungent thanks to the sour hit of preserved lemons and plump green olives. Diced lamb is sautéed in a Somalian spice mix of garam masala and toasted coriander seeds.