Nigella Lawson's Oriental steak and kidney pud, Nigel Slater's Spanish-style spuds, Sybil Kapoor's guide to ethnic stores... We celebrate the diversity of British food and drink. Claudia Roden remembers arriving here in the 50s, when food was inedible and the best roast beef came from Cairo

When I came to London in the mid-50s, the food was horrifyingly bad. It was not entirely a culture shock because in Cairo I had been to the English School, where the Egyptian cooks gave us roast beef with gravy and Yorkshire pudding, steak and kidney pie, and jelly with custard.

The British did not like foreign food. Lord Carnarvon had regular hampers sent over from Harrods to Egypt and the excavator Flinders Petry, who could not afford Harrods hampers, lived on tins. Because of the heat, these were dangerous. He would throw the tin at the wall, and if it exploded he would not eat it.

When I started working on A Book of Middle Eastern Food in the late 60s, people would ask: 'Is it about sheep's eyeballs and testicles?' Looking at the first edition, I see substitutes for everything: 'If you can't find chickpeas, use beans' and explanations such as: 'Courgettes are baby marrows.' Our greatest treat then was to eat spaghetti Bolognese in Soho coffee houses, and mezze and grills in Cypriot kebab houses in Camden Town.

Today, British tastes have changed. London is one of the food capitals of the world. Every type of restaurant and food shop is represented. Going to east London's Stoke Newington and Green Lanes is like stepping into Turkey or Cyprus. The East End, Southall and Wembley in north London are a little India and little Pakistan, and Chinatown in Soho keeps expanding its borders. You even have Japanese supermarkets in the suburbs. (It's hard to believe that only a decade ago hardly anyone here would let raw fish pass their lips.)

Britain is the country which has, more than any other, adopted and integrated its immigrant cuisines (compare it to France and Italy, which have not integrated foreign foods). And people here are the most adventurous cooks in the world. They will attempt anything, and they carry it off very well. You can find hundreds of cookery books on every kind of food. When an ethnic dish is demonstrated on television, you'll find it at hundreds of dinner parties in the following weeks.

From bulgur and couscous to lemon-grass, okra and all kinds of unusual pasta, our supermarkets have a huge variety of ingredients never seen before. The chilled-food range at my local Marks & Spencer is like an ethnic-food emporium. Italian is the biggest seller, then comes Chinese, and Indian chicken tikka masala - chargrilled chicken in a creamy sauce - is the most popular Indian dish here, though Waitrose doesn't do it because it's not authentic. After Indian comes Middle Eastern (my mother was surprised once to find, at a friend's house, that some of the bought savouries were like hers).

Not long ago the British found Indian cooking smells so nauseous that they would not consider living next to an Asian family. Now curry is the national dish and chicken tikka is the nation's favourite sandwich. Curry houses, balti restaurants and Indian takeaways account for £2.5bn of trade. The Indian meal has become part of the British way of life, with football fans singing, 'Vindaloo! Vindaloo!'

The Jews had an early influence on the cooking of Britain. Fish and chips is their legacy. In 1968, the National Federation of Fish Friers presented a commemorative plaque to Malin's of Bow in the East End. Joseph Malin, newly arrived from eastern Europe, was the first to sell chips with fried fish in 1860. Following his example, Jewish fish and chip shops opened all around the country. Smoked salmon was the prime Jewish delicacy in Britain at the turn of the century. It was immigrants from Russia who brought the smoking techniques to London. Soon after the Second World War, immigrants from Vienna and Hungary opened pastry shops and coffee houses that popularised apple strudel, cheesecake and Danish pastries.

Middle Eastern, too, has become part of our own eclectic cooking, partly as a result of the Lebanese civil war and the revolution in Iran. Star chefs such as Peter Gordon, Alastair Little and the Clarks at Moro in Clerkenwell, serve Egyptian lentil soup, Lebanese tabbouleh, Moroccan pastilla, and all kinds of tagines and brik.

Food seems to be that part of an immigrant culture that immigrants hold on to longest - when they have abandoned the traditional dress, the language, the music. Instead of marginalising it, Britain has absorbed it and made it its own. Our cooking has become a true melting pot - the joint heritage of our multicultural society.