The co-founder of Moro saw her love for Middle Eastern cooking flourish with the help of pioneering cookbook author Paula Wolfert, her recipes and experiences

My husband Sam and I met when working at The Eagle pub in Farringdon. The cooking there was predominantly Mediterranean, but we were allowed to dabble in Middle Eastern food, which is what most interested us.

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When we got married in 1996, Ruthie Rogers gave us a copy of Paula Wolfert’s The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean as a wedding present. And along with Claudia Roden’s Middle Eastern Cooking, it was instrumental in helping us find our style.

When we left The Eagle, we didn’t want just to go and cook Italian food. We wanted to do our own thing. So we went travelling around Spain before heading eastwards, with Paula’s book tucked under our arm, like a culinary travel guide of sorts. Sam was very interested in Muslim culture. And in terms of food, we didn’t want to be limited.

Travelling around Spain at times felt as if there was too much focus on meat and fish, whereas the Middle Eastern side of things was the complete antithesis of that. Lots of salads, lovely vegetables, lighter grains, yoghurts, spices. It gave us a much larger repertoire of countries and ideas to delve into.

The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean is a travel-based book. Paula lived in Morocco for years during the 1970s, and that’s where she learned her love of going into people’s homes. That’s where you fully understand the unspoken language of food and the doors it opens– it’s amazing. When you show an interest in someone else’s country and heritage, you don’t need much more than food to communicate.

When we were travelling, we’d come across things that Paula had written about; eating freekeh – that ancient roasted green wheat we loved so much – in a village in Turkey, say, or finding out about the hundred different types of kibbeh. Other times we would read about ingredients and go on a quest to find them, or dishes we’d need someone to show us how to make – because these weren’t things like the classic kebab that everyone knew about, they were things you couldn’t find in London at the time.

Paula does a vegetarian kofta with bulgur wheat and homemade pepper paste, red lentils, coriander, garlic and pomegranate molasses, which is cooked and served with a squeeze of lime.

Every recipe also comes with a story on the side. This one was about learning to make the pepper paste with the different varieties you find in different regions. And how the flavourings – the molasses, the spices – changed, too. Pomegranate molasses is such a cliche now, but back then it was new. And we were passionate about learning to cook with these new flavours. We were learning, discovering, and that was exactly what Paula encouraged you to do. She was inspirational.

Back in London, before Sam and I opened Moro, home was where we did all that experimenting. We have a little less time to cook at home these days, but our love of food travelling adventures is still intact – it’s in our blood. We yearn to explore the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, still inspired by Paula.

Sam Clark is co-founder of Moro and Morito restaurants

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