“I didn’t know what I was missing,” he says.
A holiday with a friend and their family was the catalyst for his expansion beyond beige food.
He remembers courgette being the “gateway vegetable” to extending his limited palate.
“I felt obliged to eat what was on offer,” he says, “and probably, I was starved.” That was it; overnight, he started trying everything and appreciating food, especially at Claudia’s.
“It was like a treasure box,” he says. “There were so many delicious things on the big table that were new to me. I couldn’t get enough.”
How things have changed since his childhood. We’re at Claudia Roden’s Hampstead house, where Cesar is testing his grandmother’s recipe for confit duck and prune, a delightful combination of savoury, sharpness and sweetness, served on a pillow of smooth potato. Her next book, on which she is currently working, is Middle Eastern-focused. Claudia is interested in the recipes for regional dishes that nobody gave her before, because they were regarded as “poor foods”.
“I’m so proud of my grandson,” says Claudia, beaming as she surveys Cesar preparing the dish. “He is such a great cook. He has such good taste, but he is also so precise. He can tell me exactly how much garlic I should have put in,” she says of his exacting attention to the milligram. “And I’m also thrilled, because we share the passion for food.”
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This is a common day in the life of the duo; Cesar is often here at his grandmother’s home, where they develop each other’s recipes together, and offering a taste of his latest creations for his food business, Ice Kitchen.
Cesar has just launched his range of frozen curry pastes at Sainsbury’s – they are already stocked by Ocado – and is working on a recipe for a new tagine-style paste to add to his collection. At first, Ice Kitchen made artisanal ice lollies, created from real fruit, but because of their seasonality – people tend not to eat frozen treats unless it’s 17°C or more – Cesar pivoted to curry pastes.
Having travelled extensively in Asia, Cesar’s second favourite cuisine to Middle Eastern is Thai, for its “fresh” and “flavourful” ingredients. He was unable to find any commercially available pastes that tasted as fresh, so decided to make his own.
Cesar trained as a chef at Westminster Kingsway College, which he loved but was constantly in trouble “for not being in perfectly ironed uniform”.
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He then worked in a few gastro pubs, but that meant too many weekends of hard work for a 19- to 20-year-old. I wonder to what extent Cesar has used his “nepo-baby” status to further his culinary career, and Claudia remembers when her young grandson brazenly asked if he could go into business with her.
“I asked, ‘Can I put your name above the restaurant?’ And she said politely, ‘You need to prove yourself first.’ That was completely fair enough.”
Claudia’s vast influence in the food world is indisputable. Since she is not on social media, she does not see the constant praise, mentions and tags from her followers, but she did receive a CBE in 2022 for her services to food culture, and last year the University of London awarded her a doctorate for sparking an interest in food studies. Yotam Ottolenghi has raved about the influence she has had on his recipes – her first book came out in 1968, the same year the Israeli chef was born.The conversation turns to food trends and how the young people in her life, including Cesar, know what is “fashionable now”, having learnt from the likes of Ottolenghi. When she was testing recipes for her Mediterranean book, Claudia would ask Cesar what he would add and he would suggest sumac or tahini.
Claudia would recoil: “I’d think, no, you can’t put on tahini or sumac in Morocco. For me, it’s got to be of the culture, and we can’t mix. All the new chefs are mixing everything, they’re doing a fusion of the diaspora.”
For Claudia ingredients like sumac should stick with their tradition Photo: Getty ImagesGetty Images/iStockphoto
What Cesar has learnt above all from his grandmother, is that simple is best – let the ingredients sing for themselves. He suggests Claudia’s recipes are less complex than most. She agrees. “Yes – a lot of the inventors want to put in too many things.”
Is she therefore concerned about traditional dishes – those she has so painstakingly worked to preserve – fading away to make room for modern fusion? She is concerned “because culture is very important for identity, for who we were”.
She recounts how her grandmother was the source of the Syrian recipes passed to her aunts and mother, after the family came from Egypt to live with other Jews from Syria.
The recipes were passed from mother to daughter “the same in every family in every country”. That has mostly changed now.
“For a lot of countries, they don’t cook like their mother any more,” she laments. “They cook from the internet.”
However, she points to a trend where grandmothers film themselves cooking and post videos on social media, so their traditional recipes continue.
“If it’s lost, it’s a precious culture that you lose. It’s wonderful if chefs do what they like, and young people can invent, but it would be a pity to lose [tradition].”
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If there’s one of her recipes that has been made the most, it’s her famous orange cake. For Claudia, it’s an example of a dish being handed down the generations. It was given to her by Syrian Jews – Sephardi Jews who had come via Livorno and continued to cook Portuguese dishes. “It was fusion,” she says, “but it took 500 years. Not one chef deciding to do that.”
Claudia was bemused when someone told her they put chocolate ganache on the cake – something she had never considered because she so faithfully recreates the recipes given to her. “I was obsessed with tradition,” she continues. And she still is. “It’s me; I can’t be different. But I now feel a bit freer. What is exciting is I’m doing a lot of new dishes.”
Ice Kitchen pastes are available in Sainsbury’s and on Ocado. Instagram: theicekitchen
