Location: Birmingham
Era: 1980 onwards
“I was brought up in Birmingham in the eighties, so a lot of our food was frozen food for convenience – things like Finder’s Crispy Pancakes, Birds Eye Potato Waffles and Fray Bentos Pies. My parents owned a chip shop, but we didn’t tend to eat takeaway food as it didn’t seem unusual or a rarity. Our diet was very limited on the fresh food front, that was saved for the Sunday roast. My Mom is Scottish/Irish and so the weekend was her forte. Food was always the conversation starter – what we were eating, what we’d be eating next, what we’d be eating later.
As I got older and started cooking for myself, I started to have more of a Mediterranean diet. A lot of our food would be Turkish, Greek or Arabic. My favourite foods to eat and to cook are Magronia/Pasticcio – a pasta bake, almost like a sandwich pasta, that you cook in the oven. A base of pasta, then your meat sauce, another layer of pasta and a bechamel sauce. When it’s cooked it comes out in a slab that you then square off and cut up into portions. Dolmades are vine leaves that you get in a jar, rinse them off and then stuff them with rice and then steam them. Stuffed aubergines too – papoutsakia – stuffed with minced meat.”
Arif Nedjat