Yotam Ottolenghi has observed that when he moved to the UK from Jerusalem in the 1990s, making hummus at home was seen as the “height of exoticism”. Someone who was ahead of the curve on this, as on so much else, was the food writer Marlena Spieler, who has died aged 74.
Marlena’s groundbreaking 1985 cookbook Hot and Spicy (published in the UK in 1991) included a host of Mediterranean recipes that could easily come from one of Ottolenghi’s books, including spiced versions of hummus and baba ganoush as well as other Middle Eastern delights such as zhoug (a fiery Yemenite green sauce seasoned with green chillies), and shakshuka, that staple of the modern brunch scene.
In all, Marlena wrote more than 70 cookbooks, starting with Naturally Good in 1974, and co-authored or contributed to more than 25 others, maintaining a high standard of writing and recipe creation. The best of Marlena’s work combined a globe-trotting knowledge of world cuisine (she spent around a third of the year travelling) with a sunniness of tone and consistently exciting recipes.
There were certain tropes to which Marlena kept returning. A descendant of Holocaust survivors, she wrote numerous books on Jewish cooking – including Jewish Cooking, Best-Ever Book of Jewish Cooking and Recipes from My Jewish Grandmother. Melted cheese was another fond theme (for example in Grilled Cheese: 50 Recipes to Make You Melt and Macaroni & Cheese), but she was equally delighted by vegetables. The Vegetarian Bistro, published in 1997, was ahead of its time in offering vegetarian versions of traditional French recipes, while her 2007 book Yummy Potatoes led to a role as an ambassador to the United Nations’ International Year of the Potato conference in Peru. Above all, she wrote about the cuisines of her favourite countries, especially Mexico and Italy.
It was on a press trip to Parma that she and I first met 20 years ago. It soon became apparent that she had a more excitable passion for the food of Italy than anyone I had ever met, even Italians. I remember how thrilled she was about the fact that the pigs for prosciutto di Parma were fed on the leftover whey from making parmigiano-reggiano cheese, thus linking two of her favourite foods. She was on a perpetual hunt for the most delicious thing on the table and, when she found it, her generous impulse was always to share it. At a hotel breakfast one morning, she stopped me from drinking my coffee because she didn’t think it was good enough and pointed me to where I could get a better one.
When it came to food, Marlena was an enthusiast in the best sense – “I love garlic passionately. I yield to its voluptuous presence often, even at the point of destroying my social life,” she once wrote. Her good-humoured ebullience did not always endear her to the stuffier elements of British food-writing circles. Although she lived in Britain for the last 35 years of her life, with her second husband, Alan McLaughlan, her work was less recognised here than it was in her native US (although she made repeat appearances on The Food Programme on BBC Radio 4, for which she was once named the Guild of Food Writers radio broadcaster of the year). From 2000 to 2010, she wrote the Roving Feast column for the San Francisco Chronicle and in 1992 she won a James Beard award for her book From Pantry to Table: Creative Cooking from the Well-Stocked Kitchen.
Born in Sacramento, California, Marlena was the daughter of Isadore Smith, a baseball player who had played on the same team as Joe DiMaggio in Hawaii during the second world war, and Caroline (nee Dubowsky), a nurse. It was growing up in Sacramento, she would later write, that taught her to love “sun-drenched” cuisine, and particularly the tamales and tacos of Mexico. But what she called her true “culinary awakening” happened only when she left home for a kibbutz in Israel and discovered a world of “spicy fried falafel doused with tahini and pickled peppers”.
Her craving for the heat of both Mexican and Middle Eastern food inspired her second book – her masterpiece – Hot and Spicy. In that book, she wrote that eggs and chillies were “the only perfect flavour combination I know”.
In 2011, Marlena suffered a head injury in a car accident, which caused her to lose her sense of smell and taste. In 2014, she wrote an article for the New York Times on how losing her sense of smell as a food writer was “like a musician losing her hearing”. Her morning coffee was now “tasteless”, while sauteed mushrooms were like “scorched bits of sponge”. Gradually, her sense of smell returned. “A sardine sandwich at Brooklyn’s Saltie made me nearly cry with pleasure, as did the ripe peach I ate as I walked down the street.”
After recovering from the head injury, Marlena continued to write some of her best work, notably A Taste of Naples (2018), a celebration of Neapolitan culture as well as its food. The morning that she died – suddenly, of natural causes – Alan reported that she was excited to take delivery of yet another book to which she had contributed a recipe: Babka, Boulou and Blintzes – Jewish Chocolate Recipes from Around the World (2021).
Marlena is survived by Alan, by a daughter, Leah, from her first marriage, from which Marlena took the surname Spieler, three stepchildren, Gretchen, Philip and Heidi, and a grandson, Mondegreen. Her brother, Bryan, predeceased her.
• Marlena Spieler, food writer, born 16 April 1949; died 6 July 2023
