The sun come out means reading in the park with the roses. Ya!, the roses are still out, and the yellow ones smell of sweet butter. I packed a chicken pie and a strawberry shortcake with the picnic blanket.

There’s a really wonderful article about Claudia Roden in this week’s New Yorker, the food issue. I came to the woman a couple of years ago through her cake – her orange cake, that is, the one cake I regularly make that inevitably results in its tasters asking for its recipe. I made the cake and I made the cake and then one day I realised that Claudia Roden was Somebody. The cake, of course, we already knew, much like Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web was Some Pig, was Some Cake.

Jane Kramer’s article takes us through Roden’s literary and culinary life, through the kitchens in which she cooks and in which she watches the cooks. There are kitchens in Cairo and kitchens in Damascus; kitchens in Iran, in Lebanon, in the Spanish province of Asturias; there is especially one kitchen in North London, next door to two prize pigs. There are mangoes and spinach soup and a slow-roasted lamb. There is a pantry full of “grains and preserves and flower waters”. There is also a nice picture of the woman and a goat.

It’s not just kitchens, either. A scholar of food, Roden adventures among philosophers and historians, poets and tale-tellers to gather her material. She meets potential sources of recipes outside bean shops. Bean shops! This is a life. I wonder if it is the kind of life I would like mine to be like. I could hang out outside bean shops in dark glasses and a chocolate cigarette. These things you think when the sun is warm on your back and the kids in the park are cheering for birthday cake.