(Note: This article was originally written for a Chinese magazine, hence the slightly Lonely Planet-esque tone. Unfortunately the magazine was not to be, so I thought I'd best not waste my work, and am thus posting it here. Enjoy!)

The first British home of my mother's family was the East End of London. Fleeing violent persecution in Eastern Europe and Russia during the early twentieth century, they and millions of other Jews moved across land and ocean to North America, Australia, and England.

In London, Jews mainly settled in an area that stretched from Spitalfields in the West to Stepney in the East; from Hackney in the North to Whitechapel in the South. The centre of the Jewish East End was Brick Lane, a long, narrow road running for over half a mile between Whitechapel and Bethnal Green Roads. Now a popular weekend destination lined with cafes and vintage clothes shops, Brick Lane was then a little pocket of Eastern Europe in London, complete with pickled cucumber stalls and bagel shops (a couple of which survive to this day).

This was the world that my maternal grandparents grew-up in. Though it's now years since the family moved to the suburbs, my grandmother, Sylvia, still talks about the folklore of this area. Sylvia witnessed the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists were prevented from marching through the area; she remembers when the Jewish restaurant Bloom’s was at the southern end of Brick Lane; and she remembers eating cholent on the Sabbath.

Cholent, a long, slow-cooked dish of beef, potatoes, barley and beans, is the quintessential East-European Jewish food. Its origins, however, lie further west. In Medieval France, Jews in cities such as Toulouse, Nimes and Montpelier adapted the local speciality of cassoulet, and it is from the French that the dish gets its name - a combination of chauld (hot), and lent (slow), in reference to the cooking method. When the Jews were expelled from France in 1394, many went to Germany and further East, and they took their eating habits with them.

However, as the food writer Claudia Roden points out, 'the Jewish practice of cooking a meal in a pot overnight is of course much older than the fourteenth century’. Because lighting fires and cooking are both forbidden on the Sabbath (the Jewish holy day, from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday), Jews have long found ways of making sure they have at least one hot dish to eat during this time. In the shtetls (villages) of Central and Eastern Europe, on Friday evenings Jewish housewives would assemble their uncooked cholent at home, and seal the lid onto their copper pot with a mixture of flour and water. The name of the family was then marked on the pot in chalk, the pot taken to the local baker’s oven, cooked overnight, and finally fetched, often by children, on the way home from synagogue - a tradition that continued in London's East End.

Though patently a poor people’s food, cholent is nonetheless loved and held dear by many, and my own family has its own stories about the dish. My great-grandmother Annie apparently made an excellent cholent, for which her two adult sons, Harold and Morris, would come home every Saturday night. Annie also had her own secret ingredient - a sheet of parchment paper pitted with dozens of small holes made with the tip of a pencil, which she would place on top of the assembled cholent, and then pour over a layer of beef dripping, allowing the fat to ooze slowly onto the ingredients below - a pretty indulgent extra, since cholent is already so rich that it is said that ‘people have to go to synagogue on Sunday to pray for their stomach to recover’.

I bought the ingredients for my version of this dish at one of the last remaining open-air markets in East London: Ridley Road, in Dalston, Hackney. Now one of the most fashionable parts of the city, this area has, like the rest of the East End, had a chequered history. Settled by Jews in the early 20th century, it is now home to a sizable Turkish and Afro-Caribbean community, both of whom are increasingly being pushed out by the rising house prices. This is an area undergoing major changes - the Olympic Park is just down the road, making it the focus of many government-funded regeneration projects; this though is creating its own problems, as the riots in August 2011 showed. There is a certain tension in the air of Hackney, as the (usually) white yuppies rub shoulders with their poorer neighbours; while taking the photographs for this article, I was told that it 'wasn’t allowed'.

Nonetheless, I have a great fondness for this area. My best friend Francesca grew up just around the corner from here, and within my own family there are associations - my grandfather had a china and pottery shop on Mare Street, and Annie lived for a short time at the Pembury Estate (one of the flashpoints of the 2011 riots). Ridley Road market itself is a joy - ‘like taking a holiday every time you walk down it’, as I once heard someone say.

I’d never made cholent before, but the easiness and deliciousness of the finished product could easily convince me to do it again. This recipe comes from the wonderful Book of Jewish Food by the incomparable Claudia Roden, which is also where I gathered much of the information in this article.

Cholent, adapted from The Book of Jewish Food, by Claudia Roden

Serves 4

500g fatty beef, diced
3 tablespoons light vegetable oil
2 large onions, diced
3 garlic cloves, peeled and left whole
3-5 potatoes, peeled and cut into bite-size chunks
200g dried butter beans, soaked for an hour
100g pearl barley (optional)
2 bay leaves
salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 400°F / 200°C, gas mark 6.

In a large heavy pot or casserole dish with a tightly fitting lid, heat half of the oil, and brown the meat. Remove to a bowl, add the rest of the oil, and then fry the onions until soft. Add the garlic and bay leaves and fry until the aroma rises. Return the meat to the pot, and now add the potatoes, beans and barley (if using), seasoning each layer liberally with salt and pepper.

Cover with boiling water, then put the lid on and place in the oven. Cook for 20 mins, and then turn the oven down to its lowest temperature. Cook overnight, or for at least 8 hours. Serve, and in the words of Claudia Roden, ‘remove the lid at the table, so that everyone can get the first whiff of the appetizing smell which emanates’.

For the month of September 2011, Ridley's pop-up restaurant served lunch and dinner from an empty corner on Ridley Road Market, Dalston, East London.

Instead of paying with money, diners 'bought' their meal with produce purchased from the market, which the Ridley's chefs would then use to cook the next day's meals.

This film follows two Ridley's diners, who had never been to the market before.

www.ridleys.org

Before I moved to China, I wasn’t all that keen on meat. Sure I’d eat it if it was served to me and would probably enjoy it, but I never cooked it at home and never craved it. So when I first moved to China, I would usually favour vegetarian dishes, and if I did eat meat, I’d order chicken or beef.

But in a country where pork rules, this state of affairs was never going to last long. As I became more and more interested in the food of Sichuan and of China, my eating habits began to expand, and I tried more and more meat dishes.

The time and place of my conversion to pork I can remember very clearly. It was about a year after I arrived in China, and the Foreign Languages department of the university where I worked had taken the teachers away for a weekend break to the famous Emei mountain. We were eating lunch on our last day, at a fairly modest roadside restaurant near the small and unlovely town at the bottom of the mountain. Our boss had ordered lunch (including picking out a live fish) with the kind of enthusiasm and aplomb that speaks of someone who knows and loves food and doesn't need to worry about the bill. Soon, dozens of dishes appeared at our table, showcasing the breath of flavours that Sichuan is famous for.

Amongst the copious dishes spiked with bright red chilies or pungent Sichuan pepper, there was a subtle, pale dish of cauliflower and belly pork, the meat cut into finger length pieces that were an equal mix of fat and lean. The meat and vegetables lay in a small pool of equally colourless liquid, and it looked as if it would be a very plain flavoured, rather boring dish; as I remember, on being offered some by my Chinese colleague, I was reluctant even to try it.

I will never, ever forget the moment of my first mouthful of that pork. The best description I think I've come up with is 'an explosion of flavours'. Less poetically, it was as if I had discovered a whole new set of taste buds – there was a depth and deliciousness of flavour that I had simply never experienced before. It was a moment, and I say this without any exaggeration, of personal epiphany, and had two direct and wonderful consequences: I was instantly hooked on pork, and I started blogging about Sichuanese food soon after.

So, it was with delightful anticipation that almost exactly a year ago I planned my trip to Vietnam, where pork has almost equal a status as in China. My mouth watered even at the very descriptions of bun cha, bun thit nuong, cau lau et al...and thankfully, Vietnam did not disappoint.

I ate delicious pork dishes the length and breadth of the country – from bun cha in Hanoi, to cau lau (above) in Hoian, but there are two particular porky moments which I remember most of all. The first was in the far south of Vietnam in the Mekong delta, in a small town in Ben Tre Province. On my first evening there, finding myself unimpressed by my hotel’s food, I wandered into town to find some grub. In the small square at the main crossroads, I found a tiny noodle stall, and my heart jumped for joy.

As well as just looking fantastic, this barbecued pork was giving off an incredible smell – it had been marinating in fish sauce, chili and other flavourings for who knows how long, and was cooking over a fire made from coconut (the main local crop) shells, lending the smoke an intensely sweet and aromatic quality. It was cooked quickly, and served with cold bun rice noodles, crushed peanuts and various other goodies. It was simply gobsmacking, and I went back to that stall every evening of my stay.

The second porky moment of note in Vietnam was in the capital Hanoi, and was a rather special experience all round. Through my great friend Karin, who is Swedish, I came to meet and have the pleasure of spending some time with Thoa, the chef at the residence of the Swedish Ambassador to Vietnam. On hearing of my interest in Vietnamese food, Thoa welcomed us into her kitchen, not only at the Ambassador’s residence, but also in her own home.

The wonderful Thoa.

One afternoon, Karin and I went round to Thoa’s house for a very memorable cooking class/dinner, where we learnt how to cook nem, cahn chua, and this dish of pork and quail’s eggs, a variation of the Vietnamese classic pork and caramel sauce, itself a relative of my old Chinese favourite, hong shao rou, red braised pork. It’s an utterly sensational dish, and lucky for you, me and the rest of the world, I watched Thoa with eagle eyes and wrote down a rough recipe.

Thoa's version.

Having made hong shao rou quite a bit recently, I decided that the next time I bought a piece of belly pork from my wonderful local butcher I would try to recreate this dish at home. That day came last Friday, and also happened to be the day when I learnt that I'd got a job here. So, I made this dish in celebration, and it was, if I do say so myself, a brilliant success – the moment I starting cooking the meat I was transported back to the streets of Vietnam, the heady scent of fish sauce banishing the cold January day outside. The combination of this dish, and my recent meeting of another pork-obsessive, the talented chef here, have reminded me afresh why I adore this meat so. So, enough babbling: here, in honor of the pig, the King of Meats, is the recipe.

Thit Kho Tau (Pork and Quail’s Eggs in a Caramel Sauce)

500g of belly pork
1 spring onion
2 tablespoons of fish sauce
2 tablespoons of dark brown sugar
100 ml of water
½ can of coconut milk
6 quail’s eggs
Salt and pepper

1. Cut the pork belly into finger-length chunks, making sure that they have an equal mix of lean and fat layers. Finely chop the spring onion, and place in a small mixing bowl with the pork. Add the fish sauce and salt and pepper and mix well.
2. Hard-boil the quail’s eggs in a small saucepan, for about 10 minutes. Allow the eggs to cool by immersing them in cold water.
3. While the eggs are cooking, in a heavy-bottomed saucepan heat the sugar and a little of the water until they begin to caramelize.
4. Add the coconut milk and the rest of the water, and then add the pork and its marinade.
5. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat to a gentle simmer. Cook uncovered for at least an hour, stirring occasionally, topping up the mixture with water if it becomes too dry.
6. Shell the cooked quail’s eggs, and add to the pot about half an hour before serving.
7. Serve with plain steamed rice.

My version.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I recently returned to the UK after living in China for almost three years. As I hope this blog shows, during my time in China I developed a passion for Chinese food, a passion which I am now intent on sharing. Thus, I hereby present my London Chinatown Food Tour!

The tour is designed as a practical introduction to Chinese cuisine and Chinese cooking, and is particularly suited to people with little previous knowledge/experience of Chinese food but who want to learn more. The tour aims to dispel the myth that all Chinese food is greasy and unpalatable, and instead showcase the many diverse and delicious foods that China has to offer.

During the tour, participants will learn about the main regional differences in Chinese cuisine, the essential items for your cupboard if you want to cook Chinese food at home, and tips on buying unfamiliar ingredients such as tofu and Chinese fruit and vegetables. There will also be the optional extra of going for a light lunch/snack after the tour at the excellent Chinatown eatery The Baozi Inn.

The Chinatown Food Tour will be on every 2nd Saturday of the month, starting in February 2011. Please email jessielevene@gmail.com to reserve your place.

Thanks!

LONDON CHINATOWN FOOD TOURS
£8 full price / £5 concessions
Every 2nd Saturday of the month, starting at 2pm
Tour lasts approximately 1 and ½ hours
Minimum number of people in tour group: 5, maximum: 12

As I wrote about some months ago, while I was in Ben Tre province in February, I went on a bike ride. This was no ordinary bike ride however, but one on which I not only got to see the cutest baby in the whole wide world, but also...

Yes, that's right - chocolate! Little did I know, but Vietnam is actually one of the world's largest producers of cacao, almost all of which they export. I doubt that this is particularly high quality cacao, but at the time, I really didn't care - I was just beside myself with excitement at actually seeing chocolate in its rawest form. Above are the beans, spread over bamboo colanders to dry in the sun by the side of the road - this method of drying is also very commonly used in China, where everything from soy beans to sesame seeds are dried in this way.

And here is an individual bean in the palm of my hand. In fact, the chocolate bean itself is inside another thin layer of skin that is discarded before use - in the photo above you can see the bean with the skin sill on, split almost in half.

And of course I had a taste. Bitter, gritty and somewhat akin to coffee beans, I wouldn't like to eat chocolate in this form everyday, but it was definitely a memorable experience. For me though, the real icing on the cake was the sheer beauty of the cacao pods, just harvested from the trees - a positive rainbow of yellow, orange and pink.

And finally, at the beginning of this post you will find (or may have already found) a very short audio postcard that I recorded very close to where these photographs were taken. Please excuse the awful sound quality!