The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York

"Claudia Roden is brilliant, and when I was younger I saw her as lovely, sweet and maternal. My mother wasn’t really into the whole cooking thing. She worked and I didn’t see her that much, and she certainly never went into the kitchen. Well, it was good to think of her cooking away in the kitchen. Although I am 100% an Ashkenazi Jew, I wasn’t brought up as one. My mother didn’t really cook Jewish food, although one of my grandmothers did. When I was about 25 I was writing a novel, Winkler , which was about Jewishness, and I started wanting to be able to cook Jewish food. I got some recipes off my mum and then I got this book. The book is divided in half, which the world’s Jews are, between Ashkenazi and Sephardic. Sephardic is the more Middle Eastern kind of food, which is not what I am interested in, although Lebanese food is delicious. Ashkenazi is a sort of Eastern European, sort of Polish-Jewish cuisine. I like to make a cholent. This is a dish that my mother did cook, although she had a very modern, quick way of doing it whereas Claudia’s one takes a lot longer. Actually the second Leon cookbook has my cholent recipe in it, which is one that I adapted from Claudia. It is basically beans and barley in a pot with paprika and onions and marrowbones, and then a fatty cut of beef and salt and pepper, and you put it on the lowest heat in the oven, or in the warming pan of an Aga, overnight for 12 hours. If you don’t like it you are not Jewish, because it is not actually that nice. It is a sort of acquired taste."