Latest news with #Jikoni
Telegraph
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Discover recipes by Diana Henry's favourite female food writers
I hold the female food writers I most admire not just close to my heart, but at my core. That's because they're not, of course, 'just' writing about food. When I pondered whose cookbooks I'd be reading and cooking from in 20 years' time, the answer came easily: Ravinder Bhogal, Meera Sodha and Olia Hercules. Every so often you hear the phrase 'food is their language' and don't quite know what it means, but when I look at the work of these three, it's as clear as day. They recognise that food writing is a form of social history, a way of connecting to places and a way of connecting with you. All these women were separated from their homes or their heritage, and cooking was the path back. 'I'm Kenyan by birth and spirit, Indian in heritage and heart,' Ravinder told me. 'And a Londoner through and through.' In 1987 she came to London with her parents and was bullied at school. Anxiety about how her parents would survive in this new country made her withdraw and food became central. 'Cooking was a portal to what I was pining for, what I'd left behind. Mealtimes – when I could smell spices – became a coping mechanism. You got through one meal at a time.' She's also the fourth daughter in a family that wanted sons: 'Educating girls was likened to planting a seed in your neighbour's garden: a pointless pursuit.' Despite what she had to cope with, it was hard to crush her. She kept cooking, doing pop-ups and catering until the restaurant critic Fay Maschler told her to stop being a coward and open a place of her own. She describes her London restaurant, Jikoni, as 'an immigrant kitchen', because her life has crossed so many borders. Meera Sodha also feels that she is 'the product of many places' and comes from a family that has known poverty, division and losing everything because of political upheavals. She describes herself as part-Gujarati as that's where her family is from, part-Ugandan as her parents grew up there, and part-Scunthorpian because that's where she was born. As with Ravinder, cooking helped Meera feel 'more at home in all of these places'. Meera wrote her first book, Made in India – a bestseller – because she wanted to record the Gujarati family recipes she grew up with. Her huge work ethic has resulted in three more books. Her inspiration comes from all over the world, partly because she has known so many places and partly because of her love of flavour. 'A new recipe can originate from seeing two ingredients in the fridge that might not typically go together,' she says. Success was expected in her family: 'Work came first and everything and everyone else came second.' Perfectionism and long hours led to burnout – she stepped back from work for several months, then published her best book yet, Dinner. Her recipe introductions reveal the whirring of her thoughts as she explains why you too can cook this, and why it works. Olia Hercules, who moved here in 2011, was already known for her books on Ukrainian cooking ('I wanted everyone to know that it was full of colour and joy') when Russia invaded her home country. If you follow her on Instagram, you will know how raw her posts can be. I worried she was so traumatised she was breaking down before our eyes. She used her platform to get proper boots for men such as her brother, who chose to stay and fight, and urged us to hold dinners, lunches and cake sales to raise funds. Cooking in the face of such brutality seemed almost hopeless but the #CookForUkraine initiative has raised more than £2 million and kept Ukraine at the front of our minds. Olia told me recently that she is even more interested in food than she was before the war. She recognises that food writing is a way to understand – and hold close – countries you've never been to. Food binds us. We all fry onions.
New York Times
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Brunch Is Best With Some Surprises. Try This Edamame and Yuzu Dip.
When Ravinder Bhogal was growing up in Kenya, as 'Daughter No. 4' (as she wryly puts it) in a family with Punjabi roots, the avocados in her backyard were the size of coconuts. She'd crush sugar right into the flesh and spoon it out. No such luck in England, where she moved with her family at age 7 on a day of icy rain, to a dark, damp flat without central heating. Recipe: Avocado, Edamame and Yuzu Dip With Furikake Years later, the memory of those giant, buttery fruits, plucked warm from the sun-drunk trees in her grandfather's plot of red earth, came back to her as she was trying to compose a brunch menu for her London restaurant, Jikoni ('kitchen' in Kiswahili). Brunch is a black hole for chefs. In theory, it is good: a meal without rules, unmoored from proper hour, abundant, anarchic, oversating, stupefying, staunchly opposed to those pallid guardrails of modern life, efficiency and productivity. In 1895, the British journalist Guy Beringer — who is commonly credited with introducing the 'brunch' portmanteau in print, in the short-lived periodical Hunter's Weekly — praised the meal because 'it renders early rising not only unnecessary, but ridiculous.' The argument was not for sloth but for debauchery: Bypass breakfast for brunch, and you can stay up as late as you like the night before, consequence- and conscience-free, dancing on the table and embracing ruin. How did such a delightfully illicit meal become so staid, so forgettable? Blame us, the diners, who throng the sidewalks on a Sunday morning, demanding our pancakes and avocado toast. Bhogal wanted to find a way to please but also surprise the crowds. She's known as a chef who bucks convention, simmering whole mangos — pits included — in curry, on the logic that, first, a whole mango is the greatest luxury and honor you can offer a guest, and second, 'If you can pick up a chicken bone and gnaw on it, why not a mango stone?' Her 2020 cookbook, 'Jikoni,' has the subtitle 'Proudly Inauthentic Recipes From an Immigrant Kitchen.' Mulling over how to give new life to avocado toast, she turned to citrus, the startling sourness that 'makes you involuntarily smile,' she says. Yuzu is sweeter and gentler than lemon, with a sherbety tang; it's light where avocado is luscious, a fragrant evanescence against the fruit's heft. (If you don't have it on hand, try squeezing together lime and clementine.) She started to ponder other additions: ginger, with its own subtle sweetness and restorative sting; soy sauce standing in for salt, but rounder and deeper; toasted sesame oil, earthy and plush on the tongue, making everything it touches more intensely itself; edamame for body (and protein); and sambal like a red flare. The result, after a tumble in the food processor, was voluptuous, cooling with a throb of heat from the sambal and, in the yuzu's mellow brightness, a callback to that lost sun. She dusted it with furikake — she makes a vegetarian version from scratch, swapping out bonito flakes for a crackly calligraphy of fried shallots — and served it at the restaurant heaped on toast under a poached egg's fat cloud. But it's so good, you can dispense with the formality of framing it as a meal and eat it straight as a dip, as Bhogal does at home, dunking in the likes of carrots, radishes, tortilla chips or Thai prawn crackers ('the spicy ones,' she insists), those ossified gulps of briny air. 'This couldn't be simpler,' she writes in her most recent cookbook, 'Comfort and Joy.' The only hard part is choosing the avocado. You want one with a little give; if it's rock-hard at the market, she warns, it'll go straight to rotten, and you'll never get the sublime creaminess in between. To make it ripen faster, she likes to pop it into a bag with bananas 'and let them make merry,' she says. Making merry by mixing ingredients and traditions might well be Bhogal's mantra. She remembers the small jikoni of her Kenyan childhood as a place of cozy chaos, where the women of her sprawling household forged a new language out of multiple heritages, grabbing words from Kiswahili, Punjabi, Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu and English like spices out of the larder. When her family decamped to London, she mourned those clamorous, gilded days. Then she settled in, looked around her and learned that you keep loving the world; that this, too, could be home.
