This is a biased blog post, from a devout fan of Café OTO. Hearing Khaira Arby, the Malian “nightingale of the north” perform at the venue was a highlight of Eat Hackney’s existence. The melancholy minor-key carols arranged by Bill Wells for last year’s Christmas party were brilliant. Regular sax player Shabaka Hutchings is a star. And Cafe OTO just got even better, now that Soli Zardosht is cooking up Persian-inspired lunch there on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

After working as menswear designer, Soli decided to work on her other passion: food. While Soli is inspired by traditional Persian cooking, her food is a contemporary and personal take on the meals she ate growing up in the Middle East. Her signature dish is saffron and orange chicken, delicately scented and flavoured – another defining feature is that this is very pretty food, from multicoloured salads and saffron kookoo dotted with black onion seeds to stuffed dates scattered with rose petals.

Soli set up a stall at Broadway Market four years ago, which has become one of the street’s most popular foodie stops on a Saturday. And she is  happy in her new collaboration with Café OTO, cooking up soups, street food, meat mains and frittatas for music fans Friday to Sunday (12-4 pm). Attractive dishes, prepared with thought and care… Zardosht is providing a fine Persianesque accompaniment to Cafe OTO’s musical food for the soul.

Recipes

Here is Soli’s recipe for saffron & yoghurt potato kookoo, a fixture on her market stall. Another version of this dish – kookoo sabzi – was given to Eat Hackney by Sally Butcher who runs deli Perseopolis. For more Persian food try Sabrina Ghayour‘s enticing bejewelled rice and spiced citrus roasted poussins.

Eat Hackney has been spending some time with North London Action for the Homeless. This small charity is based at St Paul’s church in Stoke Newington, and provides food for homeless and vulnerable people. Twice a week, cook and artist Lucie Galand and a group of volunteers transform donated fruit and veg into a filling and nutritious meal for 50–60 service users. The vivid illustrations of service users featured in this post are also the work of Lucie. For more images, and for background on some of the people who visit NLAH, check out the blog A Three Course Story.

For three hours before the meal is served, there is an atmosphere of calm but intense concentration in the kitchen. Lucie can rely on regular gifts of food from Growing Communities, Whole Foods and other local shops, but she doesn’t know in advance what her ingredients will be. So creativity is key, as is the help of volunteers, who prepare all the fruit and veg. Everything comes together just as the service users flood into the hall – they help themselves to tea and coffee and then volunteers serve them soup, a warming main course and dessert at trestle tables.

Both volunteers and service users enjoy the social side of the project: NLAH fosters an atmosphere of conviviality and mutual respect. So while the food itself is of course vital and beneficial, so is the warmth and human contact the project offers. Volunteer Cecilia, always beautifully turned out herself, is on hand to cut hair, and donations of clothes are handed out.

Lucie and drop-in centre manager Mike Tomes also involve volunteers and service users in the Evering Road Kitchen Garden project, the creation of a small garden in the churchyard, where Lucie can pick herbs, beans and salad greens. And Lucie uses any surplus produce to cook up jars of Patchwork Preserves, organic chutneys and pickles sold in aid of the charity.

In its attitude to both food and people, this is a holistic project. Food which would be otherwise be thrown away is turned into a beautiful and much needed meal. Nothing is wasted: all the food scraps go into the compost bin which then enriches the kitchen garden. Nobody is overlooked and everybody is valued for their contribution and their conversation. Eat Hackney is very glad to have met everyone involved with NLAH.

Lucie has shared some great vegetarian recipes with Eat Hackney readers: for beetroot & horseradish chutney, pear & cardamom chutney and tarte à la tomate.

Every week day from 10am till 3pm, the wood-panelled Thirties interior of the Elderfield pub sees a vintage pop-up with a difference. The NANA comfort food café is run by over-60s women from Clapton, who cook and serve traditional food of a cockle-warming variety. This new cooperative venture is already a hit – their pancake day party saw five solid hours of frying-pan action. And the warm atmosphere and bargain grub makes it a popular stop-off for local families.

This project for older women was set up by a young one – Katie Harris. She has always worked with older people for councils and the NHS, and has a passion for improving respect and recognition for senior citizens. Katie hates the fact that older people are seen as passive recipients of social services, exclaiming that she meets people who are “totally smashing it” in their 80s.

This is a very personal project, inspired by Katie’s relationship with her own Nana, a teacher who lived nearby and taught her to sew, cook, knit, paint and draw. The menu is influenced by Katie’s Nana’s standbys, and features cosy classics such as cottage pie, dippy eggs and fish finger sandwiches. But Katie wants to celebrate the diversity of her growing band of Nanas, who have Indian, Caribbean and Jewish backgrounds. She outlines her idea for “NANA fusion food”, such as cheesy toast with spicy hot pickle.

While there’s a kitsch and fun element to the project, NANA also has a thoughtful side. Katie is keen to recruit Nanas who are still active, but on the cusp of being socially isolated. She hates the idea of people only getting help when they reach a crisis. And she is sensitive to isolation amongst younger people too, who can feel cut off from the older generation in London.

At the moment though, the two main groups in the café are the Nanas and local mums – both potentially under-stimulated and lonely. Local history talks are underway, with plans for craft classes and lectures. Katie envisages the NANA franchise country-wide – she studied in Glasgow, and loves the idea of a hard-talking, warm-hearted Glaswegian granny café. Eat Hackney hopes Katie’s plans come to pass, and can confirm that £1 tea poured from a floral teapot by a kindly Nana is a thing of beauty.

Recipes

This is Katie’s Nana’s Victoria sponge recipe – the weight of the eggs determines that of the other ingredients, for a well balanced sponge. And here’s how to make perfect cucumber sandwiches, another essential component of an afternoon tea.

Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen is the inspiration of writer, cook and punster Zoe Adjonyoh – she publicises her pop-up events with slogans such as “It’s Ghana be Tasty” and “It’s Ghana be Huge.” Born to a Ghanaian Dad and an Irish Mum, Zoe grew up in London with her father’s home cooking. She has made it her mission to introduce gorgeous Ghanaian dishes such as peanut butter stew, red red and kenkey to East London, and she’s doing it with style.

Ghana Stand Up! at Studio Gi was a celebration of Ghana’s Independence, with 56 lucky guests to represent each year of freedom. Elections in December have cemented the country’s reputation as one of Africa’s most stable democracies (see this film to find out about Ghana’s passion for politics), so there’s a lot to celebrate. Not least the food! Ghana is famous for herby soups and stews, dense with peanuts, okra, yam and plantains.

At Ghana Stand Up! Zoe served peanut butter soup with sweet fried plantain, mini yam balls, agushi with palaver sauce, waakye, mashed palm fruit yam and Independence Surprise for dessert. DJ Aries provided a spicy soundtrack of Azonto and Afrobeat, the crowd was friendly and the mood upbeat. After the food, Zoe went round each table with a bottle of fiery 46% proof Alomo Bitters and drank a shot with each group of guests. Apparently you can buy Alomo Bitters at Ridley Road Market if you ask in the right way – there was a funny story about it, but after a shot or two it slipped my mind. You’ll just have to go to Zoe’s next event, which might feature an Azonto dance-off as well as food. Trust me Hackney, it’s Ghana be great…

Recipes

The mashed yam balls with golden gari crust are crunchy and delicious and make a good starter: Zoe dished up hers with a dollop of Scotch bonnet and kpakpo (green pepper) salsa. Waakye, pronounced “waa-che”, is a really simple and nutritious Ghanaian staple of rice and beans. Millet (waakye) stalks give the red colouring to the rice. Waakye is eaten for breakfast or lunch in Ghana, and sold by street vendors throughout the country. Serve it with any meat-based stew, or for veggies with a boiled egg and spicy salsa.

Mashed yam balls with a golden gari crust

Waakye

With picture windows looking onto Lee Valley Park, a cosy quirky interior flooded with light, Caravan coffee and homemade Swedish specials on the menu, Cooper & Wolf is a big hit in Clapton. The former glazer’s shop was refurbished six months ago by husband and wife team Alex and Sara, who named the café for their cats and commissioned the modern fairytale street art outside. This is very much a family business – Alex and Sara live close by and their son took his first steps on the characterfully battered blue floor of the café.

An ex-designer from Malmö, Sara is very happy to have swapped a career in front of the computer for hands-on creative work, though cooking to keep up with demand is a big task. She thinks the Brits take willingly to Swedish food because dishes like meatballs are honest, simple, and not too alien for the British palate. Sara is delighted with the support she and Alex have had from regular customers, and from fellow shopkeepers on Chatsworth Road.

Cooper & Wolf try to use local suppliers, including Hansen & Lydersen salmon. The Scandinavian Kitchen supply Swedish delicacies, otherwise hard to find, and H.G. Walter provide free range and organic meat. And the menu continues the family theme: the meatball recipe is from Sara’s grandmother Lisa, and the fishcake recipe comes from head chef Paul’s grandmother. Along with businesses like L’Epicerie, Cooper & Wolf is part of the family-friendly regeneration of Chatsworth Road, bringing some Swedish cinnamon soul to Hackney.

Recipes

Sara describes pytt i panna (“bits in a pan”) as a good hangover cure, akin to a full English breakfast. The wonderful kanelbullar (cinnamon buns) are very traditional in Sweden – click here to find a visual guide to making them. And råraka is a crispy potato cake, delicious served with smoked salmon.

Pytt i Panna

Kanelbullar (cinnamon buns)

Råraka (crispy potato cake)

A nice wafting scent welcomes you when you walk into Chase & Sorrensen: a combination of freshly ground coffee and the citrussy smell of dill. Set up by Dane Signe Sorrensen and American Brent Chase, this is a combined café and furniture store, where you can lounge on a modular Sixties sofa whilst tucking into smørrebrød (open sandwiches). On one wall, a huge pull-down map of Denmark signals the origins of both the food and the elegant, pared down furniture, which dates from the heyday of Danish design: the 1940s to the 70s.

The menu is simple, a celebration of the predominantly fishy flavours of Denmark. Rye bread comes topped with Skagen prawns, karrysild (herring in curry sauce), spegelpølse (Danish salami) and remoulade (similar to tartar sauce). Signe and Brent make regular trips to Denmark, to buy herring and jars of crisp fried onion, as well as classic furniture. Their collection harks back to a glamorous era when offices were furnished with rosewood filing cabinets, coffee tables had in-built ashtrays and homes were lit by futuristic pendant lamps.

Chase & Sorensen is a hygge little corner of Hackney, whether you want to purchase bold bright ceramics, or just because you fancy a bit of caviar on your toast for a change. To buy your own Danish ingredients, Signe recommends the Scandinavian Kitchen on Great Titchfield Street.

Recipes

This is my favourite – in fact only – smørrebrød story, about the photographer Lee Miller. After her hard wartime experience, Miller refocussed on cooking in her Sussex farmhouse. In 1965 she entered the Norwegian tourist board’s competition for best smørrebrød. Entries were made anonymously and Miller triumphed, winning 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize. Top prize went to the “Penroses”: bread topped with poached mushrooms stuffed with paté, herbs and cheese. Miller won a trip to Norway, where her smørrebrød creativity was acclaimed. Back home, she researched and produced an eleven-course Scandinavian banquet.

Spegelpølse

Skagen

The Parkholme Supper Club was founded by Alicia Weston and operates in her Hackney home, where every second week the large kitchen buzzes with volunteers dicing, slicing, frying and baking in preparation for the evening meal. Alicia has a threefold mission: to foster communality through cooking and eating, to mentor and train people who want to learn to cook, and to raise money for Médecins Sans Frontières in a constant and sustainable way. Alicia has been spectacularly successful in this third aim, having raised £24,000 in two years. And having attended two of her supper clubs to take photos, chat, eat and chop veg, Eat Hackney can confidently say that Alicia is forging ahead with her other goals too.

All about the supper club

Alicia’s approach to cooking doesn’t revolve round fancy ingredients: if it did she wouldn’t be able to donate £35 of the £40 she charges diners to MSF. She starts with creative and engaging menu ideas. At the recent Diwali night Alicia served up an astonishing variety of food, including green fish curry with fresh herbs and coconut milk, a dahl recipe collected on a visit to a Rajasthan Palace, plus pineapple, lamb and chicken dishes: the food just kept on coming. And for the Road to Revolution night, Alicia drew on family recipes and her own Chinese heritage to contrast cooking at the Imperial Court with the earthy peasant food favoured by revolutionaries.

Once the menus are devised, Alicia shops at the Ridley Road Market, a great source of cheap, interesting ingredients such as pomelo, mangoes, water convolvulus and Chinese pear. She goes elsewhere for free-range pork and chicken, but otherwise the market has everything covered. Alicia is an experienced cook and organiser, adept at getting the best out of novice and expert volunteers.

And she draws on the specific knowledge of friends like Hong Kong-born Louise, whose guide to making Chinese dumplings follows. Louise had lovely background on some of the dishes – she told Eat Hackney the story of Wo Tou, the conical steamed bread pictured. A Manchurian Empress, the mother of the last emperor, fled the imperial palace during the Boxer Rebellion. She was offered shelter by a peasant, who revived the hungry empress with a maize and sugar roll. Restored to the palace, the empress instructed her chefs to make the dish. In fact, they reinterpreted it using the refined ingredients that characterise imperial cuisine: chestnut flour is used instead of maize.

So the Parkholme Supper Club is more than just a dinner with potential new friends… it also makes for a delicious foodie history lesson. And while it may not quite reach the grandeur of the imperial courts – 100–200 dishes with names such as “Golden Phoenix Five Treasures”, eaten with silver chopsticks, and served by concubines – what Alicia manages to achieve with £5 per person is pretty amazing, all elegantly served at the long table in her dining room. Eat Hackney loved the communal cooking and eating, and will return for more. Amongst the forthcoming events are a provincial French night and an alternative Christmas dinner with dishes from around the world. Past menus set to make another appearance in 2013 are a Georgian Feast, Syrian Supper Club and Malay Malam. It could be the tastiest and most worthwhile £40 you ever spend…

How to make Chinese dumplings

Supper club volunteer Louise made cute dumplings for the Chinese evening. The process starts with the “three shinies”: clean hands, gleaming bowl and shiny dough. Chinese people believe it is unlucky to cut dough, so it is torn into small balls. (There’s a scientific reason too, as cutting severs the strands of gluten and makes the dough tougher.) Ideally, the rolled out circles of dough should be thicker in the middle than round the edges. And they’re cooked in vegetable oil and water, meaning they’re both fried and steamed. Click here for Louise’s visual guide to the art of making beautiful dumplings!

Recipes

Alicia has kindly shared a couple of recipes from her Chinese supper club. First up is Chairman Mao’s favourite dish, punchy and pungent red stewed pork: caramalised sugar gives the meat an earthy reddish brown hue. The dense and delicious mango pudding shows a Western influence on Chinese cooking as it includes dairy products. It made a great end to the evening’s menu, and can be decorated with pomegranate seeds or mango. To learn more about Alicia’s cooking style, sign up for one of her classes which are informally taught to a maximum of four students.

“Many of the things that we want and need in life are already there around us, and don’t have to cost the world.”

October 28 marked the second birthday of The People’s Kitchen in Hackney, a great project that shows that the best ideas are the simplest. Every Sunday volunteers gather at Passing Clouds in Dalston. They set out on bikes to collect food which would otherwise be thrown away by nearby corner shops and groceries. And then the volunteers reconvene at Passing Clouds at 3pm to cook up a vegetarian banquet with whatever they have managed to forage. There’s a communal meal around 6pm – diners make a donation – and then a film is shown.

“The kitchen celebrates people power. Many hands make light work, and many bodies and minds make for a beautifully social atmosphere both in the kitchen and the dining room.”

The project is a sociable one and it also – in a very practical way – makes an important point. That as a society we are throwing away food which may be a day or two past its sell-by date but which is still perfectly edible. In Britain we’re chucking away 4.4 million tonnes of food annually, and in the process wasting £680 a year per household.

For its birthday party The People’s Kitchen fed an impressive 150 people, with the dinner, discussion and film packed out. In the makeshift kitchen beforehand activity was intense, with lots of chopping, frying and stirring, and buckets of apples being juiced with equipment provided by The London Orchard Project. Eat Hackney met volunteer Alicia, who also runs the Parkholme Supper Club. Alicia was busy preparing beetroot salad, and turning cratefuls of donated bananas into gorgeous Malay fritters: recipes are below.

If you want to volunteer in a warm and communal environment, if you have surplus fruit or veg in your own garden to donate, or if you’d like a nourishing veggie meal on a Sunday in Hackney, The People’s Kitchen could be for you. Eat Hackney wishes it many happy returns.

Recipes

More experienced cooks share skills and recipes at The People’s Kitchen. Here are two recipes from Alicia who runs the Parkholme Supper Club. The salad is easy to make with cheap corner-shop ingredients, but has quite a tangy and sophisticated taste. Kueh Kodok are yummy round banana fritters. Alicia says, “this is a type of Malaysian banana fritter my mother used to eat as a child. Kueh Kodok is the proper name but it’s also known as Jumput Pisang, banana balls.”

Kidney Bean and Beet Salad

Kueh Kodok

The F. Cooke eel, pie and mash shop is a family business with a long vintage, as current owner Bob Cooke explains. The Broadway Market shop was established by Bob’s grandfather in 1900, and the Kingsland Road branch in 1910 – this was sold by the Cooke family in 1997, and is now the Shanghai Chinese restaurant. F. Cooke purvey the same food they always have done, to a dwindling clientele of “real” East Enders”: pies and mash drenched in parsley liquor, stewed eels, jellied eels – and fruit pies with custard for afters.

Both the menu and the beautiful shop itself, fitted out in 1930 with tiles, a bright stained glass window and a marble counter and tables, are now a rarity. But at the end of World War Two there were over a hundred eel, pie and mash houses in London providing cheap and nutritious fodder for the poor – and the Thames was hoaching with eels.

Disappointingly, Bob Cooke says most of the eels he buys from Billingsgate now are farmed ones from Holland – eel numbers in the Thames have crashed in recent years. But otherwise the business, with its sawdust-scattered floor and bantering welcome, is unchanged. When Eat Hackney visited, among the clientele was a charismatic, weatherbeaten gypsy man wearing a black suit, a battered fedora hat and a scarlet neck scarf. He ate his pie and mash in silence, then was gone.

Stepping outside the shop, I literally bumped into the Hackney Empire’s new dame, sporting flamboyant drag and riffing bawdily to passersby by about cockles.  I followed her through the market as she stopped to sample some German sausage, confiding to the nonplussed stallholder in a gravelly drawl: “I never ‘ad nußknacker before.” And I felt I’d stumbled into an older London, with more than a little magic in it: with music halls and sawdust floors, travellers and an eel-rich Thames.

Scroll down for some eel facts…

Eel facts

Wild eels are born in the Sargasso Sea, the deepest and saltiest part of the Atlantic. The larvae float on the gulf stream to the European coast, transforming into elvers. The elvers then journey upriver, even travelling overland on wet grass at times, and eating voraciously and indiscriminately as they develop into adults. The eels’ riverine life can continue for up to twenty years, and they can grow to be a metre long. Then, in one of the most bizarre and impressive migrations on earth, they swim 4000 miles back to the Sargasso Sea to breed, spawn and die. Eels achieve the mighty Atlantic crossing with no food, their systems being entirely focussed on the production of sperm and eggs.

Back in February, Eat Hackney went underneath the railway arches near London Fields to visit the E5 Bakehouse. Lured by the smell of baking rye bread and intrigued by the tale of a 200 year old Lapland “mother” – the sourdough starter from which the Bakehouse bread arises – I’ve just been back for their action- and fact-filled bread-making course. The courses are run every Saturday and last from 11am till around 5.30pm: they’re super popular so you may have to book several months in advance.

The course leader is head baker Eyal, a neuroscientist who traded his high-powered brainbox career for life with sourdough. The course is more hands-on than most – in no time we were measuring flour, salt, water and leaven and immersing our hands in sticky dough. The aim is to introduce sourdough leavens, plus kneading and hydration methods, and the end result is that each participant goes home with armfuls of their own bread – a 66% rye, airy ciabatta baps, fat bagels and a flavoursome “Hackney Wild” loaf.

The day is masterfully planned – although the dough doesn’t require hard pummelling, each incipient loaf, bagel and bap has to be shaped, gently kneaded and turned at regular intervals. But there were plenty of lulls for questions about the magical science of breadmaking: about how to nurture your sourdough leaven – everyone was given a sticky ball of this at the end of the course – as well as optimal baking techniques, including spraying the oven with water to create steam and produce a better crust.

We stopped for a Bakehouse lunch round a trestle table, and later enjoyed their sticky treacle tart and luscious carrot cake for tea. Then the actual baking began and the loaves disappeared into the industrial oven, the bagels being briefly boiled first to ensure the signature taut shiny surface.

Eyal marked up the baking trays so we could identify our own work – I welled up with pride when my precious loaves emerged. And I could understand why neuroscience pales in comparison with the alchemic and essential process of producing our daily bread.

Recipes

If you want to learn to make bread, I’d advise a course to get you going rather than starting with a recipe book: learning how to handle the slippery dough is quite an art, as is the task of tending to your starter. But here are some great recipes for using stale bread from Ruth at the Bakehouse: ribollita, a Tuscan bean soup; comforting classic bread and butter pudding; and crostini.