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Joudie Kalla grew up in London and Qatar with Palestinian parents, and they would also visit Syria every summer on holiday. In October 2015 she ran her first London supperclub, Palestine on a Plate, for the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation and since then she has held around 30 in total, gaining 49,000 Instagram followers in the process.

Having published her first cookbook last year, Kalla is currently working on a second one so people attending her supperclubs in April this year will be able to test out the new recipes from it. Here, she remembers all the dishes that her mother used to cook for her, her father and her four siblings, and how food has become her place of comfort in times of stress.

“Growing up at home it was really my mum who would cook and she only made Palestinian dishes as it was all she knew. She’d have the occasional moment where she’d experiment and it would be great but generally it was Middle Eastern or other food that she’d grown up eating at home”, remembers Kalla, whose parents were both from huge families of 20-odd brothers and sisters. The only two from their immediate families who “left the Middle East and came to London”, Kalla thinks her mum cooked “as she was reminiscing. She was very young, under 30 with five kids, and she didn’t speak English, and I think she was like ‘oh my goodness, what am I doing?’ so I think the food and the kitchen was like our den. It was where we would have our meals, where we’d just sit and be together for most of the night”.

The household was loud, as Kalla is one one of five kids, “but we all got on, and family time was really important. It was sort of forced on us but we actually enjoyed it, so my dad never had to shout at us to make it known that we had to be there. Dinner time was at 7pm and then it was family time until bed time."

Food created a special bond between Kalla and her mum, and became something to do if she felt “sad or stressed. [When I was younger] it became my place to create stuff and not think about anything, and still I do that today. I became very attached to my mum through cooking. I was the fourth girl, and then my brother came as a surprise to me four years later, and I had a bit of an emotional crisis and I stuck to my mum because I couldn’t accept this new little person taking my space. And this is really where it all started - she’d keep me in the kitchen to stay away from him, because I was just terrorising him. And we ended up having a really nice bond … she’d make batters ready for me to then make cakes, and peel onions, so by default she kind of shaped by future life because I became obsessed with food."

Stuffed food played a big role on the family dinner table. “Everything from carrots and potatoes to aubergines and courgettes, and we’d have a really different selection. But even though they were stuffed similarly with the same ingredients, the end result was always different. Palestinians love stuffing food of all types. I think it’s a cultural thing, and it also allows women to gather together and spend time together talking, sharing recipes, and bonding. That’s what it did for me. Growing up with my mother and all my aunties from both sides, adding up to 20, it was an amazing experience learning from them all in different ways."

The dish that holds most of Kalla’s memories is Warak Inab, or stuffed vine leaves. These, she says, are stuffed with spiced minced lamb and rice, cooked slowly for hours with lamb cutlets and stuffed kousa (Middle Eastern courgettes), and tangy due to the lemon used in the final stage of cooking. Kalla explains that no Palestinian home “would be a home without this meal being served often. It is a symbol of our land and culture. We all like different parts of it. I like the burnt ones on the top as does my sister Tania, and my eldest sister Lara likes the lemony soft melt-in-the-mouth ones, while Maya my third sister loves all of them. I don’t eat the courgettes but like the stuffing in them. and then it’s a free-for-all to get the last vine leaf and lamb cutlets. It’s safe to say this could be the most nationalistic dish of Palestine and it is in every memory for us - birthdays, Eid, Christmas, Sunday lunches, Ramadan, celebrations of any kind. Any excuse and it was on the table."

Other stuffed things that the family always ate included Jazar mahshi bil Tamer Hindi - stuffed large carrots with tamarind sauce. “It’s sweet and tart dish", Kalla explains, “stuffed with either a mixture of vegetables and rice or meat and rice. The sweet carrot against the tart lemon tamarind sauce is so delicious. [Then] we drizzle it with fried garlic, olive oil and dried mint and there is such a burst of flavours. We’d eat this served with my mother’s divine vermicelli Egyptian rice to mop up all the flavours of the sauces and the insides of these fillings, which was just wonderful.”

Another comforting dish that was always on the table was Betinjan wa Kousa Mahshi, which is aubergines and kousa (Middle Eastern courgette) stuffed with lamb that has been seasoned with cinnamon salt and pepper, mixed with rice and cooked in a tomato broth. It’s also almost better the next day.”

All of these dishes were things that Kalla’s mum would “always be there preparing” and still does today:

“She’s in her sixties now but she cooks from the minute she wakes up, even though everyone has left home. Her freezer is full of things for when the whole family comes back to London. It works well when we cook together because she knows what she’s doing and I know what I’m doing and then we’ll test and taste each other’s food to make sure we’re getting it right.”

Kalla says that everything she cooks is about food memories, which she thinks is “particularly important to us as a people because it seems that our past is being deleted and this is why I have written my book - not only to reflect on my own short and relatively young memory but to highlight a whole culture’s memory and place us hopefully on a culinary map.”

Palestine on a Plate: Memories from My Mother's Kitchen by Joudie Kalla is out now (Jacqui Small, 2016, £25); follow her on Instagram @PalestineonaPlate