Amy Winehouse at the table

In the Winehouse household, as in many English Jewish families, the meal is organized less around starter-main-dessert than around a ritual: Friday night Shabbat with its chicken, eggs, and braided bread, extended all week by reheated leftovers and snacking. Alongside this family table, there is the street: the Jewish delis and bakeries of Brick Lane and Camden where you eat standing up, at any hour, a bagel or a doughnut. Amy grew up exactly at this crossroads, between her grandmother Cynthia's cooking and the late-night counters of northeast London.

Rendered chicken fat with a little onion (schmaltz, and its crispy little bits, gribenes) is the rich, fragrant soul of Ashkenazi cooking: you put it in soup, you spread it on bread, you bind chopped liver with it. Alongside long-corned salt beef, this is the double signature of this table — comforting fat and preserving brine.