At Home With Jenny Lau

Crispy shredded potato stir-fry, finished with a Sichuan peppercorn infused olive oil

At Home With is an original series from Honest Toil exploring the people using our olive oil in their own homes. Through conversations, recipes and personal stories, the series offers a glimpse into the spaces, traditions and rituals that shape the way we cook at home – celebrating thoughtful ingredients, shared tables and the role our olive oil plays in everyday kitchens.

For our latest At Home With, we spent the afternoon with writer, community organiser and Celestial Peach founder Jenny Lau at her home in south-east London.

Jenny created Celestial Peach as a space for exploring Chinese diaspora identity through food. What began as an online platform has since grown into a much wider practice spanning writing, events, communal meals and food education. At the centre of it all is a curiosity about the stories food can carry: the places we have lived, the languages we inherit and the different ways we learn to understand ourselves.

Her home reflects that same layering. The kitchen is not overly polished or precious, but shaped by use. Ingredients, books and cooking tools sit close at hand, each connected to an ongoing piece of work or a meal still taking form. For Jenny, home cooking is less about faithfully repeating a fixed set of family recipes and more about building knowledge through research, observation and practice.

Although food now sits at the heart of her work, Jenny’s relationship with Chinese cooking has not followed the familiar story of recipes being passed seamlessly from one generation to the next. Much of what she now knows has been gathered later in life: through reading, travelling, asking questions and, perhaps most importantly, cooking alongside other people.

Community has become one of Jenny’s most important teachers. She spends up to three or four days a week at the ESEA Community Centre in Dalston, where she regularly cooks as part of its lunch club. Originally founded in 1985 as the Hackney Chinese Community Centre, the space was created to support Chinese immigrants living in East London, and today continues to bring together different generations and diasporic communities.

"I trained in this kitchen. I didn’t train in culinary school or restaurants, but with the aunties. And that actually is the most rigorous training of all."

The kitchen allows knowledge to move in several directions at once. Jenny might arrive with a menu in mind, but the aunties and uncles around her will offer another technique, correct a method or introduce an ingredient she has not used before. Rather than seeing this as formal instruction, Jenny describes it as a continuing exchange, and one that has helped her better understand her own relationship with identity and belonging.

"This was a place where I could just be completely myself. I’m just this mishmash result of everything that happened to me. Migration and colonialism and movement, but also integration, and that was something to be celebrated."

This way of thinking also runs through her book, An A–Z of Chinese Food (Recipes Not Included). Beginning as a series of 26 essays published on her website, the book explores Chinese food, language, history and diasporic identity through subjects ranging from authenticity to migration and cultural stereotypes. Writing the book became part of a much wider process of self-understanding for Jenny, helping her move away from the feeling of having to fit neatly into one cultural identity or another. "I can safely say now, as a 41-year-old woman, I’m so comfortable in who I am. I’m completely self-accepting."

In Jenny’s kitchen, one object carries a particularly strong sense of this accumulated knowledge: her Chinese cleaver. She owns three, but her favourite for fine vegetable work is a carbon-steel mulberry cleaver from Hong Kong knife maker CCK. Broad-bladed and reassuringly weighty, it is the tool she reaches for when she needs precision. Used for slicing, dicing, mincing, crushing and scooping ingredients across the kitchen. Different cleavers are made for different purposes; this one is designed for fine slicing rather than cutting through bones.

Beyond the ingredients and tools, Jenny is also a keen collector of plates and ceramics. She regularly visits Deptford Flea Market on Saturday mornings, searching for unusual pieces to use at home and when hosting friends. "I love collecting plates. I love ceramics in general, and I love to collect random plates just to eat off at home, but also they’re great for dinner parties and they’re great for telling a story."

For us, Jenny prepared a shredded potato stir-fry in which the preparation is just as important as those final few minutes in the wok. The potatoes are carefully julienned into fine, even matchsticks before being left in cold water to draw out the starch, helping them retain their crisp texture once cooked. The dish came together with minced ginger, smashed garlic, fresh red chilli and Sichuan peppercorns, alongside a dried Spanish guindilla chilli from a garland given to Jenny as a housewarming present. She likes combining different kinds of chilli in one dish, creating several layers of heat rather than relying on a single source.

To finish, Jenny made an infused Honest Toil olive oil with Sichuan peppercorns and dried bird’s-eye chilli. She gently warmed the oil before leaving the spices to infuse for three days, then strained it and spooned it over the finished potatoes. The method reflects the way Jenny often talks about Chinese cooking: preparation first, speed second. Once the chopping, soaking and seasoning is done, everything happens quickly in the wok. Garlic, ginger, chilli and peppercorns hit the hot oil first, immediately releasing their fragrance before the potatoes follow.

Her Cantonese has also improved through spending time at the centre, although she jokingly describes what she speaks as "kitchen Chinese": a vocabulary built around ingredients, tools and techniques. One of her favourite terms describes the process of briefly pre cooking vegetables or proteins before stir-frying them, allowing them to spend as little time as possible in the wok. Ingredients might be quickly blanched in hot water or passed through hot oil before the final stage of cooking.

One version of the technique is 走水 — jau shui, literally "running water". Jenny loves the imagery of Chinese culinary language, where cooking processes are often described through movement. It feels fitting. Her own relationship with food has been formed by moving between homes, languages, kitchens and communities, gathering something from each without needing any one of them to provide a complete definition of who she is.

For Jenny, cooking is not simply a way of preserving what came before. It is a way of continuing the conversation.