ALEX GREEN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

As the old saying goes, you can take a girl out of Britain, but you shouldn’t. I’m just back from New York, where I failed to so much as catch a glimpse of the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. Instead, I mainly spent the weekend eating salmon bagels and watching Manchester United underperform on a pub TV screen. Both activities I could have managed in any city in the world.

Except, well, not really. Not the bagels bit. Sure, you can get them in Britain, but to do it properly you need to cross the Atlantic. At the airport I picked up June Hersh’s Iconic New York Jewish Food, which tells the story of the first Ashkenazi Jews who arrived here