Sweet and sour chicken first made its way to British shores in the early 20th century, when migrants from Hong Kong began opening restaurants serving familiar foods from back home to help make ends meet.

The UK bears full responsibility for turning the dish its characteristic reddish colour though — originally, it was prepared with black vinegar but, as with so many recipes, it turned out that just chucking in some ketchup was a lot simpler.

Ever since then, sweet and sour chicken has been an enduringly popular takeaway option in Blighty.

But kosher-observant gastronomes didn’t really encounter it until the late 1980s, when “Marcus’s Kosher Chinese and Traditional” first opened its doors in Temple Fortune. Serving gigantic portions of food that we’d never had the chance to taste before, at a reasonable price (and usually with a side-helping of profanity from Marcus himself, which only added to its charm) Marcus’s made kosher takeaway food available to the masses for the first time.

For close to two decades, a Sunday night Marcus’s was a staple for me — first in my childhood home, and then after I got married. As my long-suffering husband will attest, every single £10 lottery win we ever had the good fortune to score in the early, cash-strapped years of our marriage went straight into Marcus’s till.

My favourite was always a number 25 — the delightfully orange, gelatinous, pineapple and green pepper-studded sweet and sour chicken dish that no one else on the planet could make like Marcus. And I should know — after Marcus closed the doors on his unique takeaway in 2008, I spent many months trying to find something that could even come close.

We sampled the equivalent from the posher, more expensive kosher Chinese — it was tasty, but far too refined for someone who preferred their sweet and sour sauce to be a glorious shade of fluorescent orange. And I tried making it myself, but despite what the early purveyors of the dish had claimed, ketchup, which most recipes seemed to include, just wasn’t right.

And then — salvation! In 2009, we took a brief trip to Israel and found ourselves staying in the same hotel as Marcus himself. It was a bit like bumping into a celebrity — but I didn’t ask for his autograph, I went one better.

One evening, we found ourselves drinking coffee at adjoining tables in the hotel lobby and got chatting.

Outside of the steaming kitchen of his takeaway, Marcus was friendly and chatty — and there was no swearing either. I told him how much I missed our Sunday night takeaways and he offered to share one of his recipes with me. Grabbing a serviette and biro, I begged him to tell me the secret of the No 25, and he did. I was overjoyed — sweet and sour redemption was at hand.

Reader, on our return to London I did attempt the recipe, and you’ll be pleased to hear that it turned out tasting exactly like I remembered it from the glory days.

But — and it’s a big but — it was a huge palaver to make (despite the chef in the back of the takeaway making it all look so effortless). I’m a fan of the “set it and forget it” recipe type, where you plop all the ingredients in an oven-safe dish and leave them to cook.

But this involved numerous steps — first coating the chicken pieces in home-made batter, then frying them to perfection, next making the sauce and marinating the pieces and finally, nurturing them lovingly in a wok. Delicious as it was, I never made it again.

Now that I’m older and have a little bit more time on my hands, I might have been tempted to have another go at perfecting the No 25.

But the hotel serviette with the scribbled recipe on it has long since disappeared and very sadly, Marcus himself passed away exactly a year ago, having moved to Florida soon after our encounter.

The only part of the recipe I really remember is that the sweet and sour sauce involved copious amounts of vinegar and white sugar and a shockingly precise combination of red and yellow food colouring.

Not a dollop of ketchup in sight though, which, of course, is why it tasted so good. I’ll never forget it!