Long before my little fingers mastered chopsticks, our family would make a regular Sunday night pilgrimage to Real Peking, a now long-gone hole in the wall at College and Augusta. “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Sax,” the owner, Mrs. Wong, would greet us each week, before shouting in Mandarin through the swinging kitchen doors for her husband to prep our usual meal.

It would begin with bowls of ambrosial mustard soup, a tangy yellow broth filled with thin, slippery noodles, followed by sizzling pan-fried dumplings that would pop open with steaming meat and scallions as our teeth broke through their tender-crisp skins. My brother, Daniel, and I would gorge on chicken and cashews covered in a sweet, sticky black bean sauce—Real Peking’s specialty. We’d race our forks around the dish, plucking out the choicest morsels of candied fowl, splattering the plastic tablecloth with a deep auburn mess of chicken fat, sauce and nuts.

My parents’ favourite was the mu-shu pork, a mountain of shredded meat, green onions, black mushrooms, bamboo shoots and tender flecks of egg rolled up in a steaming pancake and slathered with hoisin sauce. By the time I was 10, I too had fallen in love with the dish, and one Sunday night I realized that I needed to know the root of its exquisite flavour. So I did what any 10-year-old would do, and went right to the source of all knowledge and goodness. “Mom, where does mu-shu pork come from?” I asked. “Pork, honey,” she said.

“What’s pork?” I pressed.

“Pig, David.”

Pig? But we were Jews. Pig wasn’t allowed for Jews. Pig wasn’t kosher. I had learned that in religious school just the day before. Not eating pig, the rabbi had told us, was a central part of being Jewish, a commandment handed down from God to his chosen people. Still, I thought, how could eating that mu-shu pancake be sinful when it tasted so divine?

My father looked down at the steaming roll-up on the plate in front of me and unleashed a pearl of wisdom.

“You gonna eat that?”

Get in line at Lee Garden on Sunday night and look around. Find Goldsteins and Blumenthals and Rosens devouring platters of chow mein and barbecued pork, and know that yes, the old story is true: Jews cannot get enough Chinese. It doesn’t hurt that Christmas Eve falls on a Sunday this year. While the goyim raise glasses of egg-nog and sing about the son of Israel, Is­rael’s children will be noshing on Szechuan shrimp and debating what movie to see after­ward (Ben Stiller’s Night at the Museum = kosher; Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto = treyf).

Our predilection for the foods of the Far East baffles Gentiles and rabbis alike. Why is it that all but the most strictly religious Jews (who frequent kosher—and typically inferior—Chinese restaurants) eventually yield to the command of General Tso?

In the definitive academic treatise on the subject, New York Jews and Chinese Food, sociologists Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine argue that Chinese food seems less threatening to observant Jews than, say, French or Italian. Chinese don’t mix dairy with meat, and in many dishes pork and shrimp are minced to the point of plausible deniability. Chinese restaurants also happen to be open on Christian holidays.

Jews and Chinese share other similarities: the people of both cultures aren’t typically heavy drinkers, but we love our food. The bars at our weddings often sit abandoned, while the buffet is a mosh pit. And we’ve shared the same turf: Jewish immigrants settled and built up Spadina before handing it off to Chinese newcomers. The culinary adoration, however, is unrequited. As Jackie Mason famously (and somewhat indelicately) quipped, “For 5,000 years, Jews have been eating in Chinese restaurants. Have you ever once noticed a Chinaman in a Jewish restaurant asking for a piece of gefilte fish?”