If I Were A Food...

Anna-Lena Feunekes loves food and stories about food. Of course she loves testing all the food whose stories she finds too. Who wouldn't want to ensure the information they are giving their readers is accurate? She very generously gave up some of her researching, writing, cooking and sampling time to tell us, to tell you, more about her Tasty Tales book.

How long did it take you to decide which foods to include and did the process involve any tastings? Before I found my amazing publisher, I had been keeping an eye out for stories that just made me feel a little something extra. I decided which stories to include on the basis of them either being a really familiar food to a lot of potential readers, or I would choose a dish that had ties to important historical events, or illustrious characters like knights. Once I found stories about ingredients that I didn't know myself, I made some trips to shops or looked online to try them. The only one I haven't tasted is petha, a candy made from a type of gourd, that is rumoured to have something to do with the Taj Mahal...

What is your number one food fact or food story that you have to share at every dinner party? One of the most delicious foods in Tasty Tales is Pad Thai, and I will share this example when I'm at dinner parties because it was actually invented as a sort of national dish to Thailand. But it's quite recent, I believe the 1950's or so - most people would think a national dish is something that a culture has celebrated for longer than this. But this helped solidify Thai cuisine in the eyes of the rest of the world, and the result is incredibly tasty!

Where did you go to find the detail for the stories behind the food? Did you travel and who did you have to talk to? One of the ways in which I wanted to add depth to the tales is to reference the context in which a story plays out. Some tales are very much tied to important parts of history, or a piece of lore will have a lot of meaning if you understand why it was important to people at the time. I made it a point to read up on either these events or the histories of the countries in which they take place - and obviously ask people I know with roots in some of these countries what their thoughts were. 

What is it, apart from needing it for our survival, do you think makes food so important to us? The great thing about food is that it can be an indulgence in many ways. When we are together with other people, we recharge if we feel safe. When you sit down to eat together, you are doing so in safety and celebration that you can enjoy something together. It taps into so many basic human needs, as well as being an extension of the basic: it can be a feast or something really special, too. Because it taps into all those layers, often at once, I think it's quite magical.

You created all the illustrations for the book and perhaps a little surprisingly they focus on people perhaps more than food. Was that a conscious decision and why? It really was! I see the dishes in Tasty Tales as an extension of what it means to be a person in that place and time. The dishes express what knights would eat if they couldn't pay for a cook to make them fancy desserts, or share perseverance in war time, cleverness when having to hide your religion, or accidents that happened to turn out deliciously. To name a few! But at the core of all of them, are things that we can all relate to. I wanted to show the people in the stories, so children can understand what their lives may have been like.

If you have eaten any foods in their ‘native’ country and then at home has the experience been very different? Can food, the experience of food, be transported? I had to think long and hard about this one, but one that definitely comes to mind is the memory of going for fresh baguettes in the morning with my dad, when on vacation in France. Baguettes are everywhere in the Netherlands, too, but it's such a nostalgic memory and the concept of the sound of the baguettes when we cut them or tore off pieces for our breakfast still sends tingles down my spine. It does hit different when you try to replicate something back home: but I do like to enjoy any type of food with my parents. We go out for ice cream with my son, and when I see his happy face and sticky hands and my dad very much the same, the same feeling arises.

Has all this research made you more aware of the cultural histories that sit behind it and do you have a favourite that you would like to explore in more detail? Absolutely. As a Dutch person, I've grown up learning about former colonies and our history as a trading nation, but the factual description of what happened didn't really express the depth of pain inflicted on others. As a young adult, I started living in bigger cities in the Netherlands and came across different cuisines of formerly colonised countries - and paying more attention to what that actually meant. One of my favourite cuisines is Surinamese, and in Tasty Tales, I wanted to share the story of Heri Heri. It is a dish of which the ingredients were an important part of the diets of our enslaved people on plantations around the world during the transatlantic slave trade. Today it is eaten in celebration of the abolishment of slavery for Surinamese and Antillean people, and I wanted to give it a special place in this book for its symbolism as well as it's wonderful taste.

During the process of making this book did you have to spend a lot of time in kitchens and what was it like? Can you describe your kitchen to us ~ especially when you are cooking! Actually, I spent a lot of time reading and staring myself blind on old photographs and paintings of buildings, to see if I could get it right in my art! But I did get incredibly hungry by doing that. I do love to cook (no surprise, probably) and my kitchen is frequently where I build huge lasagne's, whole roast chickens, pizza dough from scratch that we then assembly-line top and bake with friends. I usually have a glass of wine snuck between all the ingredients and talk to my husband about the latest podcast I'm obsessing over. I have a learning tower for my 1½  year old to climb on, and 'help out' - which is messy but also really fun. I always have two cookbooks near me: Salt Fat Acid Heat, and Julia Child's cookbook. I collect bronze or bronze-ish objects to decorate the kitchen with, so it could look a bit like a Disney/Ratatouille kitchen!

Who would you invite to a fantasy dinner party and what food would you serve (and why)? Ooh. Good question. I do a lot of food-related illustration work for people who write cookbooks, teach cooking classes, like pastry and foraging. I'd love to throw a big client get together dinner party at some point, but I'd be quite intimidated to cook for them. I have gotten quite good at making pizzas from scratch, though, but first I want to level up my skills by getting an outdoor oven. I think it would be really fun to get creative with them, have them bring their own ingredients and work with those.

If you were a food, what food would you be and why? I'd like to be sushi because there are so many ways to be sushi. I've always been freaked out by the idea of having to always stay the same. And I would drink soy sauce if I could, so I guess it's a perfect match? I know what I'm eating tonight, anyway!

Thank you Anna and Antonia Wilkinson as well as UCLan publishing.