Читать книгу Strudel, Noodles and Dumplings: The New Taste of German Cooking - Anja Dunk - Страница 7

The food you grow up with, the taste of home, stays with you for ever. That doesn’t mean to say it is always a good thing, but happily in my case for the most part it is. Mum did all the cooking at home – she loved it, and so did my brother Oliver and I, not least because Dad’s culinary repertoire consisted solely of cheese sauce over vegetables or Marmite on toast. Mum, on the other hand, is a brilliant cook who values good ingredients and simplicity in the kitchen. By this I mean cooking without pretension, a pared-back approach, I suppose, which in turn means doable cooking. I strive to cook by her ideals, and my hope is that one day my boys will too.

Mum left Germany for Africa when she was in her mid-twenties, and Kenya was where she met and married Dad. They lived there until their early thirties, at which point they decided to move to Wales for a life with children. So it was in Wales that my brother and I were born to a German mother and a Welsh father, and it is Wales that I call home, but the food we grew up with is very much rooted miles away in Germany, for it was German food that we ate at our kitchen table every day.

I often wonder if what came out of the kitchen during my childhood wasn’t solely to quash the feelings of longing that had taken hold in Mum while living away from her motherland. Taste, after all, is one of the most transportative senses. Feelings of belonging are also heightened when on foreign soil, and so is sense of identity, which in Mum’s case made itself apparent through the German food she produced – consequently, as a child I felt far more German than anything else.

The first ten years of my life were pretty nomadic, with time split living between Wales, Africa and Asia – most holidays were spent with our grandparents in Germany. The only constant in daily life, as well as immediate family, was the food that came out of the kitchen. It is little wonder really that cooking has become my chosen career path, as right from the word go it has been one of the most significant elements to each day. Nothing excites me more than delving into another culture by means of cooking, but since having young children of my own, the way I cook at home has shifted back to food that brings me the sense of family, love, security, and confidence – a subconscious impulse to instil the same association between food and home in my children. To me this means food in which Germany is very much at the heart of it all.