The Kitchen of Somewhere isadeeply personal story of how food shapes our connection to place, the environment and most importantly our understanding of who we are.Itweaves a narrative inspired by a plum-velvet, covered notebook found by Anna shortly after hermother's passing by suicide.The notebook was bursting with stories of hermother'stravels, and the recipes shecollected along the way.Using this notebook as a guide, Anna travelled over 64,000km to retrace her mother's steps and craft a one-of-a-kind cookbook that captures the food and the places her mother once visited in her younger years. I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to talk to Anna ahead of her In Conversation event at Readings in The State Library and ahead of Mothers Day. Storytelling is at the heart of what I do, or at least, sharing other peoples stories and Anna is an exquisite storyteller, tapping into memory, food and place as a way of honouring her mothers life and making connections with others. $5 from the sale of each book goes towards Beyond Blue to support their work with mental health. I loved connecting with Anna over a shared love of nostalgic Aotearoa New Zealand food and hearing about the journey she took to bring The Kitchen of Somewhere to fruition.
Conversation with a chef: Hi, Anna. How are you and where are you?
Anna McLeod: Good thanks, Jo. I arrived in Melbourne two days ago from LA, but I'm very happy to be in Melbourne. I can tell you right now, I got straight into my Melbourne coffee and Ive been ticking all my Melbourne boxes
Well, it's good that you're here and I have lots of things to talk to you about because I see there is a strong New Zealand connection as well, so I'm excited to hear more about that, of course.
Yes, I've been listening to your podcast, I love the podcast, and could hear a little familiar edge to the accent. And when I heard that there was a New Zealand connection yes, it's in there.
Absolutely. It looks like such an incredible project, and I was just looking at a photo of the book, The Kitchen of Somewhere, and it's thick. There's a lot in it. You've done a lot of work.
Yes. It's almost 400 pages or just over 400 pages. There's a little bit of something for everyone. There are big epic landscape photographs. I really wanted it to be a book that could happily sit on the coffee table as well as the kitchen bench. So, depending on what interests you at which particular moment, hopefully there's something in it for a range of interests.
That simple sentence, ‘this book is true about love,’ echoed in my head and the wisdom of it, that in this place that my mother was writing these words of advice, she looked at the food and she could still feel the love that was being communicated through the food and the beauty of the places that had been travelled to find the ingredients or the spectacular experience of a particular restaurant. That even in that darkest moment, she could still feel that. And the words that this book is true about love in such a simple way, captured that. I felt it echoed in my head and I felt a duty to that memory to now share that advice and that wisdom with as many people as possible. ~ Anna McLeod, The Kitchen of Somewhere
Let's start with when you found your mother's journal, which sounds like it was full of lots of interesting – well, full of life actually – with recipes that she'd written down and her many travels and thoughts that she had. When you found that journal, what was your reaction to that?
Well, you're absolutely right, Jo. The catalyst for this book was actually the passing of my mother. She was an incredible cook. She filled our family life with wonderful food experiences. When I look back at it now, it seems a little bit idyllic. We'd have family vacations where we would dive off the highway to find a particular honey hive or a specific ingredient and we would end up out on some rock somewhere with a lobster cracking on our knees. Or she'd have parmigiana wrapped in calico in her suitcase smuggling between Australia and New Zealand, and would be stopped by customs officials to say, what's this cheese you're smuggling in? I thought that this food life, what better thing could I do than record it?
So one Christmas, I gave her a notebook, it was completely empty. And I explained to her that I would regift this book every year and try and record the food memories and the recipes and the photographs that we covered that year and regift it to her every Christmas. Now, at the time, I didn't think anything of it other than the beautiful moments that I wanted to make sure we captured. And so over the years, this book grew, and it started to explode at the edges and had beetroot stains on it, and we used it to cook from, and it really grew. And I re-gifted and re-gifted it. But in 2008, my mother passed away. That was devastating experience. It's difficult to find words to explain that experience even now. Other than the fact that you still carry pain with you pushing into your heart.
But after her funeral, I went back to her desk and there sitting on her desk was this book, and I picked it up and I turned the pages and looking at the food and looking at the recipes, my sadness found sanctuary in those pages with the food. I felt a deep connection to her even though she had gone. It was very familiar. I flipped over the quince paste and the lemon cake and the great coffee shop that we'd met at. When I got to the end of the book, there was something I hadn't seen before. There were some notes that she'd left me and she'd written words of wisdom and advice for me to take with me in life when she knew she wouldn't be there to give it to me. On one simple piece of paper, it said, "I love my family and believed I'd always be there for them. So many good times. This book is true about love."
That simple sentence, 'this book is true about love,' echoed in my head and the wisdom of it, that in this place that my mother was writing these words of advice, she looked at the food and she could still feel the love that was being communicated through the food and the beauty of the places that had been travelled to find the ingredients or the spectacular experience of a particular restaurant. That even in that darkest moment, she could still feel that. And the words that this book is true about love in such a simple way, captured that. I felt it echoed in my head and I felt a duty to that memory to now share that advice and that wisdom with as many people as possible.
It is such a celebration of a life, and your mother was so much more than her death, so I think that it's a really beautiful way to celebrate that love and her life.
That's right. It becomes this idea about food and memory and how powerful food is. But we talk about storytelling, and I know you talk about food and storytelling all the time. But it also is this incredible vehicle for memory. If we suddenly have this awareness, which I had through this experience, it can be a tool to trigger memory. Then you have this ability to potentially take the brain of your future. You can craft these food experiences for your family or for your loved ones to say that I'm creating something that's somewhere down the line, you are going to have this memory trigger that brings back all these wonderful thoughts and emotions and vivid images of where you were. The power of food to do that is unique.
Absolutely. I think it's a beautiful thing.
This isn’t a cookbook, as much as we love these cookbooks, it’s not 30 recipes under 30 minutes.It’s a cookbook where the food is a vehicle to transport you to a particular time and a particular place and lift that place off the page and onto people’s plates. ~ Anna McLeod, The Kitchen of Somewhere
I think a lot about Proust. Well, I don't think Proust is my Roman empire, but I do think a lot about Proust and that whole act of biting into the Madeleine and being transported to another place, that power of scent or flavour to spark a memory and take us so vividly somewhere. I think that what you are sharing is a bit like what I do with Conversation with a chef, as in, I have these really amazing conversations with people that I just want to share with listeners. You are doing that with these beautiful experiences of food and connection, which I think is incredible. And I think it also is one of those things that for readers or cooks or people who love seeing beautiful landscapes, it's a really great prompt for us to record our own beautiful experiences for later to look back on and relive and enjoy and share. What a beautiful thing to do.
I love the idea of the Madeleine moment. I love that the reference of Proust where dipping into the lemon tea with the Madeleine and biting into it, and a flood of memories that nothing else could trigger for the character. I love that idea that now involuntary memory, which is studied in neuroscience and has this whole medical approach could also be described by a beautiful baked good. I love that cooking has found its way into neuroscience and understanding the brain.
That's right. I think my first instance of that was not a very high culinary one. I just had a sudden flashback of me as a little girl in Disneyland smelling the hot dogs and going, Hmm, that's right, this is Disneyland. I'm hoping I've moved on from that to more lofty French dishes or something. But when you set about thinking that you wanted to share these things more widely, how important was it for you to actually travel and to walk those paths?
Yes. Very important. And the understanding of how important that was came with the writing process. The actual production of the book started with the notebook I've just described as the sort of primary source. Then it moved into talking to people that were there as I retraced the origin story of 'Somewhere'. The book's called The Kitchen of Somewhere, and Somewhere is this place, which is the final resting place of all these great food ideas and great food experiences, which readers will discover along the way. But as I started having these conversations with people and looking through family archives and recipe archives, I realised that actually to capture it, you had to go, you had to be in the desert, you had to feel the wild streets of Key West. And what does it feel like to be in a town that h as a pirate spirit to it? Or how does the French Quarter of New Orleans feel early in the morning after the party? How do you actually get that visceral sense of place and translate it into the writing, or translate it into food? And the food really is a part of the story.
This isn't a cookbook, as much as we love these cookbooks, it's not 30 recipes under 30 minutes.It's a cookbook where the food is a vehicle to transport you to a particular time and a particular place and lift that place off the page and onto people's plates. It's used very much as a part of the fabric of the story. So, to go there and to be in these places really captures that essence. It was quite important to be able to translate it properly and to feel authentic.
And also the photography, for the food photography, the creative mission there was to have it in situ, in natural light, not in a studio. The majority of the food photography is done out on location, and that has a certain adventure to it as well. But hopefully that can be felt through the photography. You can feel that outdoor air or the adventure spirit through the images as well.
Absolutely. And are they that places that your mum travelled to?
The story true traverses about a decade. Its set in the 1970s. The book has this slightly 1970s retro dusting over it. There are some historical photographs in there, which are incredibly sort of 1970s stylish, if that's a combination of words that go together. It has a sort of style flair to it. They are incredibly beautiful and bring the characters to life a little bit. So yes, it's absolutely a specific time and a specific place. And some of the food has this 1970s nod to it, like bruleed grapefruit. Grapefruit was on trend in the seventies. And then I put a twist on it to transport you through that place where if you can say a fruit's on trend, to that place where they felt that they were eating grapefruit at the table in a 1970 kitchen in California.
Yes. Well, I think even in 1970 Christchurch it was on trend. We had actual grapefruit spoons that were kind of triangular to scoop out the wedges. Someone was doing a great marketing job with the grapefruit in the seventies, weren't they? That's astounding. I'd forgotten about that.
I travelled over 64,000 kilometres to cover the territory. I did this travel in sections in between life and work and did it in chunks. It took a couple of years to pull it all together. But I think that travel, that sense of place comes through and if you go there, you can feel it and translate it into the words and the food. Taking the time to do that and to get that authenticity, I think really helped in telling the story and that message that food can communicate these things. It can capture a sense of place and capture that memory. Pulling it together over that period of time and taking the time was really worthwhile. ~ Anna McLeod, The Kitchen of Somewhere
How long did this book take to compile? Because it sounds like there are a lot of layers in it.
There are a lot of layers. I travelled over 64,000 kilometres to cover the territory. I did this travel in sections in between life and work and did it in chunks. It took a couple of years to pull it all together. But I think that travel, that sense of place comes through and if you go there, you can feel it and translate it into the words and the food. Taking the time to do that and to get that authenticity, I think really helped in telling the story and that message that food can communicate these things. It can capture a sense of place and capture that memory. Pulling it together over that period of time and taking the time was really worthwhile.
Let's talk about some of the recipes, because I read somewhere about the South Island apple, is it a dessert or pie?
Apple cake.
Yes, that's right. I have such fond memories of apples as a child. I don't think I've had as good an apple as I recall having when we were little and picking apples off the tree in an orchard, just the taste of those apples in season, in autumn. Tell me about the cake.
This is a recipe that was cooked on repeat in the kitchen. And it is a recipe from right at the beginning of the story where my mother, Pauline, the main character of the book is in the South Island. She's in Dunedin in the deep south and studying and living and surrounded by all this incredible produce and working in a caf. It's a student town. So, everybody's got jobs and studying and living together. My mother would work in this cafe to make money and pay for her study. There was an apple cake in that cafe. The owner was a Dutch woman who had immigrated to New Zealand and was living in Dunedin. When my mother graduated and left that job, the parting gift was this apple cake. And for the rest of our lives, we had this. Every time we had it, was a moment that was my young mother studying in Dunedin in the South Island.
When I went back to Dunedin to study myself, and I was working as a wilderness guide out on the Otago Peninsula and traveling into the mountains and up around the top of the South Island in Nelson Marlborough and guiding up there and eating the produce that's growing right across the South Island of Aotearoa, I kept coming back to this apple cake, the apple cake and the orchards and the growing region of the South Island just was always connected to my mother and Dunedin as that student town. So, in one bite, this story of that time in her life was captured and it travelled with us for, for the rest of our lives. But there are other recipes in there as well, like the spice-soaked cherries from Nelson. Or the hokey pokey with rosemary mist ice cream or pipi fritters, which every time I have them, I just imagine myself on the Coromandel or with my toes digging into the sand to harvest the pipis and take them back and steam them and pick the little bits of sand out of it. Each of these items has its connection to a place and to a story and to a time. Everybody has these stories. It's the story of many families and everybody can reflect on their own memories and what these trigger.Whenever I go back to the South Island, now, I will have my destinations that I have to traverse. So it's Mapua for the smoked fish or a box of cherries from Nelson or Mins Bins on the Kaikoura coast for crayfish. If I don't do that, it doesn't feel like I've arrived yet.
Oh, I agree. For me, I was just back in Christchurch, and it was Bluff oysters and Ice Cream Charlie. We had an ice cream truck growing up that's still there, apparently it was started early last century and it's just this very icy vanilla ice cream topped with just a little bit of actual berry syrup. It's just the best thing. I'm not really a sweet tooth, but I said to my mum when I was just back over there, I see the ice cream Charlie van, we've got to go and have ice cream. And we had several attempts. He's now only open on certain times and poor mum was being dragged back there all the time. But I think that's the thing I was just reflecting too, I think we often have a negative view of the culinary landscape of Aotearoa before the last couple of decades, and I know when I lived in France for a year in the nineties, with all of the beautiful food they cooked there, I just thought, gosh, we've got nothing like this in New Zealand. But I'm really glad you are reminding me of the actual raw ingredients and the landscape of New Zealand, because we absolutely had all of those things, as you say, just those incredible natural resources and fruit that tasted like fruit. We certainly had and have those incredible things. I just spoke to a chef last week, Winston Zhang at Akaiito, and he said he loves going to New Zealand, but he won't eat in any of the restaurants. He just goes to go to those places that you mentioned where the produce is so good, the crayfish and the, the green-lipped mussels and so on. But we do have treasures over there.
That's so interesting to hear. I think Monique Fiso at Hiakai is doing an amazing job as well in New Zealand, in her restaurant here, which is bringing to life those native ingredients fromNew Zealand and taking a whole new twist. She's doing a remarkable job. Her book is also spectacular, but her restaurant is doing the same. She's taking ingredients like kawa kawa and native ferns and bringing to it level of culinary skill that just elevates all these ingredients that we understand as bush ingredients. I think Australia's really embracing its native ingredients and some of the spectrum is just spectacular in terms of the flavour palate and restaurants are really starting to use it. But wouldn't it be fantastic if every kitchen had these ingredients?
I was guiding in New Zealand and when tourists came or travellers came, or even local New Zealand students would come out into the wilderness with me. You would go into the wilderness, and you would be challenging yourself physically or you would be learning a new athletic skill or you would be pushing yourself to a limit. But when you introduced food to that process, it just shifted these experiences into a place of luxury. So if you were hiking a trail and kawa kawa was there and you picked a few kawa kawa leaves, or you were paddling out in the Marlborough Sounds and you passed green lipped mussels on the edge of the rocks, and you just harvested six and then pulled up on the beach and at the end of the day you were steaming your green lipped mussels and boiling in the billy, the kawa kawa leaves for a digestive at the end. And you could see people's eyes light up with the fact that there was the open fire and the ocean dancing at their toes, but they were eating and drinking something that they'd seen growing just a couple of hours earlier in the day. That sense of being in New Zealand or in that place as you consumed it, you could see it feeling like magic in those people for that experience. It wasn't just about the struggle, it wasn't just about the environment. It was also how food can elevate that moment. It is really quite incredible to see.
I love visiting Australia and there are ingredients that are so exciting here. One of the first things I have to do when I arrive in Melbourne is go to Mabu Mabu by Nornie Bero. How the storytelling and the ingredients are being woven through the menu is just another fantastic example of that same idea in the book of transporting to place. With every bite you are in a different environment and a different place. And she’s obviously huge on storytelling. It’s fantastic to have Monique Fiso in New Zealand and Nornie Bero in Australia, they’re these exceptional chefs who are doing such a great job with this same idea that I’m sharing in this book. ~ Anna McLeod, The Kitchen of Somewhere
That's right. I was about to ask a question that involved the word, exotic, I was going to say what's the most exotic destination you've been to, but actually New Zealand sounds pretty exotic the way you just described it.
I think both you and I have this connection to both sides of the Tasman. I think that is reflected in some of the recipes that are in this book as well. Ginger crunch is this very nostalgic baking item, but it's got a twist of pepperberry in the book, which gives it this depth and rich earthiness to something that we're all quite nostalgic about. But I've had some fantastic experiences that some people would call exotic in Australia as well. I was in a national park in Queensland, and came running along the trail and saw two lizards fighting each other. They were on their hind legs and they were swinging punches at each other. And I thought, sure, they'll hear my feet and decide to scatter into the trees. But they were very confident and they were just fist fighting each other and not taking any notice of anyone else. I had to scramble up the bank and skirt around them as they continued to Mike Tyson each other on the trail. And, and I thought to myself, these lizards are almost as tall as me on their hind legs. And they did not care that I was present at all. I thought, this is a uniquely beautiful Australian outdoor moment that I would say I couldn't find in too many places around the world.
That's right. Goodness. It's a good reminder too that we are not the main protagonist of their story, we think we're the top of the ladder, but you were just nothing to them as they continued their lives.
Right. I love visiting Australia and there are ingredients that are so exciting here. One of the first things I have to do when I arrive in Melbourne is go to Mabu Mabu by Nornie Bero. How the storytelling and the ingredients are being woven through the menu is just another fantastic example of that same idea in the book of transporting to place. With every bite you are in a different environment and a different place. And she's obviously huge on storytelling. It's fantastic to have Monique Fiso in New Zealand and Nornie Bero in Australia, they're these exceptional chefs who are doing such a great job with this same idea that I'm sharing in this book.
You are a great storyteller as well. You're very good at sharing your experiences and the ideas and the food. I see that you've got a few dates coming up here where you will do more of that.
Yes. We've got an In Conversation event at the state library with Readings, which would be great to see everybody there. The book is also raising money for Beyond Blue. So with every book we sell in Australia, we are donating $5 back to their support services. Again, that mind memory, mental health connection, which is woven into the motivation of this book and it is really important for us to keep funding the resources that support mental health in the community. The book has got a purpose to it that we're really trying do some good with it as well.
That's right. And people can buy it from Readings, and also online.
Correct. If they want to find stockists, they can visit somewherekitchen.com, we have all the stockists listed on the website.
I definitely need a copy of this book because it's just reminded me of ginger crunch. What an all-time favourite. I like baking from the Edmonds cooking book, which nowadays online is the Chelsea sugar website, which maybe is a sign of the times and another favourite was Afghans. Do you remember Afghans?
Yes. Why don't we still make Afghans, Yo-Yos, Coconut Ice, Ginger Crunch, hokey pokey biscuits? The Edmonds cookbook was up there as your go-to Bible in the kitchen next to the Joy of Cooking. It was a baking bible, for sure. That's such a trigger .
That's funny isn't it? I feel like your book's going to have everything I love, all combined into one with storytelling and food. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on a copy as well. So thank you Anna. I really appreciate talking to you and, and I look forward to meeting you in person one day.
Thank you so much for having me on your show. I'm a huge fan, Jo, so it's wonderful to have a conversation.
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