4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thEstate.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018
Text and photography copyright © Anja Dunk
Anja Dunk asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Design by Atelier Dyakova, London
Author photograph by Jonathan Cherry
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780008244385
Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008244392
Version: 2018-06-26
FOR LUCAS, TOBIAS AND AIDAN
I am not a professional photographer, but when the idea for this book came about it made sense that I take the photographs myself at home over the course of a year. It was a challenge, but one I welcomed, and I have thoroughly enjoyed watching how the light falls in the kitchen at different times of day, standing on chairs, and occasionally teetering on ladders.
All the plates and bowls of food in this book are real, whether they were part of a family breakfast, lunch or dinner; a solo lunch when the boys were in school (while I love a busy table, I relish a lunch on my own all the same); a dinner for two; cake and coffee with friends or drinks in the late afternoon – everything that was photographed was eaten as it was intended to be, or indeed was in the process of being eaten as the photo was taken.
I have to say, though, that taking pictures of children eating isn’t as easy as it may look – for every photograph of the boys that made these pages, hundreds didn’t. There is a fine line between a half-eaten plate of food and, well, a mess. A bigger challenge than taking the pictures themselves was actually getting the boys to eat more slowly – often it was a case of ‘Ready, steady, go! But slowly, slowly …’ followed by me snapping away as quickly as I could before I also sat down to eat.
All the tables, work surfaces, tablecloths, tools, utensils, pans and tableware are things we use every day – you might well, for this reason, notice some items appearing on the pages more than once.
I hope you enjoy this little window into our kitchen.
CONTENTS
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