‘how food is an act of love that has the potential to bridge cultures’: mxogyny interviews 'dear safia'

Banana bread and sourdough starters have been the circumstantial stars of the year. With everyone taking to the kitchen in lockdown, it’s become more evident than ever how important food is for us, how it binds families and communities together, and how it’s more than just sustenance to keep us ploughing through our usually packed days.  

Named a ‘Rising Star of 2019’ by Sainsbury’s Magazine and a Guardian ‘Instamasterchef’, a contributor to Caffeine Magazine, and half of Cook and Baker, Safia Shakarchi, the creator of ‘Dear Safia’, is the baker with a drool-worthy Instagram bringing a Middle Eastern spin to classic baked favourites from her Iraqi heritage. With the rise of social media and the massive boom in food-related accounts, the intermingling of cultural cuisines has become a global sensation, and it’s never been easier to share your favourite dish with thousands of hungry admirers. 

Mxogyny’s editor, Dalia, caught up with Safia to discuss the many facets of what it means to be a foodie and baker today, from navigating hybrid-British identities and Safia’s involvement with Bake for Syria to discussing social media’s relationship with eating disorder-related controversies.

(Mxogyny cannot be held accountable for the dangerous levels of hungry you’re about to get…)

‘dirty’ chai doughnuts, yum.

Let's start at the beginning; I've read on your website and past press that it was your Bibi (grandmother) that inspired your passion for baking, and the passing down of recipes and cooking skills is a recurring theme for many cooks and bakers. Why do you think family ties are so important when it comes to the making, and eating, of food? 

I think we forget how emotionally charged food actually is. It’s such a routine part of our daily lives that we don’t pay attention to how much meaning it holds within it, and we don’t realise that the food we eat genuinely forms part of who we are.  

Feeding is an act of love. Our mothers and grandmothers cooked for us to nourish us, to allow us to grow. The food they made literally gave us life – how magical is that! That surely plays a part in the significance those people have in our lives and the importance of those family ties. I think part of the longing we have for our grandmother and mother’s food is the comfort and wholeness it makes us feel when we eat it. It kind of takes you back to that safe place, that time when someone was always looking out for you and you so strongly felt part of a family unit. 

We grow up, we forge our independence, we build our own lives and we kind of separate a little from those roots; we shun that need to be looked after because we think we don’t need it, or maybe society tells us we don’t need it. But we so do, and I find a lot of the time food is what ends up bringing us back to that – we gather with the ones we love to eat together, be they friends or family. In our family, that’s always been on a Sunday. When my grandma was alive she and all our cousins would come to ours for dinner every Sunday, she would cook all her delicious food in her flat and bring it over. When she passed away we lost that for a few years and noticeably lost a little sense of that connection and unity. Over the last few years, we’ve made an effort to bring it back, and now I’ve somehow ended up taking over the cooking part!  

In a way, I also think I turned to food as a way of solving the classic second-generation immigrant ‘identity crisis’ (for want of a less dramatic term). I struggled a lot with the in-between-ness of being an Arab female growing up in British society. In fact, I resented being Arab because of how difficult it made things and a lot of the time I felt like I didn’t belong to that culture at all.  

Without really realising it I think I was trying to dig deeper into the idea of ‘belonging’ and the one thing I realised I had never questioned about my heritage was the food. Something genuinely just clicks every time those flavours hit my tongue. The crazy acidity from the amount of lemon and sumac that we use, the mountains of fresh herbs in and on every dish, the intensity of cardamom and rosewater in the tooth achingly-sweet desserts. All of those flavours and sensations were in the dishes that I had day-in-day-out as a child, in the food that my Bibi and my mama cooked for me. I guess they kind of feel like home – in the least cliché (or maybe most cliché…) way.  

For many people, home is such a loaded and confusing concept, regardless of whether you’ve grown up in between cultures, and for me, at least food helps make sense of what and where home really is. It doesn’t have to be a place or a house or a country, it’s a feeling, it’s both sensory and sensual: it’s the tastes, the smells, the touch and warmth of the people around you. It’s the heat in the kitchen whilst your Bibi is making dolma, it’s on the dining table when your brother tries to steal the salt, it’s sharing a meal with someone you love. 

Your cakes are works of art, almost too beautiful to eat! Where do you draw your inspiration for flavours and the aesthetics from? 

 I genuinely just make food that I want to eat and that I think looks nice! At the end of the day, food is beautiful. It is art. I’m really drawn to the visual aspect of it and in fact that was my initial route into the food world. I wanted to study art at university but I fell out of love with it a little whilst I was at school, and I found a different creative outlet in the kitchen. I completely fell in love with it.  

When I was 16, I was given a camera as a gift and I started to photograph all of the things that I baked. Soon after, I started a blog to document my recipes. It kind of became an obsession. This is definitely still the case - although over a decade later, I’m lucky enough to say that I’ve somehow made a career of it and now split my time between food writing and photography.  

I would say that over the years one of the things that have influenced how I cook and bake the most is tuning into the seasons, and that’s probably where I find the most inspiration. You start to notice how beautiful food really is when you cook or bake with produce at its best.  

There’s nothing better than finding the jammiest, deep pink figs in the summer, or purple-stained blood oranges in winter, or verdant, juicy asparagus in spring. The world has become so fluid and mobile (or at least it was before…!) that it’s easy to forget the rhythm of the seasons. It took a long time for me to convince my mum to stop buying strawberries in the middle of winter! Honestly, I get so much joy out of waiting for all of the different produce that pops up at different points in the year and finding creative things to do with it.  

Of course, there are also the staples and spices - which again are mostly the flavours I’m drawn to and that I grew up with – sesame, pistachio, tahini, rosewater, orange blossom, cardamom, nigella seeds. The food I make is always some kind of weird, confused mix of Middle East and West, like me I suppose.  

I’m also so lucky to live in one of the best (if not the best…) culinary cities in the world. London is incredible. Every single meal that I have inspires me to cook or bake something new, to try out a new flavour combination or a new technique. I miss the buzz of it! The food industry is also so closely knit here that I get a lot of inspiration from the people that I work with, who really are good friends as well. 

As an Insta foodie yourself, I'm interested to see what your take is on the relationship between social media and health fads /eating disorders. The Insta Foodie scene has blown up in recent years, however, social media has also been criticised for encouraging eating disorders and diet fads. Do you believe the correlation between the two holds enough ground?   

I think quite a few separate worlds exist on social media so what literally ‘influences’ you is dependent on the feed you curate and the people you follow. I always find that seeing someone else’s feed is like getting little glimpses into their personality. Scroll through mine and literally ALL you will see is food: chefs, restaurants, food photographers, food stylists, food producers. Scroll through someone else’s and you might see endless photos of cats.   

I can’t speak for other industries, but the food industry that I work in is quite far removed from diet culture. The chefs and foodies I know and love are truly passionate about sharing delicious, wholesome food, the provenance of ingredients, restaurant culture and using social media to forge a sense of community. Not many people shy away from butter or sugar or carbs or other things that have been demonised in mainstream media over the last few decades. I rarely see the people within the food world talk about health fads, and if they do talk about weight or diet culture it’s usually in a very personal and heartfelt discussion about their own demons. If anything, I think people can find comfort in that. 

A lot of us that work in the food world have had a complicated relationship or history with food – it’s hard not to when you’re surrounded by it both in your professional and personal life. I can completely see how social media could feed our obsession with food as a society in a way that could be unhealthy. I’ve definitely had my fair share of struggles with it, but belonging to that kind of community has helped me work through any feelings of guilt that, really, I blame the fashion, gossip and celebrity magazines I read as a teenager for. I imagine that glossy magazine culture been reincarnated on social media too, but I’m probably not informed enough to comment on that. 

Being a part of the food world has taught me that what really matters is eating good quality food, knowing where it comes from and enjoying it how it deserves to be enjoyed. Feed your body what it needs, and know that a lot of the time food is good for the soul. I guess that’s one take on body positivity!  

The rise of Instagram as a means of business and promotion is giving many an opportunity to be their own boss and take control of their career. Do you think this is especially important for women?  

Social media is incredibly democratising and has given voice to so many people that previously wouldn’t have had any sort of platform to speak from. It has the ability to mobilise a community and, in turn, shape a culture. Just think about things like #MeToo and the Arab Spring. 

I know Instagram has done great things for female empowerment and solidarity. There’s a huge community of female business owners and so many networks offering support and guidance specifically for women. For example, in the food world, there’s Ladies of Restaurants run by a friend of mine, Natalia Ribbe. She normally puts on really great events but at the moment she’s using social media to host virtual discussions and workshops, and connect women all over the world. She is so passionate about changing gender dynamics in the hospitality industry and giving women the confidence to do more. 

I don’t have any statistics to go by but I really do see more female-led businesses and female entrepreneurs popping up on Instagram than ever before. Social media has created a whole new career category, and it’s shown us that we don’t need to be in an office to do great things – and that applies to both women and men. It’s broken down barriers and empowered us all to build careers in a less traditional way.  

That’s not to say other kinds of hierarchies don’t still exist online. Social media is a lovely extension of our lives, but we do still have a lot of work to do in the real world!  

We have the Bake for Syria cookbook at home and my mum & I can't wait to try some of the recipes out during lockdown! I'm really interested in learning about your beliefs on cooking and cultural cohesion; why do you think cooking and baking is a good way to raise awareness for the refugee crisis?  

Cooking and baking have no borders, right? We all have food in common. It brings us together not only over our own dinner tables but it also has an incredible ability to bring us closer to other cultures and places we haven’t even been to.  

Food is able to foster a kind of empathy in that way. Middle Eastern food, for example, is inherently about sharing - our mezze, salads, dips and kind of ‘picky bits’, our big platters of dolma and biryani, our desserts like knafeh and umm ali that are made to feed masses and be scooped out of a big dish. That to me says something about our culture and the importance of family, friends and togetherness - and how much we love throwing a party (seriously). When other cultures eat our food, they’re gaining insight into that.  

So when we think about raising awareness, the acts of cooking, baking and eating the food of other cultures can humanise what we sometimes only see on the news as a collection of distressing photos, videos and faceless statistics. I think it can be hard for many people to fully comprehend that side of the story when it’s so far removed from their own lives, it sort of ends up being compartmentalised somewhere in your mind.  

By trying to promote cultural understanding instead, we can show that behind all of that there is a people and a way of life, something that they left behind and something that they’re seeking to establish again. It creates an emotional connection with that culture. The universality of food makes it an especially powerful medium to do that through. 

earl grey and cardamom sugar buns

Finally, what are your three favourite Iraqi dishes? (Mine are timmen bagilla, kubba obviously, and masgouf!)

I’m definitely with you on timmen bagila! The combination of rice, dill and broad beans is so simple but just so good - always served with a hefty dollop of labneh or laban (yogurt) of course. I think it’s an Iraqi rite of passage to sit and pod broad beans with your Bibi when you’re a kid so I feel like we’re all programmed to love that dish. And a ridiculous amount of dill on anything is just great.  

I always say I feel more Middle Eastern or Arab than I do Iraqi, and the same goes for the food I like. I’m actually the antithesis of Iraqi because I don’t eat lamb (I know, I know!!), so even though most people eat timmen bagila with lamb, I don’t. That also rules out most kubba too sadly, but my grandma used to make kubbat haleb with beef just for me which was amazing. We call it yellow kubba – is that just us?! 

 I also really love tishreeb lubia and I feel like it’s so underrated. It’s black-eyed beans cooked in a delicious oniony broth until they’re incredibly soft, then they’re layered on top of Iraqi tanoor bread which soaks up all the juices and the whole thing is finished with a shed load of dried peppermint. Any kind of tishreeb to be honest, even tishreeb bagila which is more of a breakfast dish with fava beans and an egg on top. Give me beans any day of the week. Maybe I’m more Iraqi than I think!  

find Safia’s insanely delicious creations on her instagram (@dearsafia) or website.