The flavors of the Four Nations: An Avatar News interview with Chef Jenny Dorsey, author of the official Avatar: The Last Airbender cookbook!

Out of our five senses, animation technically only uses two: sight and sound. Despite this, anything and everything can be depicted, and sensations of touch, taste, and smell are never far away. Say a nice, juicy peach shows up on your screen. This isn’t just visual information, but can also trigger the familiar fuzzy feeling of its skin, the smell as you bring it close to your mouth, the sound as you bite down, and yes, oh yes, the taste. Anyone hungry?

Food shows up a lot in Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. It’s an intrinsic part of the fully fleshed-out cultures that make up the Four Nations and it’s a daily necessity and pleasure for the fictional characters that populate them, just like us in the real world. Now, this is going to sound familiar: how do we bridge the two worlds?

Meet Chef Jenny Dorsey, author of the official Avatar: The Last Airbender cookbook. She’s the bridge: a distinguished culinary master, a dedicated savant of food justice, science, culture, and history, and a huge Avatar fan.

^{→🍯 Chef Jenny Dorsey: “And yes, that’s a photo of me being doused in honey mustard, because life is about living and the internet is forever.” Photo by Hannah Burton for Bustle.}

I had the incredible opportunity to interview Chef Jenny; we sat down and talked about everything from what tastes the best in the cookbook, to geopolitics, to cabbage. Lots and lots of cabbage.

The following is a transcript of our conversation edited to best fit the medium of text.

Avatar News (bold text): So, my first question is: is that really mustard?

Jenny Dorsey (normal-weight text): [Laughs] It is, it is. Honey mustard.

AN: It is! Okay, that sort of sets the stage for, like, your level of commitment to food. In your description of yourself on your website, I saw a couple of cool lines that really stood out to me. One of them was that you “use food to express the full range of human emotions and social commentary about the world around us” and then a bit later you also say that food is “a powerful medium for storytelling”. I really liked the way you put that, because my last interview was about music with Jeremy [Zuckerman, the composer of the scores of ATLA and TLOK] and both music and food make the world of Avatar feel real. Like, they have to eat, right?

JD: Right.

AN: All five of our senses can do it, although obviously some of them are more common in the shows. Even with food itself, you have your own photography showing it to us, so that’s sight, and you even make the literal physical dishes yourself— ceramics— so that’s the sense of touch. When it comes to taste, and the food in Avatar, we know much less than some of the other senses. How did you take the purely audiovisual medium of a TV show, and the secondary information we know like cultural inspirations, and translate it to the real-world sense of taste?

JD: I did a lot of research into what the showrunners’ cultural inspirations for a lot of the different regions were— the show has geopolitical roots that are, I would say, a little bit more prominent in Korra as opposed to the first series, but I do think it was fair to use food to talk about how things might have changed.

For example, in the Avatar world during [the time of the first series], in the Water Nation they’re only accessing the actual things that they have up in the Arctic, so you wouldn’t be using certain ingredients that would be more available in hotter climates. They’re not using vegetable oil, right? Realistically, they’re probably using something like seal blubber. That’s difficult to find in most grocery stores in the States, so what is the right substitute for that? In the book, I use lard as a substitute to at least ensure the final ingredient is still a saturated fat that comes from animals.

As the book progresses, there are more recipes that utilize things like flour, sugar, or things that would come from trade routes into the Water Nation once they’d been established. In some of the headnotes in the book, Katara talks about how they wouldn’t make cookies in the Water Nation because they don’t have any flour— you can’t really grow wheat there— until there’s a reason for flour to be coming to the Water Nation, and that wouldn’t have been possible until there was peace.

Keep reading

Exclusive: Mai loves getting cherry ice cream because “it pisses Azula off” 😂

Got some new canon info for you today, from my upcoming interview about the official ATLA cookbook, which comes out the same day as the book: November 23rd!

The author, Chef Jenny Dorsey, created the book in collaboration with Avatar Studios. Here’s the full quote from our interview on this hilarious new character info about Mai and Azula:

🍒 “There’s this one Fire Nation dish— Ember Island cherry ice cream. Well, what kind of ice cream would they serve on Ember Island? Remember it’s a summer resort for the royal Fire Nation people, so it should be gourmet ice cream and it would definitely be spicy. That particular recipe is from Mai’s point of view and harkens back to the finale when Azula spits out the cherry pit and she’s, like, so angry about it, so Mai’s telling the reader ‘I love getting this cherry ice cream because it pisses Azula off.’ So, like, just being able to give you a little bit of an inside look as to what some of these characters are thinking.”

The book is FILLED with surprisingly great new info like this– I’ve already seen you guys laughing and crying over the preview pages I posted like Zuko saying he’s “not the trendy type” (and now you’re all calling him a pick me 💀) and Sokka putting so much love into the mooncakes he makes to honor Yue and her sacrifice.

Well, there are SIXTY recipes in the book, so there’s definitely more where that came from, hitting shelves on Tuesday!

The official Avatar cookbook is coming on November 23rd!

From the mind and taste buds of Chef Jenny Dorsey, an official Avatar cookbook featuring dishes and recipes from and inspired by Avatar: The Last Airbender is coming to your kitchen table!

Check out some previews above– the book actually features some decidedly deep new character moments and worldbuilding! I had the fortune of sitting down with Chef Jenny to discuss the book and I can tell you she really gets Avatar. There’s a delectable spread of interesting, surprisingly funny and emotional, and of course tasty things coming from this book… Check out our interview when it comes out on the same day as the cookbook: November 23rd!

You can see full preview pages for the five above recipes below, including ingredients, instructions, etc. And if that gets you salivating, the full book contains SIXTY recipes!

Keep reading

An official Avatar cookbook is coming in 2021!

Here’s the description from the product listing:

Feast on delicacies unique to the Earth Kingdom, Water Tribe, Air Nomads, and the Fire Nation with the official Avatar: The Last Airbender Cookbook.

From the shores of Kyoshi Island to the crowded streets of Ba Sing Se, this official cookbook collects signature dishes from all four nations, like vegetarian plates of the Air Nomads, fiery entrees from the Fire Nation, seafood from the North and South Poles, and delectable cuisine from the Earth Kingdom.

Featuring enticing color photography, step-by-step instructions, and tips for adapting dishes to specific diets, this book includes sixty authentic food and beverage recipes inspired by the beloved series. Enjoy this diverse compendium of delicacies from the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

I think this is a really great concept, I’m definitely looking forward to it especially because of how good Insight Editions’ previous books– An Avatar’s Chronicle and Legacy of the Fire Nation– were.

The author of the book and its recipes is Jenny Dorsey (pictured above), a chef and writer who has competed on Chopped and other cooking competition shows, which is pretty cool!

No cover art or preview pages yet, but I’ll be sure to share those when they crop up. That will probably be closer to the release date, which is August 24th, 2021.

Anyone else hungry now…