A Financial Times and Observer "best summer read"
'With its union of practicality and magic, a kitchen is a portal offering extended range and providing unlikely paths out of the ordinary. Offering opportunities to cook, imagine and create ways back into other times, other lives and other territories. Central Asia, Turkey, Ukraine, the South Caucasus, Russia, the Baltics and Poland. Places that have eased into my marrow over the years shaping my life, writing and thinking. They are here, these lands I return to, in this kitchen.'
A welcoming refuge with its tempting pantry, shelves of books and inquisitive dog, Caroline Eden finds comfort away from the road in her basement Edinburgh kitchen. Join her as she cooks recipes from her travels, reflects on past adventures and contemplates the kitchen’s unique ability to tell human stories. This is a hauntingly honest, and at times heartbreaking, memoir with the smell, taste and preparation of food at its heart.
From late night baking as a route back to Ukraine to capturing the beauty of Uzbek porcelain, and from the troublesome nature of food and art in Poland to the magic of cloudberries, Cold Kitchen celebrates the importance of curiosity and of feeling at home in the world.
Table of Contents:
A Subterranean Homecoming
WINTER
1. Winter Melons
2. Russian Railway Pies
3. Sultanahmet in the Snow
SPRING
4. Better a Dinner of Herbs
5. Baltic Symphonies
6. Journey Food
SUMMER
7. Carried Away by a Cloudberry
8. Soup and a Sparrow
9. Cheap Thrills
AUTUMN
10. Clover Dumplings
11. Smashed
12. Night Cooking
About the Author :
Caroline Eden is a writer, book critic and multi-award winner. Before moving to journalism she completed an MA in Jewish Studies and Diaspora at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London. She has travelled extensively to countries such as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and Bangladesh, documenting her experiences across multiple publications, as well as on BBC Radio 4’s ‘From Our Own Correspondent’.
She has contributed to the Financial Times, the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement. Her first book, Samarkand: Recipes and Stories from Central Asia & the Caucasus, was a Guardian Book of the Year in 2016 and won the Guild of Food Writers Food and Travel Award in 2017. Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes – Through Darkness and Light, Caroline’s second book, has won numerous awards, including the John Avery Award in 2018 and the Art of Eating Prize in 2020. Her most recent publication, Red Sands: Reportage and Recipes through Central Asia, from Hinterland to Heartland, was a 'book of the year' for The New Yorker and won the prestigious André Simon Award in 2020. Caroline has also written forewords and introductory essays to several books, including They Went To Portugal by Rose Macaulay and Through Khiva to Golden Samarkand by Ella Christie.
Review :
A quiet and beautiful book, a unique blend of history, place, love, food and belonging. Eden writes so sincerely and so intimately you miss her as soon as you’ve read the last page.
Powerfully evocative and beautifully written Cold Kitchen will warm your heart. Curl up with this book and let it gently take you places near and far; you will find a sense of home, the hearthstone of our shared humanity.
A hugely accomplished work that manages to be wildly enjoyable, often moving and always thoughtful.
One of the most brilliant travel writers of her generation, Caroline Eden is masterful at evoking the flavours and emotions of her encounters while on the road in eastern Europe and Central Asia. In Cold Kitchen, she weaves together the contemporary and the historical, the mundane and the magical, in a heartfelt memoir on the meanings of both distant adventures and the comforts of home.
A beguiling book overlaid with a tinge of melancholy for a world that is so often in a state of violent upheaval. Anyone who has ever felt the pangs of homesickness will understand how cooking can transport you.
Into her Edinburgh kitchen, Caroline Eden tenderly gathers the ingredients and memories from a hundred journeys in Turkey, the Baltics, the Caucasus and Central Asia. A wonderful feast of a book by a multi-talented author.
A unique memoir to savour by an explorer of our time. Eden’s cultural and culinary map takes us into a wonderfully rich world.
We’ve really enjoyed Cold Kitchen, Caroline Eden’s travel memoir hewn through recipes from as far and wide as Central Asia, Ukraine, the Baltics and Turkey.
Travel, history, food and identity – it’s all here in intrepid traveller Caroline’s tenderly written memoir. From her basement kitchen in Edinburgh, she re?ects on past culinary adventures, including plucking cloudberries in the Scottish Highlands and the magic of Riga’s rye bread pudding, sharing memorable recipes along the way.
There are few with Caroline Eden’s ability to convey the particularities of people, place and landscapes through food … This honest, personal food memoir takes the reader from Eden cooking the recipes in her Edinburgh basement kitchen to a Russian railway for pies, Latvian capital Riga for dark beer and rye pudding, and much more besides. A special book to read, cook from and be transported by
A moving reflection on how meaning is accrued through time and memory
