Cold Kitchen with Caroline Eden

‘Caroline Eden is an extraordinarily creative and gifted writer. Red Sands captures the sights, tastes and feel of Central Asia so well that when reading this book I was sometimes convinced I was there in person. A wonderful book from start to finish’

Peter Frankopan

Caroline Eden, author of the wonderful, award winning books, Samarkand, Black Sea and Red Sands is a travel and food writer and book critic (Financial Times, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement).

In this new book, Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Journeys she finds comfort away from the road in her basement Edinburgh kitchen. With an alluring pantry, shelves of books and inquisitive dog, we 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 heart-breaking, memoir with the smell, taste and preparation of food at its heart.

Home again. Home again to this subterranean kitchen, cold as a larder, quiet as figs...

'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 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’

Diana Henry

‘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’

Elif Shafak