Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels

Caroline Eden reflects on her travels through recipes and ingredients in a poetic memoir for food lovers and adventurers alike, crossing countries and cultures.

'With its union of practicality and magic, a kitchen is a portal, offering extended range and providing unlikely paths out of the ordinary . longed-for places are suddenly not so far away. Not unreachable, but present. Held again in the hand and heart.'

In her Edinburgh basement kitchen, Caroline Eden recounts travels across Central Asia, Turkey, the Baltics and beyond using recipes, souvenirs, ingredients and imagination to provide routes back to distant lands and past adventures.

From late-night baking as a way to Ukraine, to the magic of Uzbekistan's wintertime melons, once gifts fit for emperors and tsars, this is a hauntingly honest memoir with the smell, taste and preparation of food at its heart. Cold Kitchen is an ode to the kitchen's extraordinary ability to tell human stories and transport us to faraway places and different times.

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. ― 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

A hugely accomplished work that manages to be wildly enjoyable, often moving and always thoughtful. -- Olivia Potts ― The Spectator

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. ― Fuchsia Dunlop

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. ― Mail on Sunday

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. ― Philip Marsden

A unique memoir to savour by an explorer of our time. Eden's cultural and culinary map takes us into a wonderfully rich world. ― Lyse Doucet

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. ― National Geographic Traveller

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. ― Waitrose Food

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 ― Delicious magazine

A moving reflection on how meaning is accrued through time and memory ― Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

Caroline Eden is a writer and book critic contributing to the Financial Times, The Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement. Her books include Samarkand, Black Sea and most recently, Red Sands, winner of the prestigious André Simon Award and a 'book of the year' for The New Yorker.