Cold Kitchen
A Financial Times and Observer "best summer read"
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year
‘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.
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.