INTERVIEW: Caroline Eden, Author of Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels

Interviewed by Amy Fish

I picked up Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels (Bloomsbury; Jan. 2025) because I like when a book has recipes.

It may be nostalgia for the key lime pie in Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, or the champurrado hot chocolate in Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. Not that I’ve actually cooked anything from Cold Kitchen yet — I haven’t — but the desire is there. Her descriptions are inviting.

This interview was conducted via e-mail at Caroline’s request.

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Amy Fish: Our readers are mostly writers so we like to know about your journey to publication: How did this book get from being an idea you had to a book we can hold in our hands?

Caroline Eden: Over the years my books, including Black Sea and Red Sands, have been set entirely overseas as they are narrative cookbooks, or travelogues with recipes, about the lands between eastern Europe and Central Asia. For this memoir, I wanted to bring the reader into my home, and to Edinburgh where I live. Cold Kitchen has at its heart the idea of feeling at home in the world and looking at how the kitchen can operate as a portal to other times, lives and places. Each chapter moves in and out of my basement kitchen here in Edinburgh as I prepare a dish, for which there is a recipe at the end of each essay. The book opens in Uzbekistan and concludes in Ukraine but it keeps returning home.

(Sidenote: Interesting, but also reveals the challenge of an email interview. I meant to ask more about how Caroline got the book published, not what countries she had visited. I may not have been clear in my question, let’s see how we do on the next one.)

AF: You reference a lot of memoirs and diary records in your book, as well as cookbooks, some from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. I’m wondering what they were like to read – like what did they physically look like, and then also if any of them were hard to find? Any good stories about discovering an old tome in a dusty bookstore or library?

CE: I fear this won’t be the most exciting answer but to be honest… Like most researchers and writers I do the majority of my research online, but I am a big fan of libraries and use the National Museum of Scotland a lot and the library at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) in London, where I studied. I can lose a lot of time in the latter just admiring old book covers which might be a Russian language guide to trekking in the Caucasus or a 1970s pamphlet on Armenian cooking. They have it all!

AF: Of all the books you read, in researching Cold Kitchen, which was your favourite and why?

CE: In all of my books I always try to bring in a couple of writers who I feel have fallen by the wayside over the years and who ought to be better known. For Cold Kitchen I fell in love with the work of Carla Grissmann. Her book, Dinner of Herbs: Village Life in Turkey in the 1960s was recently re-published by Eland Publishing who are based in London and give new life to old books. Grissmann is remembered in certain circles for helping to safeguard and catalogue the holdings of Kabul’s National Museum of Afghanistan in the 1970s, but it is in the pages of her book, outlining a year spent in rural Anatolia in the 1960s, that her impressions and ideas best live on. Leaving behind a job at the Jerusalem Post when she was in her late thirties, and arriving at the tiny farming hamlet of Uzak Köy, she recounts ‘non-stop meals’ and sitting with the village women ‘packed together on the floor in an incredible confusion of laughter and chatter, eating walnuts, apples, sticky pink and white candies’. Wonderful, evocative writing.

(Sidenote: This is an excellent answer. Maybe we are getting the hang of this email thing.)

AF: You do a great job engaging all the senses in your descriptions, especially the smells. What is your favourite smell? Does it evoke a particular memory that you are willing to share?

CE: Honestly, it’s not linked to this book but it is wood smoke. In my twenties I spent time in the Indian Himalaya and the smell of wood smoke always takes me back to my early travelling days in the mountains there. In terms of food it is definitely the smell of bread baking in a tandoor oven.

AF: You are an adventurous eater, which is part of what makes Cold Kitchen so interesting (Latvian black pudding with sauerkraut, for example). What was the worst food you encountered on your travels? Anything that you really just could not put in your mouth?

CE: I’m not so keen on mutton but I have eaten it quite a lot in Central Asia over the years. Qurut, the snack of nomads historically in Central Asia which is very salty dried milk curds shaped into gob-stopper balls, are an acquired taste. I also used to struggle with okra, which when I cook it can be slimy and stringy but recently, in India, I was served a plate of okra that had been deep fried, and it was delicious.

AF: What would you say is the narrative structure of Cold Kitchen? Did the narrative evolve over time as you edited, or was it always your plan to organize seasonally? Can you talk about this for us?

CE: It made sense to organise it by season and I began with that structure in mind. I wanted Edinburgh to come into the book, and so when I have the kitchen window open the sounds of the summer come in, and at other times rain lashes at the pane. When you are pinging in and out, that familiarity of the kitchen and the shape of the year was a useful framework, for me, and I hope, the reader.

AF: Were there any scenes that you wanted to include but that got edited out? What were they about and why was that decision made?

CE: No, to be honest. With a memoir I think it is very much up to you what you include. And more generally speaking, in the UK nonfiction tends to be less edited compared to fiction. The freedom is great, albeit slightly terrifying as you can go anywhere.

AF: As a reader, I grew attached to Darwin and I am sorry for your loss. I know this is not a question, I just wanted to acknowledge and express condolences.

CE: I am so grateful for that. Darwin was the most remarkable dog and it is an honour to share him with readers and to have him live on in the pages of Cold Kitchen. People love their dogs and it is a rare privilege that I got this chance to share Darwin with the world.

AF: Our readers would like to know how much input you had into the cover and the title of this book?

CE: It’s a great question, and I have to say: a little. I sent in a “mood board” of photographs and book covers that I like that I felt represented similar themes to the ones in Cold Kitchen and the designer went ahead. I like the hardback cover but I wonder if it represents the places covered, maybe not, but it does convey dining and Darwin and I think it is really hard to get it all. The colour scheme has been divisive, I liked it, some have said it’s too pink… The paperback is different, there is a map in place of Darwin – I am OK with that as I know maps are really attractive on a cover and Darwin is on the hardback which is more prestigious, so he wouldn’t mind, I’m sure.

(Sidenote: Haha, but to myself because this interview was over email).

AF: Finally, what are you reading now? (Or, alternately, what books would you like to recommend to our readers?)

CE: I have read two outstanding nonfiction books recently. The first is Under a Metal Sky by Philip Marsden which is an expansive exploration of how the wonder of the world resides in rocks. Over 11 chapters, each named after a single material, such as peat, bronze and radium — there are deep dives into ecology, physical journeys and darker mental sojourns into our troubled relationship with the natural world, as well as unexpected perspectives on European history. The other book is a stylish global history of music by legendary record producer Joe Boyd called And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music. It is just fascinating, an invaluable historical record as well as a memoir well told.