Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith

This week, Gilly is exploring the secret kitchens of Britain’s Desi kitchens with Britain's Best Home Cook finalist, Sarah Woods.Her book Desi Kitchen is part of the current crop of second generation Indian cookbooks which are hitting the shelves right now. But Sarah’s tells the story of the communities in which Desi people from the Indian Sub continent have enriched so much of Britain with their food and spiritual cultures.  

This week, Gilly time travels through the centuries with Belgian writer Regula Ysewijn to explore the rich history of the food from her homeland.An anglophile who binged on Bronte and Austen since she was a child, Regula has spent much of her food writing life focussing on British baking. She’s a consultant for the National Trust and even wrote the Downton Abbey Christmas Cookbook. But in her book Dark Rye and Honey Cake, she’s going home to Belgium, the long way. As she digs deep into the food of the ancient Dutch language low countries, she traces the influence of their festival baking on the food culture in modern Belgium. And head over to Substack for some Extra Bites from CTB guests each week.

This week, Gilly is Zooming into the 17th-century Palazzo home in Venice of Skye McAlpine. The daughter of Lord Alistair McAlpine, one of Margaret Thatcher’s closest advisers, Skye grew up in Venice where she now lives with her own family. A classics scholar with a PhD in ancient love poetry, she’s an expert on how Greeks and Romans understood love. And in her latest cook book, A Table Full of Love, she writes a culinary love letter to the friends and family whose recipes she’s gathered over time, whisking in memories and a dash of affection. If the first two books were about Venice and friends and mismatched but beautiful China collected in flea markets, this is a deeper read about memories and feelings in the language of love.   Or is it?Follow Gilly @foodgillysmith on Instagram, and on Substack each week for a little Extra Bite from Gilly's guests.  Come to Venice with Skye in this week’s post.If you'd like to learn how to really say something, you can join Gilly's podcasting course at Use the promo code GILLY_4-PROMO

This week, Gilly chats to a new voice in food writing, Gurdeep Loyal. Diana Henry calls him 'amazing, original, boundary breaking, a genius with flavour’. He's a cool hunter, a podcaster and writer and his debut cookbook Mother Tongue has exploded a whole new way of thinking about Indian food.Since he won the Jane Grigson Trust award in 2020 for his proposal for Mother Tongue, the food world has been salivating as we wait for the arrival of the final book. Anna Jones says ‘every so often a rare cookbook comes along which brings something completely new and fascinating to the world of food.’ Claudia Roden says she’s thrilled 'to be drawn into Gurdeep’s extroarindary diaspora and fantastic world of flavours.' Felicity Cloake says he’s 'a Willy Wonka wizard of flavour.'Follow Gilly on Instagram @foodgillysmith, and you can also find a little surprise over on Substack each week as she asks her guests for a little extra something. Gurdeep has not only created a special Cooking the Books Spotify playlist, but written beautifully on her Substack about his choices. It’s a must read and listen.  And if you'd like to learn how to podcast and really say something, you can sign up for her Domestika course. Use the promo code GILLY_4-PROMO

This week, Gilly has lunch with one of Britain’s most respected and original voices in British food writing, Elisabeth Luard.A well-known writer, botanical artist and broadcaster, her many books have brought us stories of her family life in Andalucia in the 1960s set among the history, landscapes and culture of Europe. European Peasant Cookery was first published in 1986 and reprinted again at Christmas, and  is seen as one of the most important books in modern British food writing. Tom Parker Bowles in the Mail on Sunday called it 'one of the great cook books of all time.'  The 500 recipes tell much more than how to boil a lobster or salt a cod - they remind us of a way of life that Europeans had been living for centuries. Gilly takes her back to that life in Andalucia in the ‘60s to relive some of her favourite memories, and to discuss the legacy of the book at a time when the resilience skills of the peasant have never been so important.Check out Gilly's Substack for Elisabeth's Extra Bites

This week, we’re celebrating three years of Cooking the Books with its very first guest, Olivia Potts and her latest book, Butter: A Celebration.Her journey from barrister to butter, her latest book is told with what Nigella calls 'her devilish wit', both in her award-winning memoir, A Half Baked Idea and now in a book that has GONG written all over it: Butter: a Celebration.   She’s the host of the Spectator podcast, she writes for the Spectator magazine as well as running a successful catering company with her kitchen wife, best friend and fellow food writer, Kate Young. And here she talks about the enduring allure of one of the most versatile ingredients in the larder.Check out Gilly's Substack for extra content from Cooking the Books guests each week