Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith

This week, we’re digging deep – culturally and politically - into our connection with the land in Poppy Okotcha’s A Wilder Way, how gardens grow us.Poppy is this year’s winner of the Jane Grigson Trust Sous Chef Award for New Food Writers for her memoir – and very practical handbook – about putting down roots and growing a garden while reconnecting with Mother Earth’s infinite power to restore life.Her beautiful book is a wonderful wake up call to remind us of what’s under our feet, threaded through with fables and folklore from her Nigerian Igbo and British cultures. Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Poppy.

 This week, we're walking the Green Mountains of Armenia and Georgia with food and travel writer, Caroline EdenThe last time we met on CTB, it was to talk about Cold Kitchens, her dream of journeys past during Lockdown, as she tried to make sense of a changing world. This time, she’s putting one foot in front of the other to process the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on this still largely unknown part of the world, her signature edible postcards a wake up call to the sensory adventures of the Caucasus in the last in her colour trilogy after Black Sea and Red Sands.Head to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Caroline.

This week, we’re back at River Cottage with bee queen, Rachel de Thample River Cottage Handbook No 19: Bees and Honey is the latest in the practical guides to everything we need to know to live a sustainable life. Rachel and Steve Minshall take us through everything from caring for bees to honey recipes for soothing and healing, but as a former chef, commissioning Editor of Waitrose Food Illustrated and Head of Food for the organic box scheme Abel & Cole, Rachel has carved a niche as a writer who is all about the role of nature and climate change in food. Gilly asks her to trace that journey to River Cottage.Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Rachel

This week, we’re off on our travels again through Eastern Europe, this time with Irina Georgescu as our guide along the lesser known banks of the Danube.Irina has become the word on Romanian food, and from her home in Wales, she’s committed to exploring her homeland through its food history. Her last book, Tava: Eastern European Baking and Desserts from Romania and Beyond won a James Beard Foundation award in 2023. In Danube, she finds publishing gold in everyday recipes from a part of the world most of us still haven’t discovered. Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Irina and recipes from the book. 

This week, we’re visiting the kitchens of everyday India to find the food behind closed doors with chef, food writer and broadcaster, Roopa Gulati,Brought up in Cumbria, Roopa spent 20 years as a chef in Delhi before she came home to advise on Rick Stein’s India series for BBC2. She's a woman who knows how to find the story in everyday food, and Indian Kitchens is an extraordinary story behind the recipes of 12 different communities to find the food that makes up a nation.  Bee Wilson raves about it, Tom Parker Bowles calls it a modern classic, Diana Henry  says, 'The recipes are pure gold.'  Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Roopa and the recipe for the lamb in ginger and orange from her food moments.

This week, we’re back at Rockwater, Hove with River Cottage writer, Lucy Brazier telling a live audience about her memoir, The Honesty Box.It’s a highly moving and very funny diary about healing a broken marriage and growing enough vegetables to fill her new distraction, an honesty box. But the rickety old receptable outside her garden gate is also a metaphor for the treasure trove she finds as she lifts the lid on the mental health crisis her husband – and the rest of the family – have been living with.We begin with a question from the audience about the title, and if it was always meant to have such a brilliant double meaning. Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Lucy and the audience Q&A at Cooking the Books Live. 

Laurie Woolever is back on the pod, four years since we last met her to talk about the last book she wrote with the late, great Anthony Bourdain.  This time she’s telling her own story in Care and Feeding: A Memoir which paints a vivid picture of a bright, sensitive woman beset with anxiety trying to find her way into food writing in a world of celebrity chefs and toxic masculinity in turn of the century New York.Her work as a food writer for chef, Mario Batali and at Art Culinaire, the glossy magazine about chefs for chefs, gave her a unique point of view on the food scene of the time, and as personal assistant to Bourdain as well as his ghost writer, she’s seen a lot of life.This memoir feels like a claim on her own story in a narrative that has been haunted by her much-missed boss long after he died in 2018, and Gilly finds out where and who she is without him.Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Laurie.

This week, as Trump tramples over the future of Eastern Europe – and indeed the rest of Europe, we’re with Siberian-born food writer and co-founder of #CookforUkraine, Alissa Timoshkina.Her latest book, Kapusta: Vegetable-Forward Recipes from Eastern Europe is a celebration of the humble cabbage (and four other vegetables) in the everyday kitchens of Eastern Europe. Her co-founder of CookforUkraine, Olia Hercules calls it ‘A rare cookbook that engages our thinking and delights our senses’ and Nigella has already propped it up in her Cookbook Corner.  In a world that is in such turmoil at the moment, a book about the rich history of Eastern European food and its peoples can do much to remind us all of the taste and flavour of a part of the world eclipsed by the headlines of war. Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Alissa.

This week, we’re back with our favourite doctor, Saliha Mahmood Ahmed and her latest book, The 20 Minute Gut Health Fix. Saliha is a specialist registrar in gastroenterology with a Masters in Nutrition,an award winning food writer and the 2017 winner of MasterChef. She’s been on this show to talk about Foodology and The Kitchen Prescription, but since we last met, beans have made it back into the mainstream. Gilly finds out if we're on our way to gut health.Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Saliha including a recipe from the book.