Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith

This week, Gilly is gardening with teacher, podcaster and Telegraph columnist, Sarah Raven Sarah has seen massive changes in how our gardens grow over her 25 years as a gardening pundit.  For anyone interested in food and the planet, growing, even if it’s just a few herbs on the window sill, seems a no-brainer.  Her latest book A Year full of Veg gets to the heart of that relationship and how to grow your own kitchen garden.

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.