Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Journeys

“My work is in the territory of ‘food and the faraway.’ I wanted this book to bring it back home, to bring people into my basement kitchen in Edinburgh. The kitchen is like a portal to me. I’m an extremely restless person, but when I moved into my flat, and got this kitchen, I knew it had something that would hold me. I’d never owned anything before. I’d had terrible experiences renting in London, and finally I found somewhere where I felt settled to some degree for the first time. I connected with the kitchen instantly. So, we’re in Edinburgh, but the book travels out to different places. I’ll be cooking a dish—for the Polish chapter for example, I’m preparing a cold soup—and we will travel to Kraków, where I talk about Jewish history and some of what I experienced there. Then we come back to Edinburgh—the book always comes back home. I see the kitchen as a kind of way to bring down the drawbridge between here and there.” Read more...

The Best Eastern European Cookbooks

Caroline Eden, Cooks & Food Writer