Series 2: Episode Twelve
Caroline Eden
On journeys through Central Asia, Turkey, Ukraine, the South Caucasus, Russia, the Baltics and Poland, Caroline Eden reveals the kitchen’s unique ability to tell intimate human stories. This episode — discussing her memoir, Cold Kitchen, as well as her trilogy of award-winning recipe books, Black Sea, Red Sands and Green Mountains — make for a mouthwatering exploration of place and people.
Released 26.06.25
The Conversation
In this episode, Sophy speaks with British travel and food writer, Caroline Eden, whose ‘colour trilogy’ of books — Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes Through Darkness and Light, Red Sands: Reportage and Recipes Through Central Asia, from Hinterland to Heartland and Green Mountains: Walking the Caucasus with Recipes — delve into the food and culture of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, from Turkey’s Black Sea region to the Caucasus, Uzbekistan to Armenia. These aren’t traditional cookbooks: Caroline’s storytelling anchors a deeply human portrait of places and people often overlooked in mainstream narratives.
After so many years writing about far-away places and people, Caroline wanted her memoir, Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Journeys, to draw readers back to her own Edinburgh kitchen. Across 12 seasonal chapters, she blends food, memory and place, sharing “edible postcards”: recipes, stories, culture and history she encountered in her travels, whether the snow-covered homes of Siberia, the wild walnut forests of Kyrgyzstan, or the feast-laden tables of Georgia.
For Caroline, travel is so “multi-sensory” that “it made sense to use food” as a medium by which to explore places. Inspired by writers such as Sybille Bedford and Lesley Blanch, she takes us on her journeys, from the Trans-Siberian railway to the Trans-Caucasian Trail, from a miraculous cloudberry find in Perthshire, to the fog-dense streets of Istanbul.
Books discussed:
Caroline Eden
— Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes Through Darkness and Light
— Red Sands: Reportage and Recipes Through Central Asia, from Hinterland to Heartland
— Green Mountains: Walking the Caucasus with Recipes
— Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Journeys
Sibylle Bedford
— Pleasures and Landscapes
Lesley Blanch
— The Wilder Shores of Love
— Journeys into the Mind’s Eye
Carla Grissman
— Dinner of Herbs: Village Life in 1960s Turkey
Philip Marsden:
— The Crossing Place: A Journey Among the Armenians
Films discussed:
— Sergei Parajnov, The Color of Pomegranates (1969)
