Cold Kitchen

A Financial Times and Observer "best summer read"

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year



‘With its union of practicality and magic, a kitchen is a portal, offering extended range and providing unlikely paths out of the ordinary … longed-for places are suddenly not so far away. Not unreachable, but present. Held again in the hand and heart.’

In her Edinburgh basement kitchen, Caroline Eden recounts travels across Central Asia, Turkey, the Baltics and beyond using recipes, souvenirs, ingredients and imagination to provide routes back to distant lands and past adventures.

From late-night baking as a way to Ukraine, to the magic of Uzbekistan’s wintertime melons, once gifts fit for emperors and tsars, this is a hauntingly honest memoir with the smell, taste and preparation of food at its heart. Cold Kitchen is an ode to the kitchen’s extraordinary ability to tell human stories and transport us to faraway places and different times.