The idea of the kitchen as a space for transformation and transportation is not a new one. Many writers have explored the room’s ability to offer both domesticity and alchemy at the same time – how it allows cooks to travel vicariously through the food they make. This is the subject of Cold Kitchen, Caroline Eden’s memoir of her time spent in her kitchen in Scotland and of her travels to Eastern European and Central Asian cities – and somehow she makes it fresh and compelling.
She is an author and critic who has written extensively about the food and culture of the countries of the former Soviet Union. Black Sea, in which she explored Odessa, Istanbul and Trabzon, received a clutch of prizes, and Red Sands, about Central Asia, won the prestigious André Simon food book award. In Cold Kitchen, she treads familiar ground. The travels which take her away from her kitchen are places she has written about before: Istanbul, Uzbekistan and Riga. What is new is the base – the kitchen in Scotland from which she tells her stories.
Her adopted home is Edinburgh, and it is from her less than picture-perfect (cold) basement kitchen there that she revisits her far-flung journeys, cooking the dishes which have defined them. In less adept hands this might feel disjointed: a string of vignettes jumping from apricot-heavy Armenia to the tourist takeover during the month of the Edinburgh fringe. But Eden makes such transitions seem natural.
The obligatory recipes at the end of each chapter, which give the food memoir its classic form and rhythm, feel purposeful rather than incidental.
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