Cold Kitchen | Caroline Eden
Suzy Chase: When two podcasts collide, magic happens. Welcome to Dinner Party, the podcast where I bring together my two hit shows, cookery by the book and decorating by the book around here. We're all about cooking, sharing stories behind recipes, and creating a cozy home. I'm your host, Suzy Chase, a West Village wife, mom and home cook. Inspired by Martha Stewart trying to live in a Nora Ephron movie, surrounded by toile, plaid, cookbooks, decorating books and magazines, cooking in my galley kitchen and living my best life in my darling New York City apartment in the cutest neighborhood in the city, the West Village. So come hang out and let's get into the show.
Caroline Eden: Hi everyone, my name's Caroline Eden and I'm thrilled today to be talking to Suzy about my new book, Cold Kitchen, A Year of Culinary Journeys.
Suzy Chase: You and your writing have made me see the world in a different light from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. You say food lies at the heart of our understanding of the world, how other places make us who we are and the meaning of home. So this book looks back at your fascinating 20 odd years of travel, and it takes a year of you cooking in your Edinburgh kitchen. Each dish that you prepare takes us to different lands in the 12 chapters for me or anyone who's read your books, Black Sea, Red Sands, or even Samarkand, it's a really nice connection back to those books. So could you please briefly describe the format of this new book?
Caroline Eden: Thanks, Suzy. And I just wanted to begin by saying I'm grateful for all of the support that you've shown me over the years. I know we've spoken before on this podcast of yours and I'm really pleased to be back. So thank you very much. Cold Kitchen. I wanted to do something slightly different. So the main thing to know about it is that it's un illustrated, although it contains some recipes. There are just four images in the book and the four images, there's one for each season. So the book is split into four seasons and then 12 months. So there's 12 essays, and at the end of each essay or chapter, there's a recipe. So that's how we begin. That's how the book is shaped, and it begins in winter and then it goes through to spring and then obviously to summer, and it ends in the autumn. The book opens in Uzbekistan and it ends in Ukraine. And as with certainly Black Sea, which I did an updated edition four not long ago. Unfortunately, the terrible full-scale invasion of Ukraine does form a backdrop. And I don't sort of shy away from talking about that a bit in the last chapter is a bit about that because I was in Ukraine just before the full-scale invasion happened, and I have been back once since. So yeah, that's the general shape of the book.
Suzy Chase: So you understand your kitchen to be a portal and grounding, but you always felt more at home on the road. Fun fact. You like being in airports. That cracks me up. So how did this kitchen in Edinburgh change your feelings about home?
Caroline Eden: It's a great question. I mean, I have to say not all airports perhaps, but yeah, I like to be on the move and I'm always fascinated by the strangeness of airports the way that time goes funny. And you sort of spend money on things you wouldn't ordinarily do and you kind of feel like you've got forever and then you're suddenly in a rush. I just find them interesting. But this particular kitchen in Edinburgh, I've lived here for 10 years exactly now actually. And it was the first property I bought. I looked at 10 different apartments or flats as we call them here. And this one in the center of Edinburgh was the one that I plumped for because I knew the kitchen would be where life would happen. And it appealed to me because I'd moved from London and then to sort of a rural part of northern England.
And Edinburgh felt like a kind of in-between a city and it's a capital and it's got great amenities, but it's a small city. It's 500,000 people which doubles during the festival time in the summer. And this kitchen is lovely because it's on the ground floor of the flat and it takes up the whole floor. So you go down these what we call flagstone steps, and then you're in the kitchen and it's got these lovely wood beams on the ceiling giving it a slight countryside feel. So while it's an urban flat in the sense that I'm in the city center, there's something very warm about the kitchen and the fact that it's in a basement, it feels like an enclosed space. So it's a very good place to think and to sort of create. And in a literal sense, I create there because I write my recipes and I cook there.
But more importantly, I have a small office that's in a cupboard effectively off of the kitchen where I sit and work and I have my laptop screen there and I can't see anything. It's very sort of like and a good place to think. And then there's one window, there's a sash window, so it's a sash window, it's on ropes, and it's just an old fashioned single pane. And I can see Edinburgh life going past by looking through that kind of eye to Edinburgh dogs, tails, buggers. I can tell what the weather is doing by what people are wearing on their feet. And there's this kind of lovely sense of Edinburgh coming into the kitchen through that window, so it's never too far away. And yes, the idea of the portal kitchen as a portal, as a travel guide where connections are everywhere the world comes in, it's a sort of central idea of the book.
Suzy Chase: I caught the juxtaposition of you out in the big world, roaming around, writing, meeting people, and then coming back to this womb-like kitchen with one window.
Caroline Eden: Yeah, one window. Exactly. It's very insular suddenly in a way that travel obviously isn't. Travel is a place to get ideas and create and to kind of turn off the domestic world and our responsibilities to some degree. Life always feels very different when you're on the move, but then there is this lovely sense of coming home. And I guess I've only got that as I've gotten older perhaps, but it took me a very long time to get on the housing ladder because life is a freelance writer. And before that as a bookseller, you're not a banker or something. So it took time.
Suzy Chase: Could you just share an overview of the places you've traveled that are featured in the book?
Caroline Eden: It's quite hard choosing, but for me, my work has always been on a particular geographical spread, which I don't stray from for the books. So it's eastern Europe to Central Asia, and this book is very much covering that region. So it includes countries like Poland, Latvia, Turkey in the wintertime. I have an essay in there about why I like to go to Istanbul in the winter. We go to Kyrgyzstan, we go to Tajikistan, and the book obviously opens in Uzbekistan, says it's that part of the world. And I also have this chapter on Ukraine and one on Russia as well.
Suzy Chase: As you said, the book starts in Uzbekistan and ends in Ukraine, and there's one recipe at the end of each chapter you say your favorite dish in the book is Uzbekistan's national dish. And a wonderful thing with your writing is you show us the human side of your travels. I remember when we chatted about your book Red Sands and there was a man named Imenjon in Osh, and you said you love his plov most of all. So could you describe this dish and is your recipe similar to his?
Caroline Eden: I love the fact you've remembered him and John because he's one of the most amazing characters that I've met over my years of travel through Central Asia. He's an Uzbek elder living in Osh, which is a city in Kyrgyzstan, but it's about half Uzbeck and about half Kyrgy. And he lives in a very traditional Uzbek house with a lovely courtyard, and he has his quails there for eggs that he puts on the cloth. The in cold kitchen that I write about. It's interesting because it's also in Kyrgyzstan and the Uzbeks will always say that they're like the masters of plov and they are, but there's a lot of Uzbeks living in Kyrgyzstan, and it's a sort of dish which travels around central Asia. This particular PLO that I write about in Cold Kitchen is with duck and barberry, and it was a dish that we tried.
My Russian teacher and I, we went out to visit her family who were living just outside Bishkek the capital, and they've got some lovely dashes and things, and we had an outside feast. We were preparing for a birthday party and it was very unusual. I had never tried PLO with duck before, and I loved the way that the burberries gave it this sort of sweet tart flavor. And the woman that cooked it was actually Uyghur and she cooked it outside in a kaza, which is the big wok type cooking vessel that they use traditionally to make plov, and it was really, really good. So I wanted to include that recipe in the book to show how it's a dish which crosses borders. And it's also, there are many variations of it. People say that there are many different ways to cook clove as there are the people that cook it. So yeah, I love plo. It's a layered rice dish, so always you have a lot of oil at the bottom, which kind of cooks slowly, the carrots and the onions, and then you'll have the rice and then you'll have some form of meat probably on the top. Sometimes it's horse meat. Most traditionally it's mutton or sometimes lamb, sometimes beef. Occasionally people will put things like quails eggs on the top as well, or spiralized carrots. There's always people like to put their little prints, different ways of doing it.
Suzy Chase: So you have this incredible way of transporting the reader, making each place and moment feel immediate and alive and granularly descriptive. Tell me about the very rare cloudberry you stumbled on not too far from your home. And it was so interesting to read a story that was close to your home.
Caroline Eden: Thank you. I mean, that was really the idea of that chapter. I thought I just want to put one in which is here in Scotland, which is my adopted home. And I just had this amazing experience when I was out hill walking with my dog and James, my husband and I had tried cloud brews in things like jam and they'd been very, very sweet. And it was my understanding that you really only find them growing in the wild in Arctic or sub arctic conditions. If I want to try them in the wild, I'm probably going to have to go to summer of Scandinavia or Siberia, highly unlikely there at the moment. So maybe I'll never get to try Cloudberry in the world. Well, we're on this walk and it's kind of like mossy, boggy plateau in Scotland, not far from particularly mountainous, but sort of heading towards northern Scotland.
And I saw this color, this berry up ahead, and I thought I knew immediately what it was because cloud berries have got this lovely kind of pinkish cognac color to them, and they don't have as many of the, I think they're called dooplets, drooplets, the little pockets of juice that you have in say a raspberry a cloudberry has three or four. They're quite distinctive looking. And I saw this color up ahead, neon glowing, and I thought, oh my God, I think that's a cloudberry because they are very, very, very, very rarely found in Scotland. People have reportedly seen them. And I found it and I thought a bird must have dropped. It's grown from a seed, this single cloud brief, and I had this real quandary. I thought, well, do I eat it? Because I always felt like it was such a precious thing there growing in the world.
But I thought, well, of course I have to eat it if I don't eat it, a hair or a bird or something else is going to eat it. So I took a photo first and then I beck and back my beagle Darwin and I was so moved by finding this berry. It was what we call a peak moment. It was a really wonderful moment. Cut forward to a few months later, I'm like, now I have to find more. Now I know this is a possibility in Scotland. I have to go out and I'm going to go to somewhere which is called the hill of the cloudberries, because surely there will be growing more cloudberries located. The hill drove up there, no cloud brews, but when we came down off the hill, the other side, it was covered in bilberries, which are blueberries. So I raked up a load of these blueberries, put them in a Tupperware box, took them home and made some jam, which is the recipe at the end of that chapter.
Suzy Chase: I like this quote in that chapter you wrote, "Like cooking, hill walking is both an activity and a way of life and cooking. It is a way to enter other worlds." Where's your favorite place to hill walk?
Caroline Eden: Definitely Scotland. I have been writing a lot recently about the caucuses, Armenia in Georgia, which I would say probably was my second choice, but I'm very lucky to live in Edinburgh within sort of half an hour I can be among some fantastic hills just outside the city and within an hour and a half in the Kang Goss, which is just a stunning national park where you can walk all day and not see another person. And I feel in our kind of online world where we're bombarded by very hard news at the moment, it is lovely to go out into the wilderness and to walk for several hours and not pass another person and maybe not have any phone signal either. But yeah, the main reason I can't leave Scotland because I sometimes think about moving back to London, but very hard to hill walk around London. You've got to travel for hours and hours and hours, whereas if you're in Edinburgh, it's a short distance to some really fantastic hills. So yeah, it's wonderful.
Suzy Chase: Chat a bit about telling the story of food that's not tied up in a pretty bow. You say we shouldn't leave the bad stuff out. For example, the Baltic Symphonies chapter is all about a man who was caught up in the Soviet regime and the accompanying recipe is dark beer and rye bread pudding.
Caroline Eden: Yeah. So I was spending quite a lot of time in Riga, in Lavia in the winter for reasons that are too long to go into here probably. And I found this wonderful cafe there that had been named after a man called Wilhem Ude. And in the 1930s he was a chocolatier and he had these workshops and he was producing all these wonderful sweets, like 5,000 kilos of sweets a day, huge amounts and different varieties of biscuits and chocolates and candies. But of course that was a very difficult time in Europe and he kind of got through a lot of hurdles and was dealing with the authorities and trying to keep his businesses going. And sort of very sadly, after navigating successfully, and he had a football team and he supported the church. He was a well loved popular man in Riga. But unfortunately in 1940 during the Soviet occupation of Latvia, the confectionary factories were nationalized and incorporated into the system.
He was kept on as a director, but eventually he was caught up and arrested by the Soviet authorities. I think it was in the summer of 1941. And even though he'd looked after his staff very well and he tried towing the line, the Soviet line the best he could, he was arrested and deported to Siberia and basically died in a gulag, which is horrible. And a reminder of how badly things can go if you're not towing the line in Russia in its former Soviet Union. So I thought I'd love to write about this beautiful cafe and how I like to sit there and it's really cozy, it's really old fashioned. It's got some of the original light fittings. It's not sort of place you'd feel comfortable sitting with a laptop, sort of people sat around talking quietly and stuff. It was really nice. But I thought, I can't just write about that.
I've obviously got to write about this amazing man and his history and how it just shows you that you can be a very, very decent, hardworking, honorable person and still not make it during the Soviet period. So yeah, that's one of the chapters in the book about him. There were little busts around the city to him. I was renting an apartment for a short while and just around the corner was one of his factories and there was his face. He's very distinctive looking. He wore these sort of round spectacles. And I took a picture of it. I can't read Lavia obviously, and I put it through Google Translate. I knew it was him. And I think people feel like they've lost so much during the Soviet time in countries like in the B six, they wonder what things might've been if things hadn't been nationalized and changed so much and interfered with so much. All of my books have got elements of this in them because if you're writing about Eastern Europe, the caucus of Central Asia, it was decades and decades of Soviet rule. So of course it impacted everything. And unfortunately, the hangover of it still does linger on.
Suzy Chase: So I celebrated my 150th episode of Cookery by the Book with an interview with you for Black Sea. And in that episode you said "Tood is good to think with, but it's also essential because it's a rest. It helps you catch the feel of a place." So why do you think we celebrate some cuisines and not others?
Caroline Eden: It's a good question, and I think it's just down to exposure and knowledge. I mean, Riga again is a very good example because it's got some things in common with Nordic cuisine, I think in terms of flavors and herbs and birch and fish and the sort of style of cooking the landscape, the Baltics are quite flat, but the landscape is you're not geographically very far away. And obviously the Nordic countries have had an awful lot of attention in food magazines and websites and blogs and stuff, and the Baltics not so much. People are just sort of catching onto it again now. And I think that probably some of that is due to the quashing of the cuisine under the Soviet period. Obviously that Soviet Union fell in 1991. It's about time we start catching up, and I think that it is very difficult to change people's minds.
I mean, if you pick up magazines nowadays, still Italy, you are guaranteed there's going to be a lot about Italian food in the magazines. And I'm, I've always been kind of frustrated by this because obviously Italian food is wonderful, but there is a whole world out there and I feel like Southeast Asian food has done in Chinese food. We've sort of become very much more aware of that. But still, there's this sway of the world that I've been writing about and several other food writers have been writing very well about over the years where we're trying to just expose people to it and to show that the flavors are really interesting. It's just knowledge, and I think it's also travel. Where do people go? Well, people love to go to Sicily on holiday. They might wonder what they get if they go to Latvia in the summer. Well, you get the Baltic Sea, which is amazing, for example. But it is the awareness. I think that's all it is.
Suzy Chase: And that's another great thing about your writing is you show us and talk about the food and you also connect it with the people.
Caroline Eden: Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, I think that my books are mainly about people, and I think that it's very important that that's the case, especially if you're an outsider writing about other cultures which are not your own. So I try not to center myself too much and to talk to people who are happy to talk to me about their families and about their work and about the agriculture, and can they tell me about how the climate emergency is affecting them and what did their mothers do differently? And there's endless different rabbit holes you can go down to if you are having a conversation with somebody in a market or in a home stay or somebody you've arranged an interview with. And I think these are the people who tell the stories. I'm just the vehicle. And yeah, it's been a great pleasure over the years to speak to so many interesting people about food and art, food and film, food served in cafes. There's just so many different ways you can go with it.
Suzy Chase: When Russia invaded Ukraine, I immediately thought of our discussion about Black Sea and Odessa. You captivated me with the way you described Odessa as a literary haven with a vibrant cafe culture. You even turned me on to the writings of Isaac Babel.
Caroline Eden: Yes.
Suzy Chase: And Odessa has endured significant damage in the past few years. So how have the conflicts and turmoil impacted your travels?
Caroline Eden: Yeah, poor Odessa. I mean, it is very much ongoing right now as we're speaking. I mean, for me, it has impacted things obviously, and the way it's impacted me is absolutely irrelevant to how it's impacting people who live in these countries, obviously. But I have a new book coming out in the spring, which is all about the caucuses, and I had a much broader book in mind initially, and we're always being affected by geopolitics when you plan these things because the books take years to come together. And back when I had this idea about doing a book on the caucuses because I did Black Sea, which was all about the Black Sea region, I then did Red Sands, which sort of begins on the Caspian Sea and is all about Central Asia. Well, the lands between the Caspian and the Black Sea are the caucuses, so it's very natural for me to end.
And I also wanted to end the book back on the Black Sea where it all began. My color trilogy of books began them in Odessa. So I wanted to go to the North Caucasus. I wanted to go to Dagestan, and I also wanted to go to Azerbaijan, and I had this great route planned for the book, but then as I was researching it not only had the full scale invasion of Ukraine begun, which made going to Russia both a dangerous and deeply immoral place to visit. So that was off the cars, north Caucus is in southern Russia, couldn't do that. But then at the same time, Azerbaijan and Armenia have always been in conflict for a very long time, but the Armenians lost Nagorno-Karabakh, which was this kind of island of Armenian people, about a hundred thousand people living in an island and sort of enclave within Azerbaijan.
And they fled and they went back to Armenia. This obviously caused enormous upset and it was terrible, and I'd spent a few months in Armenia and I thought, I cannot, I'm not comfortable now, including Azerbaijan and Armenia in the same book at the moment. It's not to say in the future I hope peace will come between those two countries one day, but at the moment it doesn't feel right for me to put them side by side in the same book. So I'm going to put Azerbaijan to the side for now. And so it ended up being a smaller book. It ended up being a book starting in southern Armenia and ending in northern Georgia. Now that's enough to be getting on with, but it's just to kind of show you how you've got to be flexible and way up all the ethical minefield of going to certain places and not whitewashing regimes and not, I'm always very honest, but it is sometimes just enough to produce a cookery book on somewhere that it can appear that you are whitewashing a government or a regime. So I think it is very, very dicey ground. We have to be very careful.
Suzy Chase: Yeah, it must be hard because if you love the food and you're raving about the food, it might just translate to, Hey, I am okay with it .
Caroline Eden: If people don't read the whole thing. It's a bit like when you get the comments under an article and you think, have you read the whole article? As long as you put things in context, I think you can write about anything. So I do have a chapter in Cold Kitchen about Russia, for example. And I was writing this book during the full scale invasion of Ukraine, but I thought I want to include this essay on Russia. And I thought I can, as long as I put it in context and I talk about why I'm including it, bring up obviously the diabolical actions of Russia in Ukraine at the moment and put it in context, and then it's okay,
Suzy Chase: Your heart must be breaking.
Caroline Eden: Yeah, I mean it is incredibly difficult what's happening in Ukraine and especially in the past week, but I do hold hope. I think the Ukrainians are incredibly resilient, and I do feel that in Europe we are a hundred percent on side in most countries, not all. And I just pray for peace. I want Ukraine to be able to prosper and for it to stand on its own two feet. I used to love going there. It is an amazing country. The only good thing which has come out of this absolutely appalling situation is that there's a greater awareness now because this has been ongoing for a very long time. It's, it didn't start with the full scale invasion. Russia has been bullying Ukraine for years and years and years. And so I think now there is this greater awareness through great writers like Olia Hercules and then obviously all the nonfiction writers as well. I think people are much more aware now. At least that's something.
Suzy Chase: So now for my segment called The Perfect Bite where I ask you to describe a perfect bite from one of your favorite dishes out of the book,
Caroline Eden: So my head be more like a perfect sip because I was thinking we're edging into spring here. So it's quite a nice day here in Edinburgh this morning, although it's still very chilly. But at the end of a chapter I have called Better Dinner of Herbs, which is about the Caucuses and the abundant use of herbs and lots of other things in that chapter. I end that one with a springtime soup with bulgar tomatoes and herbs. And I think every meal should start with soup. And a lot of Ukrainians would agree with me on this point. You start a meal with soup, and this one's lovely because it's a bit different. It includes some bulgar wheat and it's got white pepper in it and tomato puree, and then some green lentils, red wine, vinegar, chili. It's like a really rich, delicious soup, but it's light, so it's good for spring. So I would choose that.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Caroline Eden: At Eden Travels, and you'll find me on Instagram and all the other platforms, and I have a website, which is www.carolineeden.com.
Suzy Chase: Well, Caroline, it's been so fabulous to have you back on the show for the third time. Thank you so much for coming on.
Caroline Eden: I'm enormously grateful. Thank you very much, Suzy.
Suzy Chase: Okay, so where can you listen to the new Dinner Party podcast series? Well, it's on substack Suzy Chase.substack.com. You can also subscribe to Dinner Party for free on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Additionally, the episodes will be available on both Decorating by the Book and Cookery by the Book. Long story short, you'll be able to listen to it virtually everywhere. Thanks for listening. Bye.
