Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith

This week, we're with the award-winning Australian novelist, Charlotte Wood and her ode to cooking and food, Love and Hunger. To Charlotte, cooking is 'creativity in its purest form', but it’s taken nearly 15 years to capture the attention of British readers with this book. Thanks to Nigella Lawson writing the foreword for this UK edition, and raving about it on her socials, comparing...

In the last of our mini series of speakers from BrightonFoodStory, the food festival Gilly produced this year in her home town which is aimed at changing the conversation about the way we eat, we’re with Vicky Bennison, the James Beard award-winning author of Pasta Grannies: Eat Everything. Vicky was at BrightonFoodStory last weekend to talk about nonnamaxxing, the Instagram trend of yearning for...

Ahead of BrightonFoodStory , the food festival on October 3rd that Gilly is producing in her home town aimed at changing the conversation about the way we eat, we’re meeting some of the speakers on the various panel discussions. This week, we’re with Karen Newby, author of the Natural Menopause Method and its cookbook partner, and now The Post Menopause Method . Karen will be on the Nonnamaxxing p...

This week, we meet Nick Saltmarsh and Josiah Meldrum of Hodmedods to talk about the magic of beans in their debut cookbook Whole Food. Now, Hodmedods has long since become the byword for beans in Britain, and can claim a major role in elevating the plucky pulse to enjoy its moment in the sun. Gilly's just finished another series of Bang in Some Beans for The Food Foundation Podcast – watch out...

This week we’re with former editor of the Good Food Guide, Andrew Turvil and his book,   Blood, Sweat & Asparagus Spears: The Story of the 1990s Restaurant Revolution. Like Andrew, Gilly was right in the centre of the birth of what another editor of the Good Food Guide, Drew Smith called Modern British Cooking, and has written her take on this story in a biography of Jamie Oliver, an...

This week, in an extended episode, we’re with one of the most important voices in British food writing, Jeremy Lee with Kitchening , his follow up cookbook to the 2022 multi award winning Cooking . Jeremy has taken his time to become one of the central storytellers of modern British cuisine – with his cookbooks at least , despite being   right there at the birth of modern British cooking. Do...

This week, we’re celebrating Back To School and Uni season with Claire Thompson and her latest book, Dear Grace. This is a book unlike any Claire has written before. She wrote it while her heart was breaking as her eldest daughter, Grace, set off for university, and the letters from mother to daughter – and daughter to mother - about how to survive  are a universal weep as fledglings all...

This week, we're with an absolute legend in food writing, Anissa Helou and her culinary celebration of Lebanon . Listed by Arabian Business magazine as one of the "500 Most Influential Arabs" and "100 Most Powerful Arab Women, she’s among the greats of modern food writing with the likes of Claudia Roden and Elisabeth Luard. Now, after 32 years of writing about the everyday food of the Mi...

This week, we are live in Brighton on the hottest day of the year so far with Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer, aka Honey and Co. to talk about their new book, Honey and Co. Daily. Against the sound of a massive fan at Patio Wine Bar, we talked about the huge dollop of love that the Honeys have made their brand, and how a warm hug of hospitality has not only saved their business but reminded...

This week we're with author, journalist and broadcaster, Rebecca Seal and her deep dive into the world of allergies in Irritated She's spent 20 years writing about food, not least as the deputy editor of Observer Food Monthly, and her life was all about the deliciousness of food. But it was her younger daughter’s allergy to soy which prompted her to explore the rise in the allergy epidemic, and to...

This week we're with Danish food writer, restaurateur and campaigner, Trine Hahnemann and her latest cookbook,  Midnight Sun . This is a book about long lazy summer days - cycling to the beach, stopping off to buy strawberries from a local stall, peeling shrimps to eat with homemade mayo and bread.. But under the haze of a Scandanavian sun, food for Trine is about much more than a picnic. It’...

This week, we’re with the WORD on Turkish food and heritage, Ozlem Warren to dig into her latest book, Istanbul. We’ve followed Ozlem on Cooking the Books through her writing career, from Ozlem’s Turkish Table which inspired a fund raising supper club for the earthquake in 2023 at Gilly’s house, through vegetarian Turkish in Sebze, and now to Istanbul, her most confidant work yet, and her warmest...

 This week, Gilly is with the author of  The Smallest Restaurant in Paris , Rachel Khoo Now, you may know her as the author of  The Little Paris Kitchen and   the star of the BBC’s cooler original version of Emily in Paris - without the haute couture or the PR job, a young Brit abroad, feeling her way through being in Paris and cooking in her tiny kitchen. Now she’s written a m...

This week, we're with travel and food writer, Sudi Pigott to Consider the Anchovy. Part memoir, largely a travelogue, this is a deep dive into the story of a big hitting little fish. Stuffed with maverick, rakish characters, it's a passionate manifesto making the case for the anchovy as a leading mover and shaker in world culinary history.    Rachel Roddy described it as "an anchovy odys...

This week, we're with Ella Risbridger and The Kitchen Book Now, we know Ella intimately through her memoirs, Midnight Chicken and The Year of Miracles , both of which blended grief, joy, love and loss with food, gathering serious accolades and scooping up the awards. Here, she’s happy. Her life is good. Her writing is full of joy and the reception over on Instagram in particular has been...

This week, we're with three of the judges from this year’s World Food Photography Awards which took place earlier this week at The Mall Galleries in London. The competition, first known as the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year, has pretty much put food photography on the map since 2011. With more than 120,000 entries from nearly 100 countries over that time, this year the judging panel led b...

This week, we’re off to lunch with Chetna Makan, the Bake Off semi finalist who has become one of our national treasures with her massive YouTube channel,  Food with Chetna . Her latest book 5 Ingredient Indian is yet another way of making Indian food simple enough to cook for quick weekday suppers while keeping all the flavour. Pop over to Substack for Extra Bites of  Chetna, and a...

This week, we're back at Cooking the Books live in Brighton with Felicity Cloake (and Wilf the Wonderdog) to talk about her debut novel, The Underdog. We know Felicity from her Bridget Jones-on-a-bike style adventures across France in One More Croissant for the Road , the UK in Red Sauce, Brown Sauce and America in Peach Street to Lobster Lane . But she's also the Queen of Culinary Perfection in h...

This week, we meet Jago Rackham to talk about his first book, To Entertain: Instructions for a Dinner Party. But the book is not quite what it seems. The millennial Substacker who hosts supper clubs and pop-ups fashioned as dinner parties,  has, with his long term partner, the artist Lowena Hearn, earned the social media title of East London’s power couple. But Gilly finds a rather...

This week we’re with the prince of plants, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and his High Fibre Heroes. Hugh and Gilly have been talking about the national diet for years on this show and before it was even born. They both campaign with the Food Foundation for policy change to make healthier food more accessible for every child in the UK, and Hugh's last book How to Eat 30 Plants a Week was all about ad...

This week, we’re back at Patio in Brighton for Cooking the Books Live with Tim Anderson and his latest book, JapanEasy Kitchen In front of a live audience, we find out about the nine magical Japanese pantry staples which Tim says can transform   anything we want to cook, how this white man from Wisconsin has claimed the space in British food media as Mr Japanesasy and his insider tips fo...

This week, we’re looking in depth at the shortlists in the food categories at the Fortnum and Mason Awards with Marie Mitchell, one of the judges and last year’s award winner for her debut cookery book, Kin.                                 ...

This week, we’re off to Lebanon via Reigate with the man behind Comptoir Libanais and Yalla Yalla, Jad Youssef. Lebnani is Jad’s debut cookbook that's all about the Lebanon of his childhood, the rituals and traditions of the food from his homeland that he's brought to the menus of restaurants all over the world. His fear is that Lebanese food is losing its identity, not just through war, displacem...

This week, we’re off to Malaysia with The Malay Cook, Ranie Saidi. The Malay Cook is the debut cookbook from this lawyer turned supper club host at Soho House and Curry Club London and now author. It's an homage to the memory of his grandmother, a wedding caterer who brought him up while his parents were studying. But the book is not just about  her recipes as he remembers them, but&nbsp...

This week, we’re back with farming champion, Abby Allen and her latest book, The Farm Kitchen. Abby was, until recently, the face of Piper’s Farm, the online farm shop which brought together the best farmers and producers in the South West. Her passion in creating a resilient food and farming system to food lovers across the Uk now comes from a new company, Pipers and co ,  run by A...