Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith

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...

This week, we’re with the queen of modern Caribbean cooking, Shivi Ramoutar. It’s 10 years since her debut cookbook,  Caribbean Modern: Recipes from the Rum Islands  launched this Trinidadian lawyer and supper club host from Leicester to become the Caribbean queen of daytime TV. The 10th anniversary edition – simply called Recipes from The Rum Islands is just as much about iden...

 This week we’re exploring the cuisine of Saudi Arabia in Madeeha Qureshi 's debut cookbook, The Red Sea. Madeeha who spent her first 18 years in Saudi, came to our attention on Masterchef when she reached the finals in 2021, impressing judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace with her fusion of Saudi Arabian, Middle Eastern, South Asian and modern flavours. Now, many of us will think of Saudi as...

This week we’re in Brighton for Cooking the Books live with bean queen, Ali Honour.   The author of Beans describes herself as a chef and food systems agitator, which brings together the best things about beans – how delicious they can be while saving the planet and the health of the nation. In front a live audience of keen beans and bean deniers – let’s call them beanos - we find out why.&nb...

This week we’re discussing the shortlist for the  Jane Grigson Trust–Sous Chef Award  2026 with two of the judges, Nicola Lando and Jeremy Lee. This year, it celebrates its 10th anniversary with a stunning shortlist of books about secret kitchens and migrant stories which will all be featured here on CTB when they’re out in the bookshops. Ahead of next week’s awards, Gilly asks Nico...

This week as millions of people all over the world are celebrating Ramadan, we’re with London-based Somali-Egyptian food writer, Ilhan Abdi to talk about her book, The Ramadan Kitchen. A former Amazon corporate employee, she left to focus on cooking content, gaining 265k Instagram followers (@Ilhanm.a) through live Ramadan cooking sessions inspired by her mum’s dishes during lockdown, and has...

This week we’re exploring the food and culture of Kurdistan with author of Nandên: Recipes from My Kurdish Kitchen , Pary Baban Born in Southern Kurdistan, in Qaladze, a place known for its resistance and community, Pary fled Kurdistan with her family to escape what became known as the Anfal Genocide, and this is a hard listen. But it’s her passion for using the food of her land in her restaurant...

This week, we’re back with BOSH!, the recipe developing duo who have changed the conversation about plant-based diets.  Gilly has followed their journey over the last 10 years and watched them become the biggest influencers in the plant-based space. Now, as she explores their latest book, More Plants, she finds out how they got their ready meals to the supermarket ready meal shelves - and why...

This week we are LIVE in Brighton with James Beard award-winning New York food writer, Tamar Adler to learn how to Feast On Your Life . Her latest book is the result of a deep depression that overwhelmed her after the publication of An Everlasting Meal , which is now widely seen as a modern classic. Feast on Your Life is a record of daily food delights that she wrote to find her way back to t...

This week, we’re with husband and wife novelists, Josie Lloyd and Emlyn Rees  to celebrate Publication Day of their new time travelling rom com, You and Me and You and Me and You and Me  Their use of food as device in this story of Jules and Adam’s long-term marriage hitting a midlife wobble and getting a second chance is a glorious way of getting under the skin of the wri...

This week, we’re with Rowley Leigh, chef, food writer and the food books assessor for the 2025 André Simon Food & Drink Book Awards to discuss the shortlist. Rowley is an award‑winning food writer himself, but it’s his mastery of storytelling through the theatre of food that Gilly wanted to know about before we got on to the shortlist. His Notting Hill gastrodome,...