Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith

This week, a subject very close to Gilly's heart and the work she does on the Food Foundation’s award-winning podcast , Right2Food – how to change British food culture through children. Chefs in Schools is a charity which teaches kids from the very youngest age to love food by growing it school gardens and eating the kind of dishes that makes most kids run screaming. Co-founder, Nicole Pisan i is...

This week as it's Lent, we’re off to fast in Cyprus with Georgina Hayden , and to find a host of vegan gems in the traditional fasting food from religions and cultures of the Eastern Med and Eastern Europe. Her book, Nistisima borrows the vegan dishes from the Greek Orthodox Church which frames her family life, as well as the rituals around Ukraine, Russia and Serbia where fasting is a rich vein o...

This week Gilly is with multi-award winning food writer and explorer, Eleanor Ford whose latest book The Nutmeg Trail takes us on an adventure to exotic islands and across trade routes to show how the intoxicating power of spice has changed the world.  Eleanor is also the author of Fire Islands which won The Guild of Food Writers' Best International or Regional Cookbook 2020, the Edward Stanf...

This week, Gilly is with Kalpna Woolf, founder of the Bristol charity 91 Ways which brings together the 91 languages spoken in her hometown of Bristol in a series of pop up peace cafés. Her book Eat Share Love    features the recipes shared over the supper clubs where back story is the main ingredient. She's been awarded  The Guild of Food Writers Inspiration Award, BBC’s...

This week, Gilly takes us to Tibet with Yeshi Jampa and Julie Kleeman, the husband and wife team who brought the Himalayas to Oxford through their legendary restaurant and food stall - and now, book - Taste Tibe t.  Yeshi grew up in Tibet, herding livestock on the high reaches of the Tibetan plateau and learning to cook inside a yak hair tent at a young age. When he was nineteen, Yeshi w...

After spending the last couple of months hearing the voice of Yemisi Aribisala introduce the best food books of 2021 in a special series with the Andre Simon awards , this episode is all about her book   Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds. It won the Andre Simon’s John Avery award in 2016, possibly because of its use of food to prod under the skin of Nigerian life and...

In the last of the Andre Simon Shortlist Special series, we meet Yasmin Khan whose book Ripe Figs transports us across  the East Mediterranean, tasting the best food in Greece, Turkey and Cyprus in the company of refugees and activists. As  they chop and chat about borders, memory and identity, Yasmin shows us how food can give dignity and humanise people in the harshest o...

In the 5th episode of this special series celebrating the Andre Simon Awards 2021 , Gilly discusses Mandy Yin ’s shortlisted book Sambal Shiok with Singaporean writer, Sharon Wee while Mandy is on maternity leave. Sharon's 2012 book, Growing up in a Nonya Kitchen was a victim of plagiarism last year, which shook the global food community. But she hit back and is now working on a revised version wh...

In the 4th episode of the Cooking the Books Andre Simon Shortlist Special , we meet Mark Diacono , gardener, author and cook. He's no stranger to the Andre Simons; his stunning book A Year at Otter Farm won the Food Book of the Year in 2014. Before we hear his four food moments from his shortlisted Herb , we hear from food assessor, Yemisi Aribisala on why she's chosen it as one of her seven best...

The third in this special series celebrating the Andre Simon Awards 2021 in which Gilly meets the authors shortlisted for the prestigious food book gong with an introduction by food assessor, the Nigerian born author  Yemisi Aribisala whose memoir Longthroat:  Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds won the Andre Simon’s John Avery award in 2016. Four out of seven on the shortlist have alread...

The second in a special series in conjunction with the Andre Simon Awards 2021 .Each week, we'll start with an appraisal of each shortlisted author by this year's food assessor, the award winning Nigerian author, Yemisi Aribisala . Her book Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex, and the Nigerian Taste Buds , which won the John Avery Award in the Andre Simons in 2016, uses Nigerian food as an en...

In a special series celebrating the Andre Simon Awards 2021 , Gilly celebrates the authors shortlisted for the prestigious food book prize. Each week until the Awards themselves on March 8th, we meet the seven authors with an introduction by food assessor, the Nigerian born author Y emisi Aribisala . But first, we kick off with Dan Saladino whose book Eating to Extinction was one of Cooking t...

This week, Gilly is with the deputy editor of Waitrose Food Magazine, Leah Hyslop whose latest book The Brownie Diaries is oozing with the kind of stories and recipes you’d expect from someone whose job it is to pull endless ideas out of the bag. As Jamie Oliver launches a national hunt for the best cookbook author, Leah tells us about story, angle and pitch, and how much magazine editing has to d...

This week Gilly's talking about something probably quite new to foodies, Biblical Cuisine with Ruth Nieman who has become the go-to expert on Israel’s ancient foods and recipes. Her first book, The Galilean Kitchen captured the oral recipes passed down through the matriarchs of the Druze, Muslim, Christian, and Bedouin communities in Northern Israel and won a Gourmand Award . Now her latest, Freek...

This week, Gilly is with 2013 MasterChef finalist, Saira Hamilton whose latest book takes us deep into the little-known food culture of Bangladesh. My Bangladesh Kitchen is full of food stories, poets and mystics and nostalgia for the country of Saira’s ancestors, But Bangladesh is also one of the fastest growing economies in the world as we find out as Saira explains the changing face of her fami...

This week, Gilly is with the Flava brothers, Craig and Shaun McAnuff whose Caribbean recipes, inspired by their Jamaican grandmother, are all about traditional values – family, morals and community purpose. It was at her house in Croydon that they started filming their Youtube videos. They got a million views in a week.  But as they explored more about their heritage, they found tha...

This week, Gilly is with Julia Georgallis , supper club host, industrial designer and author of How to Eat your Christmas Tree who tells us how to have a super-sustainable - and delicious - Christmas. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Gilly Smith is with Selin Kiazim , Turkish-Cyrpiot chef at Oklava in Shoreditch. A few episodes back, Clare Finney, author of The Female Chef described Selin as one of the women redefining the hospitality industry. Gilly finds out what that means while picking through her formula of Acid, Texture and Contrast which is the subject of her latest book, Three . Hosted on Acast. See acast.co...

This week, Gilly is with James Beard award-winning author, Rowan Jacobsen whose book The Truffle Hound is a fabulous romp across the world in search of truffles. But it’s much more than a story of derring do and great dogs; it’s a love letter to truffles which have so much to say to humanity about everything from the health of the environment to how get more out of life. Who’d have thought that th...

This week, Gilly is with Alissa Timoshkina whose book Salt and Time, a Waitrose one-to-watch for 2021, takes us into the Russian kitchen of her childhood, but also prods at many universal questions of food, identity and being a woman. As she takes us through her four food moments, we meet the Jewish Siberian matriarchs, her mother, grandmother and great grandmother whose food has literally shaped...

This week, Gilly is with New York food writer, Sharon Wee whose book Growing up in a Nonya Kitchen tells the story of Peranakan cuisine, a largely unknown type of cookery from Singapore, Malaysia and Malacca which was part of a craft culture binding Chinese women, including Sharon’s mother, into the fabric of a very particular lifestyle. Sharon’s book which first came out in 2012 in Singapore has...

This week, Gilly is with Luca Iaccarino , Italian food critic and journalist for Italy’s most respected newspapers la Republica and Corriere della Sera . But he’s also the co-creator of Buonissima , Turin’s most spectacular food festival featuring some of the best chefs in Europe. Gilly went to meet him by Interrail to the home of the Slow Food Movement , to explore Buonissima, meet Ferran Adria a...

This week, Gilly is with Clare Finney, author of The Female Chef . The book - and the chat - is a wonderfully multi-layered exploration of what it means to be a woman in a professional kitchen in 2021. With interviews from many of Britain’s biggest names in food, including Thomasina Miers, Zoe Adjonyoh, Andi Oliver and Ravinder Bhogal, and with a foreword from Sheila Dillon, it moves the conv...

This week, Gilly is with vegan queen, retreat chef and recipe consultant, Bettina Campolucci Bordi whose new book Celebrate is about flavours from around the world, influenced by her own peripatetic childhood and Skandi/Bulgarian parentage. But more, it’s all about wellness and conscious cooking, dressed up for a great big party. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informatio...

This week, Gilly is with Dan Saladino, co-presenter of Radio 4 and BBC Sounds’ The Food Programme whose whopping 400 page debut, Eating to Extinction is a story of the world’s rarest foods and why we need to save them It’s a sweeping story of our relationship with food, of loss of diversity and its impact on humankind, our gut and our planet, woven through with wonderful tales of resilience a...