Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith

This week, we’re celebrating the food culture of Palestine with one of its most vocal champions, Sami Tamimi Sami’s first solo cookbook, Boustany, meaning 'my garden', is about the abundance of vegetarian recipes that make up the heart of Palestinian cooking. He and Yotam Ottolenghi, largely through their first book, Jerusalem have done more to bring the food of the Middle East to the world than a...

This week, we’re off to Bordeaux with chef, author and friend of the podcast, Emily Scott to talk about fish in her latest book, Home Shores. After the kids have left home and as she faces a big birthday, Emily’s tells us how she's changing up her life. She may have left Cornwall where she was the first woman commissioned by the UK Cabinet Office to cook for royalty and world leaders at the G...

This week, we’re back at Gilly's How to Cook Book food writing retreat at her house just outside Lewes in East Sussex with muse-in-residence, the grande dame of British food writing, Elisabeth Luard. After bringing the flavours of Spain to a British readership from the 1980s on, her Classic Spanish Recipes: 75 signature dishes is part of the Hamlyn Classic Recipes series celebrating 75 years...

This week, we’re with British-Caribbean writer, Keshia Sakarah whose debut cookbook, Caribe was shortlisted with Irina  Janakievska and Dina for the Jane Grigson Trust Award in 2023. It's a history of Caribbean cooking with 125 recipes from 23 nations - from Montserrat to Haiti, Antigua to Guadaloupe, capturing the cultures through food in what this Leicester born young writer calls 'res...

This week, Gilly is with the British Iranian/Pakistani human rights activist and food and travel writer, Yasmin Khan to talk about her latest book, Sabzi. Sabzi, meaning greens and herbs in Persian, the language of her mother, and vegetables in Urdu, the language of her Pakistani father, is about how to reduce the amount of meat in our diet with delicious recipes from the Middle East, Mediter...

In extra episode from Groundswell, the Regenerative Agriculture Festival that Sheila Dillon calls 'the Glastonbury of Food and Farming', Cooking the Books Live discusses the influence of cook books and books about food on changing the way we eat and buy our food In front of an audience of farmers and food businesses, pioneers and innovators who are changing the way we eat, Gilly asks a panel of wr...

This week, we’re back at Rockwater in Hove for Cooking the Books Live with Gurd Loyal. Regular listeners will know that Gurd is probably the writer who Gilly think's best uses the lens of food to examine life. His first book, Mother Tongue won the Jane Grigson Trust award for Best Debut, and he has become the word on Third Culture food, prising open the liminal spaces between where we come from an...

This week, we’re with Guardian columnist and author Felicity Cloake as she cycles through America in search of its food culture. Peach Street to Lobster Lane is her great American road trip – on a bike. It’s the off-road trip that’s about getting to the heart of American cuisine via a glimpse into everyday life that you just can’t get by car. The story she finds is about immigration, colonisa...

This week, we’re exploring the story of Ukraine with its most famous defender and cultural protector, Olia Hercules in her first memoir, Strong Roots. It’s the story of Ukraine that history can never tell, through the stories of its people - and in particular, Olia’s people, through four generations of her family.  Nigella calls it 'breathtaking', Caroline Eden calls it cinematic, Elisab...

This week, we're with award-winning psychologist, and graduate of Gilly's How to Cook a Book food writing retreat, Andrea Oskis. Her first book is a series of tales from her clinic exploring how the food we eat reveals who we are – and how we love. Its title? The Kitchen Shrink . Genius. Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Andrea. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informa...

This week, Gilly is confronting her biggest summertime phobia with Tom Kerridge and his latest book, The Barbecue Book. He’s the man with the Midas touch – he turned the Hand and Flowers from a rundown pub in Buckinghamshire into the first and only 2 star Michelin pub in the world.  He’s the chef who lost a stack of weight and turned his diet story into books and telly which helped...

This week, we’re back with one of Gilly's favourite guests on Cooking the Books, Bee Wilson and her latest book, The Heart Shaped Tin. It’s a book about love and loss, and the magical thinking that so many of us transpose onto everyday objects, often found in the kitchen. As she navigates her way from the despair of a broken marriage to a gloriously happy present via the death of her mother and th...

This week, we’re basking in the evening sunshine at Cooking the Books Live at Rockwater, Hove with Noor Murad. Her debut cookbook, Lugma is her twist on the familiar, to use an Ottolenghi term, of the food from her homeland, Bahrain. It’s the very first international cookbook of Bahraini recipes, but reflects her own experiences of growing up there, the mix of Persian and Indian flavours infused w...

This week, we're with Malaysian Scottish chef, restaurateur and now food writer, Julie Lin and her debut cookbook, Sama Sama Sama Sama meaning Same Same is all about food and identity. It’s a book that has been simmering for years as Julie explores her same-same notions of home and all the ingredients of belonging that have come together in the hashtag third culture food. Pop over to Gilly's Subst...

This week, Gilly is with the queen of communal living an icon of bohemian anti-capitalism, Rosie Kellett. An actress, a baker with Meringue Girls and Claire Ptak’s assistant at Violet Cakes – which included working on Harry and Meghan’s wedding cake , it was moving into a Carpet Warehouse  in London that shot her to fame on Instagram. The idea of sharing the cost of living with...

This week, in a special extra episode to coincide to the minute with a fascinating new way of publishing, I’m with content creation queen, Masterchef judge and co-presenter of The Food Programme, Leyla Kazim Leyla’s debut  Pathways  is not one but two books about her massive life change to become a farmer in Portugal .  It’s a memoir/manifesto/guide to living a purposeful life. Publ...

This week, we’re talking about the dirty rotten scoundrels who run our global food industry with Dr Stuart Gillespie Stuart’s book Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet gives us the back story of a food system driven by greed and exploitation. But it suggests how to transform it into a food system fit for the future which prioritises global health and justice. And it starts with...

This week, we’re digging deep – culturally and politically - into our connection with the land in Poppy Okotcha’s A Wilder Way, how gardens grow us. Poppy is this year’s winner of the  Jane Grigson Trust Sous Chef Award fo r New Food Writers for her memoir – and very practical handbook – about putting down roots and growing a garden while reconnecting with Mother Earth’s infinite power t...

 This week, we're walking the Green Mountains of Armenia and Georgia with food and travel writer, Caroline Eden The last time we met on CTB, it was to talk about Cold Kitchens, her dream of journeys past during Lockdown, as she tried to make sense of a changing world. This time, she’s putting one foot in front of the other to process the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on this still...

This week, we’re back at River Cottage with bee queen, Rachel de Thample   River Cottage Handbook No 19: Bees and Honey is the latest in the practical guides to everything we need to know to live a sustainable life. Rachel and Steve Minshall take us through everything from caring for bees to honey recipes for soothing and healing, but as a former chef, commissioning Editor of Waitrose Fo...

This week, we’re off on our travels again through Eastern Europe, this time with Irina Georgescu as our guide along the lesser known banks of the Danube. Irina has become the word on Romanian food, and from her home in Wales, she’s committed to exploring her homeland through its food history. Her last book ,  Tava: Eastern European Baking and Desserts from Romania and Beyond   won a Jame...

This week, we’re visiting the kitchens of everyday India to find the food behind closed doors with chef, food writer and broadcaster, Roopa Gulati, Brought up in Cumbria, Roopa spent 20 years as a chef in Delhi before she came home to advise on Rick Stein’s India series for BBC2. She's a woman who knows how to find the story in everyday food, and Indian Kitchens  is an extraordinary stor...

This week, we’re back at Rockwater, Hove with River Cottage writer, Lucy Brazier telling a live audience about her memoir, The Honesty Box. It’s a highly moving and very funny diary about healing a broken marriage and growing enough vegetables to fill her new distraction, an honesty box. But the rickety old receptable outside her garden gate is also a metaphor for the treasure trove she finds...

Laurie Woolever is back on the pod, four years since we last met her to talk about the last book she wrote with the late, great Anthony Bourdain.   This time she’s telling her own story in Care and Feeding: A Memoir which paints a vivid picture of a bright, sensitive woman beset with anxiety trying to find her way into food writing in a world of celebrity chefs and toxic masculinity in t...

This week, as Trump tramples over the future of Eastern Europe – and indeed the rest of Europe, we’re with Siberian-born food writer and co-founder of #CookforUkraine, Alissa Timoshkina. Her latest book, Kapusta: Vegetable-Forward Recipes from Eastern Europe is a celebration of the humble cabbage (and four other vegetables) in the everyday kitchens of Eastern Europe. Her co-founder of Cookfor...