Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith

This week, we’re back with our favourite doctor, Saliha Mahmood Ahmed and her latest book, The 20 Minute Gut Health Fix .  Saliha is a specialist registrar in gastroenterology with a Masters in Nutrition,an award winning food writer and the 2017 winner of MasterChef. She’s been on this show to talk about Foodology and The Kitchen Prescription , but since we last met, beans have made it back i...

This week, Gilly puts her pack on her back and heads to Thailand, Baja California, Sri Lanka and Mexico with holistic chef Samantha Dormehl to explore her Wanderlust Kichen. The book is a spiritual guide to healing recipes from around the world, and the result of years of travelling, eating with locals, cooking in their kitchens and slowing right down to experience the wonders of the world through...

This week, we’re celebrating CTB’s fifth birthday with another in our series of Live events at Rockwater in Hove, this time with Claire Thomson. The Five o clock Apron, as she’s more commonly known was with us to talk about her latest book One Pan Beans, the 10th in her series of how to cook books. In front of an audience of super-fans, she told us how to elevate the simplest of ingredients -...

This week, Gilly finds out what happens when life falls apart, and grows again, with Kathy Slack’s Rough Patch Kathy was a high flying executive living the dream in Adland... until it became a nightmare. Burn out gave way to clinical depression and a very dark place indeed. Ultimately hers is a story about nature, dogs and how growing veg saved her, but she doesn’t pull any punches, and trigger wa...

This week, Gilly's with Niloufer Mavalvala to discover the food of the Zorastrians in the fourth of her compendium, The Route to Parsi Cooking. This is about food without borders, a cuisine which is under threat as so many are when their people are displaced. But as we hear so often on this show, they can also become the roots to a culture. With only about 200k Zoroastrians living a...

This week, Gilly is talking vegan baking with Philip Khoury. His book, A New Way to Bake reimagined recipes for plant based cakes, bakes and desserts won the debut cookbook award last year at the Fortnum and Masons . But his day job as head pastry chef at Harrods has given him an opportunity to turn up the dial on veganism at the top end of London’s food scene.  Check into Gilly's Substack fo...

This week, Cooking the Books Live is back at Rockwater, Hove in the first of a series of second Tuesdays and a rather fabulous food book club. And who better to start with but Brighton’s favourite novelist, Josie Lloyd and the inspiration for her latest murder mystery, Mrs Isabella Beeton. Miss Beeton’s Murder Agency is a classic whodunnit, but it’s the protagonist, Alice Beeton’s distant ancestor...

This week, as the Oxford Farming Conference and the Oxford Real Farming Conference open their doors to discuss the role of farming in modern British life, Gilly talks sustainable meat with Pipers Farm’s Abby Allen. The Pipers Farm Sustainable Meat Cookbook came out in 2022 but is one of Gilly's favourite reads and recipe resources. It’s a manifesto for the role of family farms in climate change an...

This week, Gilly is with Julian Baggini, the author of over 20 books about philosophy for a general audience. But it’s what he says about food that had Dan Saladino of BBC's The Food Programme voting How the World Eats, a Global Food Philosphy his best book of 2024. Gilly finds out what a philosopher can do to help us out of the mess of our global food system. Head over to Gilly's Substack fo...

This week, Gilly is with Kate Hall, the author of  The Full Freezer Method: Five Steps to Transform How You Shop, Cook and Live .  She’s all over morning telly and the nationals as the Freezer Queen giving tips from her fantastically useful book which really could help us save waste; as she points out, 70% of global food waste comes from the home. But this isn’t just about batch coo...

This week, Gilly is with Richard Hart, former head baker of iconic bakery ,  Tartine in San Francisco, the Londoner whose bakeries across Copenhagen began with a test kitchen at Noma, and the man who taught Marcus from the Bear how to bake.   His book, Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Baking is more of a love letter to bread than an instruction manual. It’s a r...

This week, Gilly is with Irina Janakievska, a North Macedonian born former lawyer turned chef who trained at Leiths and worked in the Ottolenghi test kitchen before becoming a runner up for the prestigious Jane Grigson Trust award for her debut cookbook, The Balkan Kitchen. It’s massive book reaching deep into the history, peoples and geo-politics of the Balkans, but also into her own fa...

This week, Gilly is with Claire Dinhut aka Condiment Claire.   Claire is  a culinary history cook and the author of The Condiment Book . A dual national of the US and France, she splits her time between LA and her family home, a mill in the French countryside where the rituals, traditions and flavours of both have inspired her till-side treasure, The Condiment Book which is bou...

This week, you may be surprised to find a fashion designer on the show. But  Alice Robinson  is not what you might imagine.  She’s only just left the Royal College of Art, but her work has already been featured in the V&A ‘s Food: Bigger than the Plate exhibition. Her first book  Field, Fork, Fashion  has had her on  Radio’s 4’s  Start the Week  to discu...

This week, Gilly's with Jon Watts, the author of the instant Sunday Times Bestseller Speedy Weeknight Meals .   He's a chef with 885k followers on Instagram, but it all started when as a teenager serving a six and a half year sentence for GBH in a young offenders institution, he was given a job on day release at one of the early Jamie Oliver restaurants. Now in this mid 30s, he...

This week, Gilly is with new kid on the block in cookbookland, Emily Roz. Emily is a trained chef, a recipe developer, and the content creator behind Myriad Recipes. Her “Around the World in 80 Dumplings” series went viral, gaining millions of views. They caught up to talk about The World is Your Dumpling , which has over 80 recipes celebrating the diverse flavours and textures of dumplings f...

This week, Gilly is with another changemaker, Elliot Webb, the author of Growing Mushrooms at Home: The Complete Guide to Knowing, Growing and Loving Fungi  on the awesome world beneath our feet. The   founder of Urban Farm It is a passionate grower and educator of alternative agriculture based in the UK.  His goal is become a leader in the global movement to a more sustai...

This week, Gilly's with the man who’s on a mission to put flavour in the heart of a revolution in the food system. Franco Fubini is the CEO and founder of sustainable food distributor, Natoora. He’s also one of the judges of The Food Planet prize for innovation in food, and now, the author of  In Search of the Perfect Peach. His philosophy is simple but its impact could be massive - He b...

This week, Gilly continues to curate the changemakers with chef, author and co-founder of Leon, Allegra McEved y In Chefs Wanted , she’s on a mission to teach kids not just to play with their food but to cook like the pros. It’s a must-buy for any kids who want to be properly creative in the kitchen and stretch their skills. But Allegra has a deeper purpose behind everything she does, including th...

This week, Gilly is with Tim Spector, geneticist, author of Food For Life and founder of Zoe, the personalised nutrition app that has changed the way we think about food. And now, the Food for Life Cookbook . Since their first meeting for the delicious podcast before Covid changed the world, gut health advice is everywhere, and personalised nutrition is set to become the Next Big Thing. Gilly find...

 This week, Gilly is with one of the old skool TV chefs who taught Britain how to eat, Rick Stein They last met over lunch when she was chatting to him about his book Secret France for the delicious. podcast. This time, it’s about secret Britain, or at least the communities of Britain bursting with flavour and influencing our national diet. Rick Stein’s Food Stories, the book and the BBC show...

This week, Gilly is with food royalty, the restaurant critic, writer, and son of Queen Camilla, Tom Parker Bowles.  Royal Food has always been about impressing the most powerful people in the world, and in his book Cooking and the Crown , he tells how it has set trends for centuries, from Victoria to his stepfather, King Charles 3rd.  Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of...

Gilly is with Pam Brunton, chef/owner at Inver restaurant on Argyll and Bute, author, philosopher and star of Rick Stein’s Food Stories on BBC1. Her book, Between Two Waters: Heritage, landscape and the modern cook is a deep dive into everything that we need to know about food - the philosophy, the politics and the provenance of what we eat. It’s part memoir, part manifesto on the future of f...

This week, Gilly is with Saturday Kitchen regular and author of nine cook books, Claire Thomson, aka Five o Clock apron. Her latest book, Veggie Family Cook Book is, like Claire, what it says on the cover – genuine, real, easy-going, with 120 recipes to make life more interesting. Gilly finds what makes her so appealing - and enduring - in the plentiful world of cookbooks. Pop over to Gilly’s...

This week, Gilly has her hands on on the brand new, much awaited book from Ottolenghi, Comfort. Written by the 'four hungries', Yotam, his original co-writer Tara Wigley, Helen Goh and Verena Lochmuller, these are the foods that provide a comfort blanket for them, and mark a departure from the big Ottolenghi books of the past. In a deliciously raw, often indiscreet chat with three of the 'hungries...