Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith

This week, Gilly's with the king of Tik Tok, the idol of Insta and star of channel 5’s  A Taste of the Country , Julius Robert s. His debut cook book The Farm Table is a beautifully written story of a young man following his dream from cheffing to farming, with goats who think they’re dogs, pigs begging for a tummy tickle and an idyllic walk through the seasons. An audience of 500k on both In...

This week, Gilly is with one of Britain’s very best food writers, Diana Henry . The new edition of her 2005 book Roast Figs, Sugar Snow is a lyrical walk through the autumn leaves and winter wonderlands of her favourite food places in the world as she shares the delicious finds that have made her one of Britain’s most well-respected and award-winning food writers. It’s a book that makes you feel w...

This week, Gilly is at Knepp with the queen of wilding, Isabella Tree. The Knepp estate is an extraordinary pioneering wilding project to restore nature which Isabella captured so beautifully in her 2019 book Wilding .  Chris Packham called it ‘A poignant, practical and moving story of how to fix our broken land'. Now, The Book of Wilding  breaks that story down into encyclopaedic f...

This week on Cooking the Books, Italian-Kiwi gardener and cook, Bri DiMattina tells us how she’s grown a food forest using permaculture principles in her garden in New Zealand. Her book  Nostrana , meaning ‘home grown’ is also an extraordinary story of Italian food heritage in New Zealand. It’s the legacy of her grandparents growing a new world for themselves and their fellow Italians during...

This week, Gilly is with Conor Spacey , chef, culinary director of Food Space Ireland and one of the movers and shakers behind the Chefs' Manifesto , a community of over 1000 chefs in 110 countries making real change in the world of food His book Wasted is packed with recipes for the kitchen waste we all have in our homes, and it’s ingenius. Check Gilly's Substack for a chocolate cake recipe made...

This week, Gilly is with Adriana Cavita , the brilliant Mexican chef and, now author of Cocina Mexicana , whose journey from her grandmother’s street food stall to top international restaurants like Pujol and El Bulli has brought the real flavours of Mexico to London.  Have a listen to the resilience of this woman – she’s like a hurdler, jumping the barriers of gender, language, money an...

This week, Gilly is with the Indonesian chef behind her last sell out supper club, Petty Elliott.  Her book, The Indonesian Table is a seminal work on the food of this archipelagic state of 17000 islands. We might think we know the flavours of Bali, Java, maybe even Sumatra, but Minangkabau? Manado? Banda Island? Probably not. Petty brought Indonesian food to a hungry public for the first tim...

This week, in the last of this mini series on Matrescence , Gilly is with Helen Rebanks , farmer, businesswoman, teacher, conservationist and a working mother of four. She's also wife to Britain’s most famous farmer, James Rebanks whose phenomenal success with his books The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral (as featured on Cooking the Books), changed the way we look at farming.  Now Helen...

This week, Gilly is with Emiko Davies, the Australian born, half Japanese writer on Italian food who lives with her family in Florence to talk about Japan. Her book Gohan is the story of her childhood food, fed to her by her Japanese mother in Australia and by her grandparents in Japan. It's the Japanese word for rice, but it also means ‘family meal’ and for Emiko, the only word as the title for h...

This week, in the third in a special series this summer on Matrescence, Gilly is with Tara Wigley, co-author of the award-winning Falastin , in-house writer of Team Ottolenghi, Yotam’s co-author on eight of the biggest food books, including the million-seller,  Ottolenghi Simple .. and mother of teen twins and a tween. Her hilarious and often biting ditties on Instagram have won her...

This week, in the second in a special series on matrescence, Gilly is talking about morning telly, cook hacks and motherhood with TV chef, Shivi Ramoutar . Shivi is the Caribbean Queen of Morning TV. She’s the chef on  Oti Mabuse’s Breakfast Show , she was the TV Chef on Garraway’s Good Stuff and cooked with the Kemps on Martin and Roman’s Weekend Best . She's a  regular guest on BB...

This week, Gilly's at the home of award-winning recipe writer, author and YouTuber, one of Bake Off’s most celebrated winners and mother of 2, Chetna Makan to talk about her new book, Chetna’s Indian Feasts .    But in this first episode of a special series this summer, we’re talking about food through the prism of matrescence , the raw ingredients which make up the heady mix o...

This week, Gilly is with Maria Bradford, author of Sweet Salone, the first book to tell the story of the food from her homeland of Sierra Leone.  Maria came to the UK as a student and grew up with her guardian in a village in Kent, far from the colourful food culture spreading through London’s West African communities. But it was her sense of being different that has led to her becoming...

This week, Gilly is with Syrian chef, restaurateur and charity pop-up king, Imad Alarnab, whose story has become a symbol of hope for so many migrants fleeing their war-torn homelands. His book, Imad’s Syrian Kitchen is so much more than a book of recipes from Syria. It’s the story of gritty determination to make a better life for his family, of meeting angels even  when he was in the de...

This week, Gilly is with cook, gardener and beekeeper, Amy Newsome . Her book, Honey: Recipes From a Beekeeper's Kitchen takes us through the beekeeper’s year, arguing the case for less but better honey from inside the bee hive. Her holistic approach takes us from terroir to table via a garden designed for bees, while her four food moments capture the alchemy a pot of honey can achieve. Check...

This week, Gilly is with the woman who cooked for Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, the late Queen and the leaders of the Western world at the G7 conference in 2020. But as she opens up about what drives her, she reveals that she didn't always feel such a superwoman. Her restaurant Emily Scott Food, perched on the beach at Newquay, has settled into the excellence of the Cornish food landscape now and as...

This week Gilly is with journalist and author, Clare Finney whose new book, Hungry Heart is a memoir which unravels a tricky relationship with food.  As she explores her own story with food, she unravels the complexities of British food culture in conversation with famous friends, Diana Henry , Bee Wilson and Gurd Loyal , academics and school friends. Head over to Gilly's Substack for Clare's...

This week, Gilly is with chef, restaurateur, journalist and award winning writer, Ravinder Bhogal. Her latest book, Comfort and Joy: Irresistible Pleasures from a Vegetarian Kitchen  celebrates the legacy of her grandfather and the life he built, ground up, for her family in Kenya Her writing is surely some of the best in Britain today, and her poetic meditations on where we are with an...

This week Gilly is going fishing with Jenny Jefferies , author of For the Love of the Sea, who has made it her mission to give a voice to the hidden fisherfolk of Britain, capturing the detail of their daily work, their passion and their massively important contribution to our economy.  Gilly and Jenny discuss sustainability, politics and why an island nation has such a problem with seafood....

This week Gilly is with Jenny Chandler whose book A Good Appetite is all about eating for planet, body and soul. It's a subject particularly close to Gilly's heart; her award-winning book Taste and the TV Chef looked at the influence TV chefs have had and could have in changing the way we eat. Her podcast for Leon H ow to Eat to Save the Planet and her work for Compassion in World Farming , the Fo...

This week, Gilly is with James Whetlor, former chef at River Cottage and The Eagle in Farringdon with a whole new take on the barbecue. For festival goers, upcycling hobbyists and outdoor cooking fanatics, James has come up with genius ways to easily build your own. Before she traces the fascinating dark history of the barbecue with James, Gilly asks why a man who admits he can’t even put up a she...

This week, Gilly is with  Niki Segnit ,  the award-winning author of  The Flavour Thesauru s, Lateral Cooking, and now The Flavour Thesaurus: More Flavours,  The original Flavour Thesaurus published in 2011 has been called “a masterpiece” and is widely seen as a modern classic with its flavour pairings format inspired by Roget’s Thesaurus.  This se...

This week, Gilly is with Iranian food writer and photographer, Saghar Setareh whose debut book  Pomegranates & Artichokes  is the story of two food cultures that share so much in common but which are worlds apart. Saghar was born in Tehran and moved to Rome in 2007 to study at the Fine Art Academy. But by 2009 protests against the new regime broke out in all the major citie...

This week Gilly is with former lawyer, Jennifer Medhurst, aka The Imperfect Nutritionist . And while there's plenty of talk about gut health, this episode focusses on mental health and exhaustion after the interview took an unexpected turn. Gilly asked Jennifer about a rather throwaway line in the introduction to her book about her own recovery from a long illness, and opened a fascinating discuss...

This week, Gilly is back with MasterChef winner, author and doctor, Saliha Mahmood Ahmed. She’s a historian, a TV chef and a gastroenterologist with a kitchen clinic, and she’s on a mission to prescribe food to fix our obesity crisis. Gilly first meet Saliha on the delicious. podcast when she took her through the fascinating history of food in the Mughal empire in Khazana. They met again for Foodo...