Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith

This week, Gilly is with honey sommelier and bee champion, Sarah Wyndham Lewis .  Her book, The Wild Bee Handbook is a fascinating insight into the world of the 'other' bees, the ones that don't make honey but go almost completely unnoticed. Their role in the protection of the planet is mighty, and as the unsung guardians of biodiversity, we all need to know much more about them and what we c...

This week Gilly is with chef, TV presenter and now, finally author, Andi Oliver .  She’s one of the most successful black women on British TV, a respected pundit on Caribbean cooking on Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet and rocking it in the best frocks on the telly in the Great British Menu . And after her return to her ancestral home of Antigua with her daughter Miquita for the BBC , &nbsp...

This week, Gilly is with Rupy   Aujla to talk gut health, flavour and his latest book, Dr Rupy Cooks He’ s a best selling author,  a BBC presenter, a podcaster - his podcast The Doctor’s Kitchen is massive, his Instagram following is in 6 figures and somehow he manages to make it to work as a GP.  If anyone can change the narrative about why heatlhy eating is so important...

This week, Gilly is going to Pakistan, through the memories of food writer and writing coach, Sumayya Usmani   Her memoir, Andaza tells the everyday stories about life and food in Karachi. It sees the kitchen as a place where young Pakistani girls learn much more from their mothers and grandmothers than how to make a recipe, but how to feed, how to nurture and how to connect. For Extra B...

This week Gilly is with Turkish food writer and chef, Ozlem Warren  Ozlem found fame as a blogger after moving here in 2009, and her supper clubs, meze nights and her book, Ozlem’s Turkish Table have made her  the  name in Turkish food. But since her home town of Antakya  was devastated by the recent earthquake, she’s raised thousands for the relief effort with the help of...

This week, Gilly is gardening with teacher, podcaster and Telegraph columnist , Sarah Raven Sarah has seen massive changes in how our gardens grow over her 25 years as a gardening pundit.  For anyone interested in food and the planet, growing, even if it’s just a few herbs on the window sill, seems a no-brainer.  Her latest book A Year full of Veg gets to the heart of that rela...

This week, Gilly is exploring the secret kitchens of Britain’s Desi kitchens with Britain's Best Home Cook finalist, Sarah Woods . Her book Desi Kitchen is part of the current crop of second generation Indian cookbooks which are hitting the shelves right now. But Sarah’s tells the story of the communities in which Desi people from the Indian Sub continent have enriched so much of Britain with thei...

This week, Gilly time travels through the centuries with Belgian writer Regula Ysewijn to explore the rich history of the food from her homeland. An anglophile who binged on Bronte and Austen since she was a child, Regula has spent much of her food writing life focussing on British baking. She’s a consultant for the National Trust and even wrote the Downton Abbey Christmas Cookbook. But in her boo...

This week, Gilly is Zooming into the 17th-century Palazzo home in Venice of Skye McAlpine .  The daughter of Lord Alistair McAlpine, one of Margaret Thatcher’s closest advisers, Skye grew up in Venice where she now lives with her own family. A classics scholar with a PhD in ancient love poetry, she’s an expert on how Greeks and Romans understood love. And in her latest cook boo...

This week, Gilly chats to a new voice in food writing, Gurdeep Loyal . Diana Henry calls him 'amazing, original, boundary breaking, a genius with flavour’. He's a cool hunter, a podcaster and writer and his debut cookbook Mother Tongue has exploded a whole new way of thinking about Indian food. Since he won the Jane Grigson Trust award in 2020 for his proposal for Mother Tongue, the food world has...

This week, Gilly has lunch with one of Britain’s most respected and original voices in British food writing, Elisabeth Luard. A well-known writer, botanical artist and broadcaster, her many books have brought us stories of her family life in Andalucia in the 1960s set among the history, landscapes and culture of Europe.  European Peasant Cook ery was first published in 1986 and reprinted...

This week, we’re celebrating three years of Cooking the Books with its very first guest, Olivia Potts and her latest book, Butter: A Celebration. Her journey from barrister to butter, her latest book is told with what Nigella calls 'her devilish wit', both in her award-winning memoir, A Half Baked Idea and now in a book that has GONG written all over it: Butter: a Celebration .    S...

This week, Gilly is talking revolution in the bakeries of Europe with Berlin's Fine Bagels baker, Laurel Kratochvila . Her book, New European Baking is part guide book to the coolest city bakeries in Europe, part celebration of the return to craftmanship. As she takes us from Boston to Prague, Lisbon to Warsaw and Hackney, we join her in sniffing out the best brioches...

This week, Gilly's talking about food and identity, folklore and First Footers with The Hebridean Baker. Coinneach Macleod has cooked up a magical story of the Outer Hebrides, packed with ancient myths and recipes, and captivated a massive Tik Tok audience. She asks him how he did it, why people are so attracted to story and why Hebridean mothers smash their newly-wed daughters over the head with...

This week, Gilly's talking food and class in Jeremy Lee ’s book Cooking with 17-year-old food campaigner at the Food Foundation , chair of Bite Back 2030, and Youth Member of parliament for Winchester, Dev Sharma.   Jeremy Lee is one of the handful of chefs who’s cooked his way into the history books of modern food culture. His journey has taken him through the kitchens of some of the most in...

Tthis week, Gilly's off on her Zoom travels again, this time to the complex and multi cultural flavours of Romania. Irina Georgescu has become the voice of Romanian food in the years that she's lived outside it.. She believes that there is no better way to tell the tale of a nation than through its food, and in her latest book, Tava , she unpicks the rich fabric of its political, spiritual an...

This week, Gilly is at the home of the queen of food writing, the original collector of Middle Eastern and Jewish food and grande dame of food and identity, Claudia Roden . As they celebrate 25 years of Claudia's internationally acclaimed Book of Jewish Food, they discuss the foods in our repertoire now that have been hidden in the kitchens of the Jewish diaspora for centuries - until Claudia...

This week, Gilly is talking Christmas wines with Cindy-Marie Harvey whose beautiful book, Watercress, Willow and Wine tells the story of the English vineyards which are creating a revolution in wine. Climate change has not just warmed the soils in England, but also focussed a new movement of sustainable producers to think laterally about how local wine pared beautifully with local, seasonal food c...

This week, Gilly is off to find Christmas – and a whole lot more - in Africana, the debut cookbook from the new voice in pan African food, Lerato who whisks us off on a tour of the latest obsession in culinary cultures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Gilly is with the queen of the Fowl Mouths supper club, BBC Good Food contributor, co-director of the British Library Food Season and now, author, Melissa Thompson . Her debut cookbook, Motherland is the story of the Jamaica that was her father’s family home. As she traces its history through its food, she uncovers the stories of its people, its struggles and its resourcefulness - as we...

This week, Gilly is with chef Tim Anderson who holds a unique position as cultural commentator on Japanese food culture in Britain. He's a chef, a Masterchef winner, the author of six books on Japanese food and a regular on Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet, yet he grew up in Wisconsin. Gilly digs deep to draw a line between the dots as they discuss his latest book Japanesy: Bowls and Bento. Through C...

This week, Gilly meets travel writer, Sylvie Bigar whose article about the rich history of the South West French cassoulet inspired a personal investigation into her often toxic family history and her own love affair with food.  Cassoulet Confessions is a food memoir which takes us deep into where a love of food can come from, however dark the path. A New Yorker brought up in a 'mini Downton...

This week, Gilly's with Prue Leith to talk about her new book Bliss on Toast which elevates the simplest of pleasures into the most delicious meals. Her journey in food makes her look like a gourmet version of the Bisto kid, sniffing her way from her Michelin restaurant in London’s starched 60s through, to taking on the catering at British Rail, through Leiths School of Food and Wine to Bake Off ,...

This week, Gilly is slowing right down for a meditation on cooking and eating in An Everlasting Meal by former chef at Chez Panisse , Dan Barber’s researcher and Vogue journalist, Tamar Adler.  The book which first came out in 2011 has clear echoes of Tamar’s hero, MFK Fisher with its poetic message of resilience and personal power, and its gentle humour is particularly resonant in these chal...

This week Gilly is talking the culture and politics of food with Hugh Fearnley-Whitingstall. His latest River Cottage book, Good Comfort is about tweaking our favoruite recipes with healthy extras, saving the pennies and losing a few pounds.  It’s also about food memories and generations of family recipes, rooting those cottage pies and weekend pancakes in who we are. And as we navigate our w...