From Azerbaijan to a Scottish kitchen – travel and food writer Caroline Eden packs flavour in her new book

Memories of adventure give a taste of places and people near and far

Caroline Eden is serving us cheese scones, the photographer and me, in her Edinburgh basement kitchen as we talk about her latest travel/cookbook Cold Kitchen, inspired by her twentysomething years of travel in Central Asia, The Baltics and in the last decade around her Scottish home. It takes a year of her cooking in her Edinburgh kitchen and through each dish that she’s preparing over 12 chapters, whisks us off to the different lands covered within the book. Starting in Uzbekistan, it ends in Ukraine and in between we travel to places like Poland, Russian, the South Caucasus and are served up a recipe at the end of each chapter.

Despite rain falling in sheets so the disembodied feet visible at head height through the old window splash by, there is nothing cold about this kitchen today.

Eden is warm, effusive on her subject, and so are the scones, packed with herbs, cheese and… what is that?

Caroline Eden, whose latest travel and food book, Cold Kitchen, is available now, published by Bloomsbury. Pic: Lisa Ferguson.

“Svan salt. ‘Cos I didn’t have any black pepper and I thought ‘what can give this some heat?’”.

The Svan salt hails from Georgia, brought back by Eden who rarely returns to the Edinburgh flat she shares with journalist husband James without a foodie souvenir. It sits on the table along with a tile from Samarkand serving as a coaster, ceramic mushrooms from Istanbul, chocolates from Ukraine, and on a shelf a rose medallion bowl from Tajikistan. All serve to evoke memories of her travels which she pours into her books along with recipes inspired by food she encounters along the way.

Cold Kitchen is her latest volume, written in Edinburgh, as she kneads non bread or stirs a pan of bubbling fruit and rum for a Central Asian take on a strudel. Over 12 chapters she gives the reader a flavour of far flung places and closer to home, writes about discovering the Scottish capital itself. And ever present too is the image of her late dog Darwin the Beagle, who would hang around the pantry door hoping for a tinned sardine, or doze in a corner of the kitchen, nostrils alert, and now adorns the book cover, eyeing the kitchen table.

To read Cold Kitchen is to be transported by Eden to a sunny veranda to join the women of the ‘Bishkek Dacha Collective’ in Kyrgyzstan as they chat and sip Krygyz cognac and tea, eat duck plov (a rice dish) with salads of pear, beetroot and walnuts and smoky shashlik (grilled meat on skewers), and only days later witness the 2020 riots in the capital. Or to taste a spoonful of the mustard that propelled the best climbers in the world up mountains, proffered on a spoon by the owner of a Uzbeck homestay, and closer to home, join her in the the discovery of a single, rare cloudberry, hiding in the heather above the River Almond, something she’d previously only eaten in jam on Estonia’s Baltic coast.

Author Caroline Eden at home in Edinburgh, her base in between travels to Central Asia and The Baltics. Pic: Lisa Ferguson

Following her previous books, the Guild of Food Writers Award for Best Food and Travel Book-winning Samarkand, and what will be a trilogy when the third in the series joins Black Sea and Red Sands possibly next year, Eden’s Cold Kitchen will awaken your taste buds, wanderlust and desire to cook up a feast, even if you never make it out of Scotland.

For 20 years you’ve travelled in Eastern Europe and Central Asia – Turkey, Ukraine, the Baltics, Poland, the Caucasus – and written books about it, but Cold Kitchen is different as it’s also about Edinburgh, why did you write it?

My work has always been in the territory of food and ‘The Far Away’, so I like to go somewhere and come back and recreate the food and the journeys through travel writing, radio pieces and recipes.

With this book the idea was to bring it back home, base the book in Edinburgh and travelling back into the world through it. I thought it would be interesting to write more of a narrative tale, and to bring Edinburgh into it because I’ve lived here nearly ten years now. I liked the idea of introducing people to my adoptive home. I looked at the way it looks and smells, what the architecture is like, as though I was somewhere like Warsaw or Samarkand, and tried to see it with an outsider’s eye

A jar of spicy Svan salt, which Caroline Eden brought back from Georgia. Pic: J Christie

I’m a traveller first, rather than a food writer, and use food to talk about other things. It’s the medium rather than the subject.

What role does food play for the traveller?

It’s really important for people when they travel, whether it’s sitting at a cafe or going to a bistro or eating in a train carriage. I think food is really good at evoking memories of a place and it’s often our first way into the country when we arrive somewhere: what’s on the menu?

Is Edinburgh a good place for cooks?

Travel and food writer Caroline Eden at home in Edinburgh, where she cooks up the dishes she tastes on her travels from Central Asia to the Baltics. Discover her words, along with recipes, in her latest book, Cold Kitchen. Pic: Lisa Ferguson

I write in the shop about my Saturday ritual on Leith Walk with my rucksack. The Polish supermarket, Chinese supermarket and Turkish supermarket and within those three I can get everything. There’s a fantastic Indian supermarket up by the mosque too and when I’m cooking from Roopa Gulati’s cookbook I can get everything there.

The recipes you include, where do they come from?

Mostly from cafes and restaurants, home stays or B&Bs where there’s often somebody cooking in the kitchen and I recreate a version to help the reader taste the journey. So the strudel is inspired by one in a cafe in Lviv in Ukraine. I put a little bit of rum in mine and do it with blueberries and apples. The recipes are like maps or postcards.

What is your favourite food from all the places you have been?

That would have to be plov, the Central Asian pilaf-style rice dish, often with lamb or mutton, sometimes with quail eggs. It’s a really delicious dish.

It’s hard to recreate because it’s cooked in a very big pan called a kazam, but I’ve got a big pot we got as a wedding gift and use that. The key is to cook it in layers really slowly. It’s very lightly spiced - some cumin, red pepper, black pepper, herbs, maybe some dill, coriander or parsley - but really it’s about the meat, often mutton, sometimes beef. Here I cook it with lamb, and in Turkmenistan they use fish because they’re on the Caspian Sea. I do a vegetarian one with barberries. Sometimes in Central Asia, especially Uzbekistan, they put quail eggs on top, which is amazing visually, and sometimes quince. What I love is its many variations and the smell of the rice and meat, and those spices cooking slowly. That does transport me back.

Author Caroline Eden at home in Edinburgh among her books and ceramics bought during her travels, which she writes about in her travel/food books, including her latest, Cold Kitchen. Pic: Lisa Ferguson

Which recipes do you get the most feedback on?

Definitely Central Asia because there’s not much written about it and that’s what people are most interested in. And there’s a group of us who are interested in food from Russia, Ukrainie, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia who have shared food traditions, so you will find borscht, which is Ukrainian, in most of those countries, and the same for non bread, the big flat golden discs of bread, called lepyoshka in Russia, and you get it in Uzbekistan, you might find it in Ukraine and I found it recently in Riga in Latvia.

In Central Asia you’ve got pockets of different cultures living in these countries, Ukranians in Uzbekistan, Armenians everywhere, Georgians - I was chatting to Georgians in Odessa in Ukraine in February in the market.

You were in Ukraine in February?

Yes, I went for the first time since the war started, and I went to Lviv a few months before the full scale invasion, that’s in the book.

What is it about Central Asia which fascinates you?

Back in 2009 when I first went to Central Asia I was captivated by the mixture of Islamic culture and the Soviet hangover and how that was co-existing. In Uzbekistan there was a leader called Islam Karimov who had an iron grip and tourists were not welcome and it was quite challenging to travel there and I liked that. I liked writing about somewhere that people weren’t going very much and thought deserved to be more on people’s radar. And food is a very nice way of leading people in to then talk about anything, political repression or art - I’ve written quite a lot about a museum in Karakalpakstan out in the Far West of Uzbekistan where art was squirreled away to keep safe during repressions in the 1930s-1960s and that museum is full of still lifes of fruit and paintings of markets.

Why did you go there in 2009?

I was a bookseller in London and this epic guide book of 900 pages came out on Tajikistan by a guide book publisher I was moonlighting for. After I’d finished working on it I thought I ought to go and see it.

It sounded amazing, and I knew that border was open between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and I could probably get to Samarkand so I flew in on my own, saw things that were incredible, like mountain landscapes, I took a tiny Antonov plane up into the High Pamirs [The Pamir mountains of Tajikistan], came back down, went overland to the Uzbek city of Samarkand and it was just the most amazing thing I had ever seen.

There was no tourist infrastructure so it was a completely different experience, very challenging, but that region is addictive. Once you’ve seen one or two countries you want to see more, and then you start thinking what about The Caucasus and how does that link with Eastern Europe?

What is the significance of food to you beyond sustenance?

You can tell any story through food. Take Kyrgyzstan, a country in Central Asia that not many know much about outside of that region, but in Red Sands (2020), I use food to talk about unusual things. I go to the largest walnut forest in the world, and that’s a way to talk about our climate emergency because they haven’t had good harvests there for a very long time.

Then there’s Imenjon [Mahmudov] an Uzbek, living in Kyrgyzstan, who runs a guest house and chatting over a plate of plov he was telling me that during Soviet times he would cook at the base camp of Peak Lenin for the great Russian and Kazakh climbers like Anatoli Boukree. He came out with some mustard on a spoon and said this is what gets them up really - the heat of the mustard. That’s just two examples of about 30 in the book on different topics, that show food can lead you anywhere.

What role does food play for the traveller?

I think it’s critical. It’s one of the more accessible areas of culture for people when they travel. They want to eat local food and are adventurous and interested to know what the food’s like in Poland or The Baltics.

Have you always been restless?

Yes, I’m pathologically restless. I’ve made a career out of it. The world’s a difficult place but when you’re travelling you meet incredible people and go to interesting places and it reminds you how amazing it can be. Sitting down chatting to people, whether it’s a taxi driver or an artist or a welder, people love to talk and share food, share ideas. That makes me feel good about the world.

And the reimagining of things and writing when I get home, I enjoy that as much as the travel. Looking over my photos and thinking about experiences, it’s like living them again.

What do the foods that other people east and how they eat them tell us about other places?

I talk in Cold Kitchen about how herbs are served in springtime in The Caucasus for example. I remember being very surprised when I was in Baku in Azerbaijan and went for lunch and a dinner plate covered with herbs came to the table, huge bundles of dill, coriander, parsley, purple basil - which is cinnamony tasting - and ginormous, for eating with your kebab or salad. That shows how herbs are used and revered and used in abundance for flavour. When I read in a recipe a pinch of this or that I think for goodness sake, you probably want three times as much as that.

In Central Asia non bread is held in great reverence. It’s one big round dinner plate-sized piece of bread and traditionally the head of the table would break it up and hand it round (generally a man) and now people are cutting a bit more with knives, which would have been completely disallowed years ago, so you can see the changes coming in.

There are all these stories around non bread, like if a man goes off to join the army the family would hang the non bread up in the house somewhere and only bring it down when he returned safely back. There’s always bread in the wedding ceremonies, a bride and groom I saw in Samarkand once, the bread was dipped in honey, he tasted a piece and she tasted a piece as part of the wedding ceremony, umpteen things, always really interesting.

Is there anything that is ubiquitous?

Tea. It’s always a good ice breaker and a simple welcome that people offer wherever you are, Armenia and Turkey, also coffee, but huge amounts of tea. And vodka unites quite a lot of countries, but I think the tea tradition is probably the most obvious one.

What is your favourite food ritual?

Something I really love that is disappearing is the chaikhana, the traditional tea house that you find in Azerbaijan, all through Turkey, in Central Asia, Afghanistan, not so much in Eastern Europe, but these old, generally beautiful, tea houses where people gather. They used to be, and still are in some places, very male spaces, where people drink tea, normally in a glass, and play backgammon or an equivalent, smoking cigarettes and chatting.

Current favourite taste?

I’m obsessed with the spice mix, Svan Salt, from the remote mountainous Svaneti region in Georgia. It includes dried coriander, blue fenugreek, marigold petals, garlic, red pepper, wild caraway seeds and salt. It’s really strong, deeply savoury and pungent but works with everything. I use it often but sparingly, adding it to soups, scones, boiled eggs and salads. I brought it back when I was last in Georgia. I’ve another cookbook coming out next year and I use it in that. I’m experimenting with Svan Bloody Marys, which I’d tried in a Tbilisi bar, so I did a salt rim with svan salt to see if it’s crazy or works.

Your first book Samarkand won the Guild of Food Writers award for Best Food and Travel Book in 2017, how did that change things for you?

Before I did that book I didn’t really think about writing about food at all. I wrote it with a friend who wrote the recipes. It was a book to right a wrong because I’d been travelling in Central Asia and was fed up with everyone in the guidebooks being rude about the food, saying if you don’t eat meat you’re going to go hungry, the food is terrible, and that was not my experience. In people’s homes the food was really interesting and delicious and the markets had amazing things so I wrote that book to show another side, and then I thought I could do something a bit more narrative next time, do recipes but also put more writing, so I did Black Sea.

What Scottish recipe have you either cooked in other places or items have you taken with you or recommended?

I have travelled with bottles of whisky which is an amazing gift. I did give Tatiana [a cabin-mate] on the Trans-Siberian a small bottle of sloe gin I had and she absolutely hated it. I always take oatcakes for me, and take shortbread too when I travel. I ended up eating a packet myself on my trip to Ukraine.

Cold Kitchen, Caroline Eden, 9 May, Bloomsbury, hardback £18.99

See Caroline Eden's website www.carolineeden.com for details of her other titles and upcoming events in Scotland:

15 June: Borders Book Festival, bordersbookfestival.org

August: Edinburgh International Book Festival, https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/, dates tbc