Caroline Eden crafts travel-evocative recipes from her basement kitchen in Edinburgh

Caroline Eden’s curiosity marries an apparent fearlessness and where and how she travels. She writes of destinations where many will never go that have a whiff of deep history and the exotic Samarkand, Black Sea, and Red Sands are her previous books, and in each Eden seamlessly weaves history, art, politics and food for her stories. She looks at places of historic change, along with a kind of modern loneliness and comfort. Her latest book, Cold Kitchen, begins in her home, a place she's never shown us before. 

Evan Kleiman: Can you speak about the restlessness that compels you to travel and what you seek when you return home?

So I mean, I've been traveling for 25 years now, amazingly, and I probably go away for something between a third of the year, or sometimes even half of the year, to do my reporting. I do pieces of journalism and to research my books. I like the feeling of leaving, and I like the feeling now, as I'm a bit older, also of coming home. I like the flux. I find being away is where I get my ideas. They come to me much easier than when I'm sat at home. But I also think I need the home to sit still and to download and to process all the interesting things that I've seen and experienced. So I think that's really what this book is about. It's about leaving but it's also about coming home and finding a home.

Could you describe the physical space of your kitchen? It sounds like such a unique but cozy place to work. 

Yeah. I mean, I just loved it when I found this flat. It was the first one that I looked at, and it's the basement and the ground floor of a classic kind of Edinburgh New Town building, so a tenement-style building. And what I loved about it is that you go down these stone steps. This isn't a grand place. I should say it's quite a simple place. But you go down these stone steps and then the kitchen takes up the entire basement. So I immediately thought, this is where life will happen. I've got a hexagonal mahogany table in the middle that I can fit six to eight people around wooden floorboards and three small rooms off the main kitchen area. One is a tiny office with no window or anything that I write in. One is my pantry, very lucky to have that. And one is the kind of area with my fridge and tumble dryer and stuff. And there's one window in the kitchen. It's a sash window, meaning you throw it up and it's, you know, hangs on strings, very old fashioned, and it's freezing because it's Edinburgh and it's a single pane piece of glass. But What's lovely about it is you can see Edinburgh happening through this window, but only the bottom half of this so you see a dog's tail go past, and you see a buggy go past, and you see people's you know, you can tell what season it is by what people are wearing on their feet. And all the noise, all the noises of the summer festivals, of course, come in as well. So you get all the sort of drunk and banter in August, whether you know it's light until nearly midnight in Scotland in August, and you know the smell of smoke and the kind of beer and people drinking, having a good time, and then it goes very quiet in the winter, and I just love it. It's like an eye to Edinburgh, and you've got the cobbles, so literally under the cobbles there.

Caroline Eden spent a year traveling through Eastern Europe and Central Asia before finding refuge in her basement kitchen. Photo by Effie Ioannou.

Amazing. I mean, that view, I think, is hilarious and awesome. So many of us are armchair travelers who use recipes as a way to journey, you know, to faraway places. What does it mean for you to stand in your kitchen and prepare your way through actual memories?

It just feels very natural to me, because I've always been such a greedy traveler. Like so many of us, I love, you know, discovering the good canteens and cafes and things [that] I'm away but I'm also always thinking, “What can I recreate when I get back home?” And I've always said in all of my books, because I'm not a professionally trained chef at all, you know, I learned through cookbooks. I'm self-taught through, you know, great cooks like Diana Henry. I've read all her cookbooks. But I've always said, for me, because I'm a travel writer, really, first, probably, the recipes are postcards. I see them as a way of an extra dimension, another way for me to share the journey and what I've experienced. And people love that. I think they like the fact that it's kind of an extra you get to the end of the essay or the chapter, and it's the same in all of my books, and you get a recipe, and it's normally the thing that I've been describing having eaten, on a ferry, on a train, in a cafe somewhere. And because a lot of the countries that I travel to, not all of them, but some of them are not very well explored by Western travelers. It's a way in for people to begin to get an idea of what the agriculture is like, about what people are shopping for in the markets. You know, you can talk about anything through food. That's why I love using it as a medium, because it's sort of gentle, but it doesn't have to be. It can also be quite dark, and you can kind of go in any direction with it. So I think the recipes are kind of key as a way of illuminating places. 

Yeah, I love how you use them, almost like punctuation. The book begins in Uzbekistan. What drew you there, and how much time did you spend, and what was the book that resulted from that trip?

So I wrote a book called Red Sands, which came out during the pandemic in 2020 and I spent six months in Central Asia researching that book. But I've been to Uzbekistan many times over the years. Since 2009 I've been going back and forth, and now it's become quite a popular tourist destination. But that wasn't always the case. It used to be quite hard to travel there. But what I loved about these winter melons that I describe in the Uzbekistan chapter that we open with is they're so other worldly. They hang them in these specially constructed sheds, which are very well-aired. And as they're hanging there for many, many months, these melons, and there's many different varieties, hundreds, they accrue sucrose. They get sweeter and sweeter and sweeter. And they will have special names, like “Black Feather.” They've got very exotic names, and the traders are very proud of these melons and understand them. And as I say in the book, you'll never find an Uzbek melon with a sticker on it saying, “ripen at home,” because the seller knows when it's ready, and that's when he sells it to you. I'm very jealous, because I know in America, I think in California, they've tried growing some of those black varieties.

A bakery in Lviv. Photo by Caroline Eden.

Yes, you know, I'm here in Southern California, and our farmers markets have a couple farmers who are melon specialists. Incredible. We are very, very lucky.

Yeah. I mean, that's very special. So I get very excited. I think the closest that they've come to me in the UK is Germany has a very big Turkish population. The Turks understand the value of melons, and apparently you can occasionally find those black melons there.

 I love when in the midst of telling us the story of your travels in Uzbekistan through the lens of the melon, you are cutting up a melon from a supermarket nearby, which, of course, is nothing like the melons you're describing.

Yes, unfortunately. I mean, we have very few to choose from, like two or three, but I also explain, you know, this is why you need imagination. And the dish that I'm preparing is just a very simple salad. So it's a watermelon feta mint salad, which lots of us know about, but, you know, sort of it's too elementary to require an actual recipe. You just put it together. But the real feast is within, that's what I say. You know, it's what chopping up that melon does for me, is it opens the gates back to Uzbekistan, so it brings forth good memories. And that's kind of enough. Sometimes in the store cupboard of the mind, you know, the real feast is within. It's not necessarily was on the plate.

One of my favorite parts of the book, actually, is the way you describe winter in Istanbul. Give us a sense of what it is that you love so much about winter there, you could read a couple of sentences, if you like.

Okay, sure, so, I love Istanbul. I come two or three times every year. I've got some good friends here, and it's always busy. It's a really busy city, always year round, but it's a little bit less busy in the winter time. And I think it suits the winter. It's a very melancholic city. I think this is why I've always loved it, because it's when you're sat on the bus for us, and there's a sort of fog swirling about. It's very romantic. You can get carried away by the sort of misty light, and the food changes. So in the winter, you've got the chestnut sellers out on the street selling roasted chestnuts, “castano,” and then you've got the anchovies, hamsi, which are in season. So you get lots of rice dishes with anchovies, which I absolutely love. It just suits it. And I like to go there in the winter, because it's almost like film noir. The city looks different. It changes with the rain bouncing off the bridges and the clouds. Yeah, that's my Istanbul. I prefer it.

You have a way of looking at a contemporary scene and imbuing it with layers of history to help all of us be better travelers. Can you describe some of the preparation you do before heading for a destination? Or does being there drive the search for literary art and historical references? 

Oh, that's a great question. It's a mixture. I think I tend to do lots of research when I get home, so I spot things that I find interesting, and then I come home and I'll research them in more detail. Some things I know about before I arrive, but obviously I occasionally go to other places in the world, but my area of interest has always been and it's a large enough area, from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. So by returning again and again and again. To Turkey, to Ukraine, to Central Asia, to the Caucasus, I feel like it's adding layers every time. So I sort of understand a bit more. It's a vast area to be, to be interested in. It's more than enough. And by returning, I can sort of add to what I know already, so that might be, you know, literature or art, or certain food techniques or certain breads or certain, you know, snippets of language. Even that you sort of pick up and develop. And I think there's a real value in returning to places and to go for as long as possible. Obviously, this isn't something that everybody can do, but I do like to land in one place and then travel over land as much as possible to keep the emissions down again. Because by traveling overland, you see things that you just won't see if you were zipping through on a plane. 

So I think spending time, repeat visits and just being curious. You know what I mean? In Lviv, there was a cafe that had the name “Scotland,” and I thought, “Well, why on earth would it be called that?” And it's a long story. It's in the book, but it's about a group of mathematicians who had a book called The Scottish Book. And it's just curious. I mean, you have to find these things out when you see things, the signs that the clues are all there. It's just a case of unpacking it all. And you do need a home and a quiet place to do that. So the book is about that as well. You know, it took me a long time to get on the housing ladder as a writer and a former bookseller in the UK, and I finally have a home to do that, and that does help.

Caroline Eden recalls memories and recreates recipes inspired by her extensive travel for her latest book, “Cold Kitchen.” Photo courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.

One aspect of this book is how many writers you introduce us to by referring to their work. And among them is Carla Grissmann, author of Dinner of Herb: Village Life in Turkey in the 1960s. I just ordered that book. So thank you for that. Tell us about her and this book in particular.

Oh, I just love Carla Grissmann. I say in every book that I write, I try and introduce one or two writers that I feel ought to be better known. This is a privilege I have as a writer, and I love thinking like, “Who's going to work in this essay?” And in my essay about herbs and the Caucuses in the springtime, I talk about Carla Grissmann, who was an American and she wrote this incredible book about her year that she spent in rural Anatolia in Turkey in the 1960s. And she turns up to a village called Uzak Köy, and lives with a family, and she was just a remarkable writer. She had a journalistic background. She'd worked at the Jerusalem Post, and she was headed to Kabul, which is sort of what she's known for, because she helped to catalog the museum there. But in between, she did this, this time in Turkey, and her recollections are just wonderful. She's really interested in the food and the domestic side of things, and how the women live and how the men live, and what the seasons are like, and what the children are doing. And it's just sort of an incredible snapshot of a time before mobile phones, before the internet, before roads pretty much in that part of Turkey back then, a time that's long gone, Carla died. Unfortunately, she lived to a good age, but she's not around anymore. But she wrote this wonderful book, and I do recommend it to everybody, because I think it's fantastic.