On Cooking the Books this week, multi-award winning travel writer and journalist Caroline Eden takes us to her Cold Kitchen in Edinburgh to cook up her memories of some of her most extraordinary journeys.
She’s an immersive traveller and a generous writer, taking her readers deep into the countries she writes about. Her beautifully lyrical prose transports us all over the world, Istanbul’s ‘rain lashed post war apartment blocks’, for example, its ‘poorly lit alleys, gloom circling about minarets, nocturnal cigarette smokers huddling in doorways, white-mist dawns and pea-souper afternoons.’
One of her food moments is the Duck and Barberry Plov, a rice dish she ate in Kyrgyzstan where she was caught up in a brutal coup. ‘It is about unlikely friendships, and a unique look at a country that is generally ignored in the West’, she wrote to me. ‘There is much to be said about plov and its endless variations’.
She told me that she records sounds from her travels on her phone, and sent me a recording of quails singing in a courtyard home belonging to her friend Imenjon Mahmudov in his home city of Osh, Kyrgyzstan's second city. Allow yourself to be transported to the eastern border of the Central Asia, southeast of Kazakhstan, west of China, east of Uzbekistan and north of Tajikistan and imagine quail eggs served whole on the top of that plov.