Cold kitchen A year of culinary journeys

Over the course of a year, Eden (Red Sands, 2020) invites readers into her Edinburgh basement kitchen, beagle Darwin at her feet, as she recreates dishes and evocatively recounts the journeys to the Baltics, Central Asia, and the South Caucasus that inspired them. She begins in winter, with three chapters per season, each episode encompassing a place and a recipe. Winter offers a recipe for the egg-and-vegetable hand pies Eden ate on the Trans-Siberian railway; spring, a Georgian soup packed with herbs; and summer, a meditation on rare cloudberries and a recipe for jam. An autumn journey to Lviv, mere months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the brutal war that wages on, offers a strudel to make in wakeful wee hours, both process and result bound to soothe. Eden is a history-attuned traveler who mourns for changed places even as she assures that they will endure. As for her titular kitchen, if it gets chilly due to weather, worry, and a fallen friend, it is ever warmed by Eden's efforts and memories, so generously shared.

Delectable journeys. Journalist Eden, an award-winning food writer, cooks on a little electric stove in a chilly basement kitchen in her Edinburgh flat, surrounded by hundreds of cookbooks and accompanied by her mellow beagle, Darwin. If cooking is for Eden "a mindful form of therapy," it is also a spur to recounting her travels through Russia, Central Asia, Turkey, Ukraine, the South Caucasus, the Baltics, and Poland. "One ingredient or dish," she writes, "can conjure up a single moment, or an entire expedition; a whole city or just one unforgettable meal." Her kitchen is filled with souvenirs of those travels--a silver sugar bowl from India, a honey jar from Tasmania--and with recipes that she collected or reconstructed. Organized according to the seasons, the book begins with Eden's memory of Uzbekistan's wintertime melons, "fruits of rare and strange beauty," and a recipe for a watermelon, feta, and mint salad. A long adventure on the Trans-Siberian Railroad yields a recipe for pirozhki, small Russian hand pies: pastry stuffed with chopped eggs, sauerkraut, mushrooms, and caraway. Eden evokes the elegance of Riga, with its hundreds of Art Nouveau buildings and serene cafes, sharing a recipe for dark beer and rye bread pudding. Ghosts inevitably intrude, as in Poland, where she finds herself unsettled, haunted by the Holocaust. In Edinburgh, Eden is devoted to hikes and rambles in the hills, for which she carries "journey food." Her favorite is hillside pasties, the perfect repast for a backpack. "Like cooking," she writes, "hillwalking is both an activity and a way of life, and like cooking it is a way to enter other worlds." Eden gently invites readers into those other worlds and, graciously, into the warmth of her fragrant kitchen. A lyrical, captivating memoir. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.