The idea of the kitchen as a space for transformation and transportation is not a new one. Many writers have explored the room’s ability to offer both domesticity and alchemy at the same time – how it allows cooks to travel vicariously through the food they make. This is the subject of Cold Kitchen, Caroline Eden’s memoir of her time spent in her kitchen in Scotland and of her travels to Eastern European and Central Asian cities – and somehow she makes it fresh and compelling.
She is an author and critic who has written extensively about the food and culture of the countries of the former Soviet Union. Black Sea, in which she explored Odessa, Istanbul and Trabzon, received a clutch of prizes, and Red Sands, about Central Asia, won the prestigious André Simon food book award. In Cold Kitchen, she treads familiar ground. The travels which take her away from her kitchen are places she has written about before: Istanbul, Uzbekistan and Riga. What is new is the base – the kitchen in Scotland from which she tells her stories.
Her adopted home is Edinburgh, and it is from her less than picture-perfect (cold) basement kitchen there that she revisits her far-flung journeys, cooking the dishes which have defined them. In less adept hands this might feel disjointed: a string of vignettes jumping from apricot-heavy Armenia to the tourist takeover during the month of the Edinburgh fringe. But Eden makes such transitions seem natural.
The obligatory recipes at the end of each chapter, which give the food memoir its classic form and rhythm, feel purposeful rather than incidental. Each is Eden’s interpretation – a translation – of what she has eaten elsewhere. Hand pies like those she tasted on a train in Russia, still stuffed with the traditional sauerkraut and hard-boiled eggs, take on a new life in her hands; and recapturing chlodnik, a chilled beetroot soup from Poland, becomes an ‘urgent need’ at home in Edinburgh. A recipe forhoşaf, a Turkish spiced fruit compote, leads her to a box of chocolate-coated candied chestnuts. As she reverse engineers rupjmaizes kārtojums, a layered rye bread and dark beer trifle-like pudding from Riga, she finds ‘links between there and here become less severed’.
Her skills of observation and storytelling are absorbing and her prose is masterful. She is able to evoke in a few words the physical, sensory aspects of a foodstuff, from haggis, ‘meaty, oaty, slightly spicy, slightly mythical’, to herbs: ‘Heaps of herbs. Always herbs. Herbs are flavour, herbs are a whole salad bar, herbs are medicine.’ Her descriptions of ingredients and the seasons are perceptive, rhythmic and well-paced, crafted but not over-engineered; while the weaving of experience with history, literature and art – almost irrepressible in its abundance, from David Hume’s dinner parties to Russia’s porcelain factories – is scholarly without being academic.
At its heart, Cold Kitchen is an interrogation of place and belonging; but if there is a recurring theme it is the kitchen’s duality. Eden’s desire for travel exists side by side with her appreciation of domesticity; she frequently feels an affinity with somewhere while also being the outsider. Sometimes melancholic, sometimes comforting, it is a careful study, and never shies away from the complicated reality of the kitchen embodying both ‘ripening and decay, chaos and discipline’. Early on in the book, Eden writes: ‘Sometimes what we choose to cook mirrors what our soul misses, and sometimes the food we eat is a reflection of past routes taken.’ Cold Kitchen is a hugely accomplished work that manages to be wildly enjoyable, often moving and always thoughtful.