Caroline Eden's fourth book, the sumptuous Cold Kitchen, harvests memories and recipes from her travels in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. The dozen chapters--three per season--cover an archetypal year.
Eden (Red Sands) cooks and reminisces from the basement kitchen of her Edinburgh apartment. When wanderlust strikes, she revisits favorite places via their cuisines. In Proustian fashion, smells and tastes evoke other times and places. As she prepares a watermelon, feta, and mint salad, she remembers asking a taxi driver to wait at the roadside so she could buy winter melons in Uzbekistan. To relive a Trans-Siberian railway trip, she bakes Russian hand pies stuffed with sauerkraut and hard-boiled eggs.
Later sections re-create memorable meals in Turkey, the Baltics, Poland, and Armenia. Many of the countries spotlighted bear tragic histories or have experienced unrest. Some dishes also bring to mind turbulent events: not long after Eden shared a duck plov at a friend's Kyrgyzstan dacha, news came of the overthrow of that country's president. Keeping cultural and food traditions alive offers a way of honoring a place's history--sorrow and all.
Cosmopolitan travel contrasts with cozy time back in Eden's kitchen, which is presided over by her beloved beagle, Darwin. Lyrical descriptions craft vivid still lifes. "A kitchen is a portal," she declares, and by following her memoir's tantalizing recipes--dark beer and rye bread pudding from Latvia, for instance--readers, too, can be transported to perhaps unfamiliar locales. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck