Dispatches and Recipes – Through Darkness and Light

Black Sea

Winner of the Art of Eating Prize 2020 Winner of the Guild of Food Writers&#39; Best Food Book Award 2019 Winner of the Edward Stanford Travel Food and Drink Book Award 2019 Winner of the John Avery Award at the Andr&eacute; Simon Food and Drink Book Awards for 2018 Shortlisted for the James Beard International Cookbook Award &lsquo;The next best thing to actually travelling with Caroline Eden &ndash; a warm, erudite and greedy guide &ndash; is to read her. This is my kind of book.&rsquo; &ndash; Diana Henry &lsquo;Eden&rsquo;s blazing talent and unabashedly greedy curiosity will have you strapped in beside her&rsquo; - Christine Muhlke, The New York Times &#39;The food in Black Sea is wonderful, but it&rsquo;s Eden&rsquo;s prose that really elevates this book to the extraordinary... I can&rsquo;t remember any cookbook that&rsquo;s drawn me in quite like this.&rsquo; &ndash; Helen Rosner, Art of Eating judge This is the tale of a journey between three great cities &ndash; Odesa, Ukraine&rsquo;s celebrated port city, through Istanbul, the fulcrum balancing Europe and Asia and on to tough, stoic, lyrical Trabzon. With a nose for a good recipe and an ear for an extraordinary story, Caroline Eden travels from Odesa to Bessarabia, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey&rsquo;s Black Sea region, exploring interconnecting culinary cultures. From the Jewish table of Odesa, to meeting the last fisherwoman of Bulgaria and charting the legacies of the White Russian &eacute;migr&eacute;s in Istanbul, Caroline gives readers a unique insight into a part of the world that is both shaded by darkness and illuminated by light. In this updated edition of the book, Caroline reflects on the events of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent impact of the war on the people of the wider region. How Odesa, defiant against shelling and blackouts, has gained UNESCO protection while in Istanbul, over lunch with a Bosphorus ship-spotter, she finds out about the role of the Black Sea in the war and how Russians are smuggling stolen grain from Ukraine. Meticulously researched and documenting unprecedented meetings with remarkable individuals, Black Sea is like no other piece of travel writing. Packed with rich photography and sumptuous food, this biography of a region, its people and its recipes truly breaks new ground.

A genuinely erudite dive into the cultures that meet at the Black Sea. Beautiful enough for the coffee table but fascinating enough for the nightstand and useful in the kitchen, too.

It&rsquo;s packed with human stories as well as history, giving the recipes a significance and resonance.

It&rsquo;s her writing &ndash; elegant, fluid and as mesmerising as the Black Sea itself &ndash; that captures and holds your attention and imagination throughout this journey.

Eden’s blazing talent and unabashedly greedy curiosity will have you strapped in beside her... If Sybille Bedford or Patrick Leigh Fermor had included a few recipes in their accounts of their journeys, you’d know exactly where to shelve this gem.

The food in Black Sea is wonderful, but it&rsquo;s Eden&rsquo;s prose that really elevates this book to the extraordinary. She captures people, history, and the ineffable soul of cities with astonishing, almost novelistic precision &mdash; more than once, even in the headnotes, I felt myself getting lost in the world of the story. I can&rsquo;t remember any cookbook that&rsquo;s drawn me in quite like this.

Caroline Eden is an author, journalist and book critic regularly contributing to The Guardian, Financial Times and The Times Literary Supplement. Her book Black Sea won the Guild of Food Writers Best Food Book Award 2019, the Edward Stanford Travel Food and Drink Book Award 2019, and the Art of Eating Prize 2020, as well as being shortlisted for the James Beard Award International Cookbook Award. Red Sands was winner of the André Simon Food Book Award 2020. Caroline lives in Edinburgh.

Reportage and Recipes Through Central Asia, from Hinterland to Heartland

Red Sands

Winner of the Andr&eacute; Simon Food Book Award 2020Fortnum &amp; Mason&rsquo;s Awards, shortlisted in &lsquo;Food Book&rsquo; category (2021) "Caroline Eden is an extraordinarily creative and gifted writer. Red Sands captures the sights, tastes and feel of Central Asia so well that when reading this book I was sometimes convinced I was there in person. A wonderful book from start to finish." Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads "Caroline Eden, whose book Black Sea was showered with awards, is on the road again, this time travelling through the heart of Asia. It&rsquo;s not your usual cookbook, it&rsquo;s more a travel book with recipes, the recipes acting as postcards which she sends as she meets new characters, most of them involved with food... Eden travels quietly and lets you in on every encounter and every bite. A moving... as well as a fascinating read." Diana Henry, Telegraph "Red Sands follows in the footsteps of Caroline Eden&#39;s previous volume Black Sea. Both are pleasures to read, triangulating journalism, literary writing, and cookbookery. The recipes are part of the reporting, and Eden describes them as edible snapshots." Devra First, Boston GlobeRed Sands, the follow-up to Caroline Eden&rsquo;s multi-award-winning Black Sea, is a reimagining of traditional travel writing using food as the jumping-off point to explore Central Asia. In a quest to better understand this vast heartland of Asia, Caroline navigates a course from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the sun-ripened orchards of the Fergana Valley. A book filled with human stories, forgotten histories and tales of adventure, Caroline is a reliable guide using food as her passport to enter lives, cities and landscapes rarely written about. Lit up by emblematic recipes, Red Sands is an utterly unique book, bringing in universal themes that relate to us all: hope, hunger, longing, love and the joys of eating well on the road.

Caroline Eden takes us through the heart of Asia as she eats sweet winter melons in Uzbekistan, gaudy cream cakes in Kazakhstan and rich lamb and quince plovs in Kyrgyzstan. Every character she meets and every meal she shares leads to a deeper understanding of place and people, every recipe is a postcard from a world few of us know. Beautifully written, quietly personal, generous, rich with detail, I absolutely loved this book.

Eden&#39;s beautifully observed travelogue includes essays on the connections she made and thorough examinations of the food she tried. It is as much a book for the bedside or coffee table as the kitchen counter. She has rightly won awards for her remarkable talent for telling stories that take the reader right to the heart of her experiences.

She is a great writer... If you want to lose yourself, I highly recommend this book.

Sheila Dillon, BBC Radio 4 The Food Programme, 'Cookbooks of 2020'

There is nobody writing about food at the moment who&#39;s committed to this level of immersion and it rings out in every line.

Eden writes beautifully, not just about food... but about what it means to live an unchanging way of life in a fast-changing world.

A fascinating fusion of travel and food writing.

If reading about exotic and colourful lands makes you feel better about not having any proper holidays this year, escape with this book.

Rich, contemplative, and full of food that will enchant, it reports back from lands you may not be all that familiar with.

Caroline Eden&#39;s prior work, The Black Sea, was one of the most awarded cookbooks of 2019, a sweeping travelogue told through the lens of food. This book moves east, roughly from the Caspian Sea to the Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan, again telling stories of Eden&#39;s travels and histories of the region, studded with recipes.

Contemplative and full of food that will enchant, it reports back from lands you may not be all that familiar with.

Caroline Eden

Walking the Caucasus with Recipes

"There is nobody writing about food at the moment who’s committed to this level of immersion and it rings out in every line." - Tim Hayward, Financial Times 
 
"She has rightly won awards for her remarkable talent for telling stories that take the reader right to the heart of her experiences." - Lisa Markwell, Sunday Times Magazine 
 
“One of the most brilliant travel writers of her generation.” - Fuchsia Dunlop 
 
Green Mountains is the final instalment of Caroline Eden’s ‘colour trilogy’, following on from her multi-award winning books, Black Sea and Red Sands. 
 
Beginning in Armenia, moving northwards through Georgia and ending at the Black Sea, Green Mountains weaves together the enchanting geography and the cult of the kitchen that prevails within these two countries. Tales of testing hikes and unpredictable terrain are punctuated by the foods Eden eats for respite – citrus, herbs, flatbreads, nuts, apricots, mountain greens and magical cheeses – the recipes she shares and the stories she uncovers. 
 
Sharing both the deep comfort and satisfaction of a meal served after a long walk, and the unique relationships she forms with her hosts, Eden offers readers rare insights into the culture and food of these two countries. With meticulously researched histories, a catalogue of more than 30 recipes from her travels, and rich, compelling stories, this is a travel book like no other.

Caroline Eden

Books by Caroline Eden

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