Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith is about people and politics, climate change and culture – through the prism of food and the latest books of favourite food writers from Claudia Roden to Yotam Ottolenghi, Tom Kerridge, Anna Jones, Gill Meller, Olia Hercules, Dan Barber and Raymond Blanc.
This week, we’re with the Spirit of Christmas herself, Skye McAlpine and The Christmas Companion
Among all the talk of the pressures, the aspirational values and the industry of Christmas, Gilly finds herself feeling like the Grinch in the presence of the Christmas Fairy as she asks Skye about about the nostalgia, the beauty and the magic ...
This week, we’re with Northern Irish food writer Cherie Denham and photographer Andrew Montgomery in The Irish Kitchen
If you’ve listened to Gilly's chat with Andrew on her Substack a couple of weeks ago, you’ll know that this is no ordinary book. It follows their first book, The Irish Bakery, published by Montgomery Press, Andrew’s own ...
This week, we're with Masterchef winner and the hottest name in Thai food, Nat Thaipun.
Her book THAI: Anywhere and Everywhere is packed with glorious flavours of Thailand via Melbourne where she grew up. But it was when Jamie Oliver as one of the judges on Masterchef spotted her talent that she really saw what a book could look like. We ...
This week, we’re off to the Bohemian Kitchen of Brit-Czech writer, Evie Harbury
My Bohemian Kitchen is a nostalgic trip through the memories of a place Evie only knows through summers with her Czech granny and her dad’s childhood memories as she investigates the traditional cooking techniques of this largely untapped culinary region. The ...
This week, we’re with one of our favourite CTB pals, Mark Diacono in front of a live audience at Patio, the buzziest yet somehow most intimate bar in Brighton to talk about his latest book, Abundance.
Abundance is Mark's pioneering way of writing a food book, a Substack post every week over a whole year, supported by a global readership of ...
This week, we're with Amber Guinness whose latest book, Winter in Tuscany takes us into her own home to rifle through her pantry and cook what she cooks. But, as Gilly finds out, it’s also a stroll through a time and place still rooted in tradition, where cooking with the seasons and the frugal legacy of cucina povera is a reminder of the ...
This week, we’re celebrating 25 years of great British cooking with chef patron of The Sportsman and former punk, Stephen Harris. He’s the chef who put “cuisine de terroir” on the map, hyperlocally sourcing the foods from the land that have been the inspiration behind his award winning cooking. The Sportsman has held a ...
This week, we’re with Anna Ansari, the American-Iranian author of Silk Roads: A Flavor Odyssey with Recipes from Baku to Beijing.
We meet at Helm Gallery in Brighton’s North Laine, in front of a live audience which includes members of the Network of international Women whose debate about the culinary variations of Kuku from Iran and Iraq ...
