543: Bumping Around the Baltics and Central Asia with Journalist Caroline Eden

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. I don't mind what people call my books, whether they call them cookbooks or travel logs or whatever. Most people call them cookbooks. But I wanted to do a sort of three-dimensional journey where people could taste the journey. And I thought, wouldn't it be nice to put some recipes in a travel log so that when people are reading, you've got the photograph and then you can make the recipe as well. So for me, they're sort of travel logs as recipes. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard. Caroline Eden is a writer and literary critic.

1:02She's the author of many terrific food and travel books, including Samarkand, Black Sea, and Red Sands. She has been awarded both the Art of Eating Prize and the Andre Simon Award, and Red Sands was Book of the Year for the Financial Times, Sunday Times, and The New Yorker. On this episode, we talk about her terrific new book, a memoir titled Cold Kitchen. The book is a real journey through parts of Eastern Europe, the Baltic region, and beyond, and we dive into her travels through Russia, Bulgaria, Georgia, and many other locations that perhaps don't get the time they deserve. Caroline is a brilliant reporter, and this is one of my favorite interviews in recent memory.

1:47I had such a great time catching up with her, and I hope you enjoy this conversation.

2:01Caroline Eden, welcome to This is Taste. So great to finally meet you. Thank you for having me. I'm extremely excited for this conversation because I've just loved your books, Black Sea and Red Sands. You know, I've talked about them on the show. Incredible works of journalism. I have to admit I've only like read probably half of each of them. It's probably because of the format. Long conversation not to be had here. But your memoir, Cold Kitchen, I read in a day. It's incredible. Congratulations. Thank you very much. I want to ask you a lot of things. I want to ask about your career. I want to hear about many, many stops along the way in this in this book and really dig into countries that I feel as Americans, we don't cover enough.

2:47They're very undercovered and you've done such a great job of bringing them to the U.S. audience and others. But the book really does kind of circle around. It's focused on your kitchen in Edinburgh. And I want to get a sense of this kitchen, this space that is the center of your memoir. Take us to this kitchen. Thank you. so it's in the new town of edinburgh which is a georgian it's all georgian buildings cobblestone streets so quite old um and the kitchen is a basement kitchen so my flat or apartment is the ground floor and the basement so to get to the kitchen you go down some flagstone steps which curve slightly and then you go in through the door and it's like this subterranean kitchen and it's got quite a countryside feel because it's got wood beams on the ceiling and And it's got one single sash window, which is an old-fashioned window.

3:46They're very drafty. And that's lovely because you look up and it's a view to the street above. So I can see people's legs and dogs' tails and buggies and things going past while I'm down there in the kitchen. And Airbnb rollies. Yes, all of that, especially in the summertime or around the time of Hogmanay when it's the new year. So it's a kind of subterranean, cozy kitchen. It's not a cold kitchen. The title's slightly ironic. we can get into that later if you like but it's um it's where i try and recreate my travels where i write my recipes i've got a little room off of it which has an office in it which is where i do my writing so when i'm at home it's where i spend most of my time so i wanted it to be a character in the book really is a character and and you talk a lot about the the folks who are walking by i've been to edinburgh and hogman yeah that was fun uh great great city and and i love that you use this kitchen and what's in your pantry.

4:44And it's, I think what a lot of us, when we write about place, we come back to our home, we feel that sense of home, but we're longing for that travel. And so your shelves are filled with spices, with oils, with vinegars. When you're cooking, Caroline, tell me, what's it like to travel to Georgia, to travel to, you know, Albania through your home kitchen in Edinburgh? So for me, it's a case of sort of trying to recreate something. So I say in the book that the kitchen is like a portal and it's where the world comes in. And it can be something very small. It could be, you know, the first chapter in the book is about Uzbekistan's melons.

5:26And of course, I can't get those in the UK, but I can get other melons, perhaps from Spain or other places. And when I'm slicing the melon, it could be just the scent of it that will take me back to that place. And really, this is a book, a memoir about paying attention and how when you pay attention, the kitchen pays back. So it can be anything. It can be, you know, the feel of a peppercorn between your fingers. It can be, you know, the feel of a cinnamon bark. And I do believe in this sort of like multisensory world that the kitchen has gotten. Lots has been said about that. But I sort of see it as a way of being here and there at the same time.

6:03So it's this sort of transaction between place. Which really informs your writing when you're off in the nook at your laptop typing away about your travels. You get your kitchen off to the side and it's like a transfer of energy from the kitchen to the laptop. In writing about cooking, you have some great, you have some bars, you have some lines that unlock a lot about what we talk about on the show and write about on Taste. And you're just so intuitive. And I love this line, a vital ingredient of cookery is hope. What do you mean by that? Well, it definitely is for me because I'm just a home cook.

6:39I learned how to cook through cookbooks by reading, you know, great writers like Diana Henry, for example. And I think you must have hope when you're cooking because things often don't go exactly the way you'd hoped. For all of us, I think, who enjoy cooking at home. And it's similar to travel. There has to be an element of hope to keep you going, even when things might go slightly wrong. So I do think hope is a key ingredient of the cookery process. Yeah. It's really intuitive, and I think we all, it's like a hope and a prayer sometimes. Yeah. First hope, then prayer is like the second ingredient on the list, right?

7:11Maybe some swearing. Maybe some swearing, too. Always, always, always some swearing. So I can talk about every chapter, and really, we can dig into each one and be here for hours. But you've got to buy the book, people. It's incredible, and you can pick through it or read it in a day, as I have. One memorable section is your seven-day trip across Russia, the Trans-Siberian Railroad for seven days. Take us there. Take us to what you're eating, what you're seeing, the smell of your cabin after seven days and several liters of vodka. You really paint a picture. It was, I wondered about putting this chapter in, obviously because now we're dealing with the terrible events in Ukraine.

7:51But it was such a memorable journey, maybe the most memorable journey I've ever taken, to be on a train going through Siberia for that length of time was such an insight. We had different guests in our cabin to start with. We had someone who was a referee for ice hockey. We had somebody who was selling bathroom materials. We had, I think, an older lady came on at some point. And then we had Tatiana and Alexei who were with us for a large stretch of the journey. And they had never left Siberia. So they were as interested in them as we were. You know, it's a mutual thing. And it was Valentine's Day.

8:29So once the train set off, Alexei went to the dining car and he magicked up a bottle of champagne, which we got stuck into. And then we were sort of jumping off at various stops. And this was February. It was deep winter. It was freezing, minus 20 outside. And we would jump onto the train platform, share cigarettes as a kind of bonding experience, jump back on. And then the vodka started. It's such a cliche, but they had these little thin bottles. And in Russia, if you're on a vodka session, you drink to the end of the bottle. So we did. And it was just a kind of wild 24 hours of, because the time zones, you're always on Moscow time when you're on the train.

9:14It's so disorientating. so I sort of found I'd be having going to the dining car and sort of having a bowl of casher like the oats the sort of groats with a sort of slick of butter on the top and maybe a beer at sort of four in the afternoon everything became very strange but it was just it was such a fascinating journey to meet all these ordinary Russians because they don't use the train as sort of an experience it's commuter train that people use to cover vast distances and it was amazing when we got to Vladivostok it took us nine hours to fly It's incredible. Back to Moscow, which for me, being from a small country, you know, like the UK, that is amazing, the distance.

9:52Yeah, you travel. It's nine hours back on the plane. That is incredible. Seven days. And I mean, traveling in February, that's a choice. Most Americans would take that trip in the summertime. But why do you do it then? Because it's so beautiful. Siberia in the winter, all the little houses are covered. I thought they always reminded me of Christmas puddings. You'd look out and you'd see a wooden house and it would have this sort of snow cap on the top. And the datchers and the dogs on the platforms and women wearing three-inch heels in the snow. Just amazing. We did stop. We broke the journey for a night or two in Iqutsk, which is quite near some lakes and forests.

10:29Yeah, it sounded like that was maybe a little bit of a dud. Yeah, well, I think when you're on the train, you want to be on the train. Yeah, yeah. Because you're mentally on the train. So really, it's just a case of getting back on and getting on with it. And it's everything fascinated me. Well, you know, I say dud because I think the way you write is you you aren't ever trying to make this journey anything but accurate. And I think you write you're you're not up or down on places. You're just writing what's there. I do try and remain honest as a sort of journalistic integrity. I think that's important to not glamorize and not idealize or, you know, certainly to be respectful always, but to tell the truth.

11:12Tell the truth. And in travel writing, it's anything but. And this industry is built on superlatives. And this is why it's fantastic. I love it. So it seems that the writing of Carla Grissman and her book Dinner of Herbs, Village Life in Turkey in the 1960s, you give it a lot of lines and you really pay homage to this writer that is kind of a footnote in history, at least to me. Talk about this writer and how much of an influence she is on your work. remarkable book. I'm very, very happy that since Cold Kitchen came out, new readers have been finding Carla Grissman's work. She was an American.

11:54She was working at the Jerusalem Post as a journalist. And then on a whim, almost, it seemed, she stayed with a family in Anatolia in Turkey for a long time, several, several months, lived with this family, you know, didn't speak much Turkish, certainly wasn't a Muslim, was a single woman, about 40-ish but you know nobody was suspicious of her she just sort of moves in and she describes these wonderful meal times and the the way that people live with such accuracy and such empathy she was such a sort of sensuous writer was always describing the food and how the women were sitting and how the men were smoking and what things smelt like and tasted like and looked like and I just love her and Eland who are a publisher in the UK have re-issued her book and I had to write about her because in all of my books I try to include one or two or three writers who are good on the region who I feel have sort of dropped off and try and reintroduce them and Carla was somebody I wanted to write about in the chapter where I write about how herbs are such a central thing in the Caucasus and in Turkey once springtime comes.

13:04Yeah, you really weave in, you know, the history of literature into your writing. And clearly you spent seven years as a bookseller. So clearly you're giving a rack still in your own work. I can't help it. No, I love that. It's a terrific part about your work. And let's actually take a break from Cool Kitchen and talk about Black Sea and Red Sands. You know, how do these two books, how are they informed by Carla's Grissman's techniques? How do you follow this style? Because you, like Carla Grissman, dropped into these countries. Seemingly, you were accepted right away. And you reported and really pick up these two books to get a sense of cultures in these places.

13:46So those two books, the third one is coming out in April. What's it called? I'm not allowed to say yet. You're not allowed to say it is two words? It's two words and it's a color. It's something I very pretentiously call this my color trilogy. It's not a pretentious. It's fucking amazing. It's fucking amazing, these books. They're also beautiful books. The packages are incredible. The design is very good. So Black Sea, Red Sands, and the final one. And it's sort of 10 years of work. It's all the same region. It's the only region that I write about. It's vast Eastern Europe to Central Asia. And Black Sea, I got the idea.

14:24I'd published a book with a friend previously called Samarkand. That was my first ever book. That was in 2016. But for me, I wanted to do a travel log with recipes. I don't mind what people call my books, whether they call them cookbooks or travel logs or whatever. Most people call them cookbooks. But I wanted to do a sort of three-dimensional journey where people could taste the journey. And I thought, wouldn't it be nice to put some recipes in a travel log so that when people are reading, you've got the photographs and then you can make the recipe as well. So for me, they're sort of travel logs with recipes.

14:54and Black Sea I got the idea because I'd spent time in Odessa in Ukraine Istanbul which is not on the Black Sea but it's sort of satisfyingly close and a city full of people from the Black Sea and then going up to Trabzon which is an ancient city in northeastern Turkey I stopped short of the Caucasus which is maybe a hint and I yeah I just wanted to talk about how the different cultures have come across that sea and how they're how things change when you start to cross borders i'm always very interested in what changes what stays the same tales of migration and yeah speaking to people and finding out stories um about where people have come from what they're holding on to in terms of recipes this episode is brought to you by aura frames if you're one of those last minute shoppers you might know the feeling ideas are running low and the clock is ticking.

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17:04Terms and conditions apply. Hi there, it's Matt, co-host of the show. We are currently running a This Is Taste listener survey, and we'd love to hear from you. Do you have a guest request? A restaurant you wish we'd visit to talk about on three things? What about a lesser-known cookbook author who deserves a spot in our studio chair? You can let us know by clicking the link in our show notes to complete the survey. It will only take a couple minutes, I swear, and will help us continue to make the best show possible. That's the This Is Taste Listener Survey link in our show notes. Yeah, they're terrific works.

17:40And you got to tell me off, Mike, what the third one is. We'll have you back and talk about it. But speaking of recipes and cooking ingredients, I could not help but notice that sea buckthorn comes up many times in your writing. And it led to an observation that you made. And like sea buckthorn is clearly this incredible product. And I'd like to hear a little bit about that. But, you know, I had in Copenhagen and, you know, this is an ingredient that you see in Northern Europe a lot. And it kind of got you talking and writing about like the cuisine of Northern Europe has been on the radars of the Michelin Guide and, you know, and World's 50 Best for a long time.

18:24But places like Albania, Latvia, they're not getting the attention, even though sea buckthorn is from there. So tell me a little bit about that. Well, I must say, first of all, I'm very lucky that I have a neighbor in Edinburgh three doors down who forages the Scottish coastline for sea buckthorn. OK. But before I even knew her, I'd been drinking a lot of sea buckthorn in tea in Central Asia, in Russia, in Ukraine, in Poland and in the Baltics. It's ordinary. People use what they have access to. It goes into teas and jam. The first time I ever had it was in Estonia and it was in a jam and it was far too sweet.

19:02And I thought, wouldn't it be nice one day to taste it, you know, in sort of more natural format. And it's a wonderful ingredient. It's full of vitamin C, but it's not something we really know very much about in the UK. It grows in certain parts of the coastline, but it's not still, most people don't know about it. We don't use it as much as we should. It's very, very good for you. Very sharp, so often needs to be sweetened. And an incredible color. Beautiful color. So I have a cocktail recipe in Red Sands, my book on Central Asia, which is called a Caspian Anchor. And it's with vodka and sea buckthorn.

19:39And you do a simple syrup to make it a bit sweeter. And that's very nice. Yeah. Yellow. It's like a shade of yellow that you can't even describe. It's a very sharp orange. Orange, I guess. Orange color. Yeah, it's like a yellow orange. But a yellowy orange. Yellowy orange. Like sunshine. Sunshine, there you go. Yeah, sunshine color. It's a beautiful color. Back to my other question about Northern Europe and kind of the way that the cuisine there has been championed around the world. But many of the countries you write about have restaurant cultures, have fine dining, but they just don't get the press.

20:11Can you square that at all? I mean it depends where we're talking about I suppose like Russian cuisine I think you know does have its fancy restaurants in London and I'm sure here in New York as well the Baltics has been very overlooked until more recently and I think that's a shame because I think it's quite similar in some ways like a lot of use of herbs of fish very seasonal a lot of pickling those sorts of ingredients but then you've got Central Asia which is sort of my you know the region i've written about the most probably over the years that is has only had a fine dining scene of any description in cities like almasi very recently it's people tend to eat at home or they would eat in cafes um and it's only now really they're starting to get more of a fine dining uh experience it's quite different but the restaurants that go back generations though are good or are high quality.

21:05It's just like we're playing catch up a little bit. I think there's just an ignorance. And that was the reason I did Samarkand, my first ever book, because I was frustrated that in guidebooks, people were very rude about the food in Central Asia. And I was staying with a lot of families. And of course, when you stay in a homestay and you eat what people are serving their families, of course it's tasty and the ingredients are there. The markets are an abundance of wonderful ingredients. People are very careful on how they cook. And in a way, you've sort of got to get into the Soviet legacy and how that sort of squashed a lot of traditional food traditions in the Baltics and Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

21:42And so that's the sort of resurgence after that, after the fall in 1991. Yeah. I mean, you definitely write about the tomatoes in the coolest way. Tomatoes there. But we don't need to talk about tomatoes. But I mean, read the book and read Caroline's lines about tomatoes. but while reading the book I'm making like mental notes like where do I want to go first and I'm like it's changing throughout the book and I'm like thinking I need to go to Georgia I need to go to you know Estonia but like halfway through I'm like I got it and I want to hear about this because I feel like the way you write about Riga Latvia is incredible the city that you talk about the architecture the cuisine the walkability of it But I just want to hear a little bit, and for our listeners, Latvia, wow.

22:33It's a very beautiful country, small country, obviously one of the three Baltic countries, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. It's a wonderful city. I've spent quite a lot of winters there, going to the cafes, cycling down to Jermala, which is on the coast. It's a beautiful cycle ride, about half an hour when it's warm. And it's not a big city. It's small. very very cosy incredible art nouveau architecture which blows people away because people don't realise that the amount of it that's there is absolutely stunningly beautiful incredibly cold in the winter so thick snow but you sort of you know hole up in a nice cafe there with a book on a park and there's a silence there you know I'm from Edinburgh it's not a huge city but you know if you were to escape there from say New York or London it's just quiet and calm and it's got an incredible market.

23:30The central market there is one of the best markets I've ever been to. Huge. High praise. Amazing. In these aircraft hangars, you walk in and there's people there with the pickles that they've pickled themselves in buckets, which is fairly typical in that part of the world, but it's just ginormous. And there are bakers there from Uzbekistan. There's the Registan Bakery. So you've kind of got that. We don't talk about that. We don't use the term former Soviet Union so much anymore. or we need to move away from that. But the food legacy of that giant group of countries does still exist. So you can get the Uzbek bread and Cheburek, which is a tartar thing.

24:07And, you know, you've got all those different combinations coming in. And then just everything from the natural larder, you know, birch water and wonderful fermented things and cheeses. And it's just really interesting. Yeah, your lines about the Regan pickle lady. Great lines there. And the sprats. I mean, if you like those sort of strong, bold flavors, which I do, you have sprats on rye with sort of cottage cheese for breakfast. It's incredibly healthy. Yeah. I mean, tell me about what are the Latvian people like and what would it be like for somebody to book a flight from New York to Latvia and spend some time in Riga?

24:44Is there English there? I'm really just ignorant about the area. And I think some of our listeners may be interested in hearing about it. I mean, the Latvians are quite, I'd say they're quite a modest, quite quiet people. The young people will speak English mainly, incredibly friendly. Some very good bars. They have a good beer culture there. So you've got these sort of nice sort of underground dive bars where you can get, you know, good IPAs and that sort of thing, which I like. But then also amazing things like quince lemonade I had when I was last there. I wasn't drinking and they had in this cool bar quince lemonade, which was absolutely delicious.

25:20It's just a kind of curious place. I like it. I like it for its, it doesn't, it sort of feels very much on its own. Yeah. You know, it's part of the Baltic Trio, but it has this very strong identity, Latvia, and it also has a large number of Russian speakers still, about a third. So that's also quite interesting with everything that's going on at the moment. Yeah, it's fascinating. And you have a recipe for a Latvian black pudding in the book, too. And I am like, talk us through that a little bit, because it seems pretty simple, but it's using beer. It's a unique technique. Yeah, it's a bread pudding.

25:56So it's a layered bread pudding. I had it in a restaurant called Milder, which in the book I say it's one of those rare restaurants because it's touristy, but it's also very, very good. So I remember I had a fish main course, and then I said, what should I have as dessert? And he said, you should have this layered bread pudding. and they soak very dark bread in beer, not brandy, which is what I thought it was. It's a very dark beer and then it's sort of layered with sort of whipped thick cream and then fresh berries. It's like a trifle. Yes. Kind of because it's a chilled pudding. I said black pudding, I meant bread pudding, obviously.

26:32It's like layered trifle. Yeah, it looks exactly like that. So it's very nice to serve it in a glass ramekin where you can see the different layers. or you could even serve it. My friend Zazak, who's a very good Polish food writer, she suggests she's got a recipe in her book on the Baltics and she does it in a giant trifle glass dish. So you could serve it and put it in the center of the table as well. I'm going to make it. It's terrific. Your recipe writing is fantastic. It's really pared down and simplified in a cool way. Major credit. I have to ask you about mineral water because I feel like this plays a little bit of a cameo and a bit of a micro theme on our show.

27:11We've written about it. Jordan Michaelman, a great writer, he's been kind of championing it in the States for a long time. Caroline, you have probably more mineral water drinking experience than most guests. So talk about the way water and bottles of water play a role in this part of the world. So I think the Caucasus, as far as my mineral water drinking goes, is the top league there. So say you're in Georgia or Armenia, In Armenia, it's Jermuk. And Jermuk has the logo of a deer on it. It's very, very bubbly, slightly salty. Very, very, very delicious. There was a problem in the U.S. a while ago because there were slightly high levels of, I think it was arsenic.