“The kitchen is a portal to a hundred different places, people, times and experiences,” Caroline Eden writes in Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels. Over the course of many trips organized by the year’s four seasons, she showcases the power of memoir to transport readers to another person’s life. Eden creates a sense of place in each chapter, taking the reader on a journey—whether to Istanbul or Riga, Latvia, or Warsaw, Poland—before returning home. In her subterranean kitchen in Edinburgh, Scotland, Eden recreates the flavors of her travels, reconnecting to these far-flung destinations with the comfort of her dog at her side.
A love of cooking isn’t necessary to enjoy this thoughtful collection of essays. But for those who do, Eden concludes each chapter with a recipe representative of the place and time of year she has just described. (Vegetarians may be pleased to discover that only one of the 12 recipes includes meat!) She ponders why we fawn over cuisine from and travel to some places and not others. That’s an apt question, and this book is full of stories from places less traveled (except maybe by your friend with the most passport stamps). Eden has a particular affinity for Central Asia, and items from her travels serve as talismans when she’s at home. She invites readers into the journey not only by sharing her experiences, but by recounting history, too. Her experience reporting on former Soviet countries and current events is clear in how she roots her story in greater context.
Cold Kitchen is a quiet book with little dialogue, but it’s full of illuminating and sensual details. When Eden writes about Armenia, for example, she recalls fluttering flags announcing recently buried soldiers, the sound of folk music playing in a guide’s car and the aroma of a ripe apricot. Her travels and her adventures in her own kitchen boast flavor after flavor.
Although Cold Kitchen recounts Eden’s travels, at heart it’s a meditation on home: “How fragile peace is. How perishable home is. All of it so easily lost. Home is many things; it is fixed for some, movable for others. . . . Either way, it is surely foolish to ever take it for granted.” Eden’s kitchen is the heart of her home. But as the world outside that kitchen reminds us daily, nothing but death is guaranteed. Cold Kitchen is an invitation to appreciate every morsel of the present moment.
