Cold Kitchen by Caroline Eden

Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Journeys

By Caroline Eden

Bloomsbury 2025

Most of the truly great culinary books are about something non-culinary under their surface, Elizabeth David’s about loneliness, MFK Fisher’s about, as she herself confessed, love, Julia Child’s about joy, Anthony Bourdain’s about provincialism. When it comes to Caroline Eden’s new book Cold Kitchen, it’s tempting to claim that the thing lurking under the book’s surface is the same thing that was always lurking under the table of Eden’s basement kitchen in Edinburgh: her beagle Darwin, the “silent witness to my cooking,” whose insistent food-attention will be familiar to anyone who’s ever been the object of a beagle’s unblinking concentration. “I throw him a carrot top and, satisfied he has won the battle, he lets go a canine sigh and leaps up onto the window seat to watch the passers-by and sniff at the Christmas cacti on the windowsill, their tubular flowers lit by Edinburgh’s northern light,” she writes. “But soon I can sense his eyes on me once again, so I pour some milk into his bowl.”

“Affection given so unquestioningly, always,” she writes. “Him to me, and me to him.” It’s a quiet heartbeat throughout almost the whole of the book, and when it stops, every dog person will stop too. But really the book is about not Darwin but about what he always seems to symbolize for Eden while she’s “beset by restlessness,” reporting on war and revolution in various danger spots of the world: home. She opens her book with a perfect quote from Naguib Mahfouz: “Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.” Cold Kitchen finds Eden always coming home to chilly Edinburgh and the reliable quasi-solitude of the kitchen. “You can delight, temporarily, in the buzz of being detached from family, friends, neighbors and responsibilities,” she writes. “But a kitchen is grounding.” Her book includes many ingredient lists, many recipes, many vignettes in Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere, but it’s her descriptions of that basement kitchen, of keeping a kitchen just in general, that animate the book:

It demands that you be physically present, at least for some periods of time. To care for it, this room of ripening and decay, chaos and discipline. To take pride in its cupboards and their contents. To keep an inventory. To manage and adjust. Look after it and it will give back, with its tools and alchemy, and its unique ability to nourish, inspire and host.

Eden occasionally pauses between travelogue excerpts and preparation methods to ruminate on both in broader terms, including a passage on “that dish,” a thing apparently well-known to foodies and, one suspects, permanently opaque to the food-indifferent:

Something you once ate that has now, quietly but determinedly, acquired mythical status in your mind. Something surprising – but probably not too surprising – that you ordered somewhere else, away from home, saying to yourself at the time, One day, I absolutely must have this again. And then that dish regularly begins cropping up in a hungry corner of your brain, again and again. You daydream of yourself eating it, recalling the dining table you sat at, the weather, your dining companions, snippets of the conversation.

In a typically introspective note, Eden mentions how “that dish” can also be a melancholy thing, since it’s often not actually real anymore. “Because you cannot recall exactly what the café was called where you had it, and you don’t get to that city very often, nor do you know its streets well,” she writes. “Eventually, you accept that you will probably never have that dish again, quite as it was.”

Cold Kitchen, the year’s first genuinely wonderful book, is full of such moments of subversion, insight, and charm. Food enthusiasts and barbarians alike will be captivated.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News