Caroline Eden on the delights of Central Asia at Edinburgh Book Festival – 'There’s just something about that region that draws me back'

In the kitchen of her Edinburgh New Town flat, the setting for the excellent series of travel and food essays in her book Cold Kitchen, I ask Caroline Eden a question which stumped our pub quiz team the previous week. “Which is the only country with a name ending in -stan that is entirely surrounded by other countries ending in -stan?”

We guessed Kyrgyzstan, which shows how little we know about Central Asia. But Eden has written at least four books about the region, so I was fairly confident our interview wouldn’t get off to an embarrassing start. Still a risk though....

“Uzbekistan,” she replied.

Phew.

Author Caroline Eden at home in Edinburgh. Pic: Lisa Ferguson

But of course she’d get it right. Because that’s where, she tells me, she first started in the travel writing game. “In 2009 I went there by myself with just three words of Russian. I was in Samarkand, which back then was effectively a closed country. It wasn’t easy to get a visa, and when you got there it was a complete police state, you’d got to register at the hotel every night and there were KGB types everywhere.

“I was in this internet cafe in Samarkand, subterranean and full of cigarette smoke, and I pitched to a newspaper in Abu Dhabi because I thought they might be interested in hearing about another Islamic country. And I told them I’d just done this epic trip from Tajikistan over the Pamir Mountains and she said yes, they’d take a piece.

“Back then, the guidebooks said that you’ll go hungry if you go to Central Asia and you’re a vegetarian. But I just thought that was nonsense. I mean, I’m generally a vegetarian, though in Uzbekistan I might eat what’s put in front of me - plov with mutton, for example. But even for vegetarians, there are all sorts of alternatives to meat - delicious breads, good dairy produce, markets full of amazing things like samsa, which are pastry turnovers filled with pumpkin.”

READ MORE: From Azerbaijan to a Scottish kitchen – travel and food writer Caroline Eden packs flavour in her new book

She’d been a bookseller for most of her twenties, running the bookshop’s non-fiction section, which she now admits mostly meant “standing by the till reading Dervla Murphy and other female travel writers”. The idea of writing something similar had always been there, and she realised that there was nothing in English about Central Asian cuisine. She’d write the travel essays, she decided, and she asked her friend Eleanor Ford to write the recipes. The resultant book - Samarkand - was published in 2016, won awards the following year, and has never been out of print since.

That set the template for what she calls her ‘colours trilogy’: Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes through Darkness and Light (2018), Red Sands: Reportage and Recipes through Central Asia (2020), and Green Mountains: Walking the Caucasus with Recipes, which came out earlier this year. But although they’re all beautifully written and produced, they are both heavy (2.5lbs) and expensive (around £28). In the internet age, with YouTube full of easy-to-follow recipes, doesn’t this spell doom?

“Amazingly no. People love cookbooks. I know they’re a very analog thing, but people get very attached to certain cookery book writers. Look over at my bookshelf there and you’ll see a whole load of books by Diana Henry - and I read her for the same reason everyone else does, because she’s not some random food blogger but someone whose recipes you can trust. With writers like me, it’s because we know the region we take people to. And my recipes are very simple because I’m a home-taught cook. If I can do it, they can do it.”

READ MORE: The 25 past Booker Prize nominees at this year's event - including Ian McEwan and Samantha Harvey

Not having tried to make any of them myself, I’ll have to take her word: I’m there for the writing, not the food. But when it comes to travel writing, I’m very picky: I want to read someone who is curious about what they see without being an intimidating show-off; an affable sort, not a travel bore. All that and just the right amount of enthusiasm and engagement and an easy flowing style. Eden scores highly in all these categories: she would, you can’t help thinking, be a great travelling companion.

In fact, if there’s one problem with Eden’s book it’s that she is the kind of guide who opens up a subject so well that you can’t help wanting to find out more. This makes Cold Kitchen a slow read: Google rabbit holes open up in front of you at every chapter. Writing about Baltic cuisine – unfairly neglected, she points out, and a lot more than a pickle paradise – she made Latvia’s capital Riga sound so enticing that I started Googling whether there’s a train linking it with Estonia to the north and Lithuania to the south (as indeed there is: and express trains on it only started running this year). And - to circle back to Uzbekistan - so wonderful does she make their melons sound (“like overripe pears with Bourbon vanilla”) that you start to understand why they were once prized by Chinese emperors and why, even today, Uzbeks will go to great lengths to buy them in their November harvest. “Sadly, you can’t buy them here,” she tells me. “Your best bet would be in Berlin, where there’s quite a big Uzbek community.”

I interviewed her two days before she headed off back to Central Asia for a month. Another ‘colour’ book? "No, this is just a holiday. I could go anywhere in the world, but there’s just something about that region that draws me back.

“I’ve always wanted to take a ferry across the Black Sea. I’ve never been on it, only around it and paddling in it. But there’s a three-night ferry all the way across it from Burgas in Bulgaria to Batumi, Georgia’s second city. I want to know who’s on the ship because a friend of a friend was on it and said the passengers seemed to consist of a delegation of Georgian dentists. I wondered why they didn’t fly, so I’ll find out. I’m packed and ready to go.”

Of course she is.

Caroline Eden’s Cold Kitchen is published in paperback by Bloomsbury price £10.99. She will appear at Edinburgh International Book Festival on 12 August at 4pm.

Make sure you keep up to date with Arts and Culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here.