It’s 10 years since her debut cookbook, Caribbean Modern: Recipes from the Rum Islands launched this Trinidadian lawyer and supper club host from Leicester to become the Caribbean queen of daytime TV.

The 10th anniversary edition – simply called Recipes from The Rum Islands is just as much about identity and belonging, but as the co-presenter now of Jimmy and Shivi's Farmhouse Breakfast and a regular on This Morning, not to mention a mum of three young wildlings, as she calls them, she’s got a different perspective.  Gilly asks her to revisit a time when she first began to dive into her heritage and its food.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Shivi and a recipe from The Rum Islands.

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Madeeha who spent her first 18 years in Saudi, came to our attention on Masterchef when she reached the finals in 2021, impressing judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace with her fusion of Saudi Arabian, Middle Eastern, South Asian and modern flavours.

Now, many of us will think of Saudi as a place which is repressive for women and the LGBTQ community, but this is not Madeeha’s story.  If Cooking the Books is a place to explore the secret kitchens from different culinary cultures, it’s also about the lived experiences of the authors who tell that story – many of them women. Gilly asks Madeeha to show us around her Saudi Arabia through her food moments. 

Pop over to Substack for Extra Bites of Madeeha including a recipe from her book, and for Gilly's post about the complexity of telling stories about place and politics.

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The author of Beans describes herself as a chef and food systems agitator, which brings together the best things about beans – how delicious they can be while saving the planet and the health of the nation. In front a live audience of keen beans and bean deniers – let’s call them beanos - we find out why. 

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Ali and a recipe from Beans by clicking here. And do follow Bang in Some Beans on the Food Foundation podcast, produced by Gilly and presented by Melissa Hemsley. Here's episode 4.

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This year, it celebrates its 10th anniversary with a stunning shortlist of books about secret kitchens and migrant stories which will all be featured here on CTB when they’re out in the bookshops. Ahead of next week’s awards, Gilly asks Nicola, founder of Sous Chef and a graduate of her How to Cook a Book food writing retreat, and Jeremy Lee, award-winning author of Cooking and chef proprietor at Awards HQ, Quo Vadis, what they look for in a winner.

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A former Amazon corporate employee, she left to focus on cooking content, gaining 265k Instagram followers (@Ilhanm.a) through live Ramadan cooking sessions inspired by her mum’s dishes during lockdown, and has since become a mother herself.  She tells us about her recipes inspired by Ramadan traditions, including suhoor and iftar dishes like Somali rice, samosas, and syrup-soaked doughballs.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Ilhan including a recipe from her book, and a beautiful prayer that means so much to her. 

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Born in Southern Kurdistan, in Qaladze, a place known for its resistance and community, Pary fled Kurdistan with her family to escape what became known as the Anfal Genocide, and this is a hard listen. But it’s her passion for using the food of her land in her restaurant Nandine in South London and now the book, Nandên meaning kitchen to keep her Kurdish culture alive after generations of hardship and displacement, that makes this an essential listen.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Pary, including a recipe for Yapraxi bahara, the stuffed vine leaves in her food moments.

You can buy the book from the CTB Bookshop at Bookshop.org by clicking here.

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Gilly has followed their journey over the last 10 years and watched them become the biggest influencers in the plant-based space. Now, as she explores their latest book, More Plants, she finds out how they got their ready meals to the supermarket ready meal shelves - and why that matters.  

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of BOSH! including a recipe from More Plants.

You can buy it from the CTB shop at Bookshop.org which supports this ad-free listen.

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Her latest book is the result of a deep depression that overwhelmed her after the publication of An Everlasting Meal, which is now widely seen as a modern classic. Feast on Your Life is a record of daily food delights that she wrote to find her way back to the light, and the result is an extraordinary, gentle reminder to look at the small things, to focus on life through the prism of food and find joy even in the darkness.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Tamar and Cooking the Books Live including a recipe for the green risotto from Tamar’s food moments cooked up by Ingrid Wakeling and her team from Sussex Surplus.

You can buy the book from the CTB shop at Bookshop.org by clicking here, and you can book tickets for the next CTB Live on March 10th here.

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Their use of food as device in this story of Jules and Adam’s long-term marriage hitting a midlife wobble and getting a second chance is a glorious way of getting under the skin of the writing process. Writers, listen up.  Gilly popped down to their home in Brighton a couple of days before the book hit the streets and the airwaves, voiced by Sally Phillips and Rory Kinnear, and shortly before a MAJOR streaming channel propels it into the stratosphere.

Click here to buy the book, and here for Extra Bites of Josie and Emlyn on Gilly's Substack

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Rowley is an award‑winning food writer himself, but it’s his mastery of storytelling through the theatre of food that Gilly wanted to know about before we got on to the shortlist. His Notting Hill gastrodome, Kensington Place was all about being seen eating the coolest food in late century London, fashioned by his time with Roux Brothers in the kitchens of  Le Gavroche and le Poulbot, and Joe Allen, Covent Garden’s post theatre supper hang out. Gilly asks how that melting pot created one of the greatest stories of modern British food.

Five out of seven of the shortlist have already been on the show. Click on the links below for the episodes.

• Julian Baggini: How the World Eats: Where Our Food Comes From and Why It Matters
• Alissa Timoshkina: Kapusta: Vegetable-Forward Recipes from Eastern Europe
• Noor Murad: Lugma: Abundant Dishes And Stories From My Middle East
• Richard Hart: Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Baking
• Bee Wilson: The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects
• Robin Sherriff: The Science of Fermentation
• La Mesa Mexicana: Rosa Cienfuegos

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This is so much more than a recipe book celebrating the best of Highland produce, and the CUIL, the Gaelic for cosy nook - is much more than a play on words. This is a story of brilliant enterprise in the face of adversity drawn from a sense of identity and belonging – Gilly's favourite ingredients in any cuisine.  

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Clare including a recipe from Café Cuil for  Lobster Roll with Nduja Butter  You can buy the book from the CTB shop at Bookshop.org by clicking here, which supports this ad-free listen.

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Her Kitchen Butterfly blog has been documenting the back story to this West African cuisine since 2009, but Chop Chop, her debut cookbook, has been a long time coming. It’s already been nominated for an Andre Simon award and builds upon a rich tradition of cultural prodding at a food landscape that stretches way beyond the old country.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Ozoz including a recipe from Chop Chop. You can buy it from the CTB shop at Bookshop.org by clicking here, and this supports this ad-free listen.

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As a former semi-professional footballer and tennis player, Jeffrey has been a top level athlete for most of his adult life. But it was his decision to go vegan overnight that has given him a place on the podium in the plant protein world. Gilly finds out how it happened and how he gets enough protein in plants.

Click here to buy Plant Fuel from the CTB shop at Bookshop.org and here to get to Jeffrey's Extra Bites on Gilly's Substack.

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The former chef, food columnist for the New York Times, senior food editor at Bon Appetit, author of Dining In, Nothing Fancy and Sweet Enough, and now owner of her own store in upstate NY is all about about doing the bare minimum beautifully.

But as one of the early queens of social media, she’s been through the highs and the lows of influencer stratosphere and cancel culture. Her recipes were among the first to go viral – listen to that chat on the delicious podcast back in 2019, and Gilly finds out what she knows now about social media that she didn't know back then.

You can buy Alison’s book - and all your food books at the CTB page on Bookshop.org

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As Emiko puts the pieces of her Italian living Australian-Japanese ancestry and influence together through all her books, The Japanese Pantry reads like she’s landing softly among the flavours of her Japan. Gilly explores that journey with her.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Emiko, including an outtake of the book. You can buy her book from the CTB shop at Bookshop.org which supports this ad-free listen.

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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 of giving.

Click here for Extra Bites of Skye on Gilly's Substack and here to buy The Christmas Companion on the CTB shop at Bookshop.org

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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 company designed to do exactly what he wants. 

The 90 recipes by Cherie are framed within stories about memory of home and rural life while Andrew’s extraordinary atmospheric photography captures the people, landscapes and food traditions still alive and well in contemporary Ireland. It’s part-cookbook, part cultural document of Irish home cooking and small producers, and a work of art. I

You can only buy The Irish Kitchen from Montgomery Press, and Andrew has even given CTB fans a discount. Click here and use COOKING10 as the promo code.

And do pop over to Gilly's Substack to see some of the wonderful photography, as well as a recipe from the book in Extra Bites. 

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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 find out about the role of MasterChef as the global phenomenon in nurturing chefs, and the might of the Jamie Oliver mentorship.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for a recipe from Nat, and to see the original photos David Loftus took of her when Jamie first brought her to London.

And if you’re looking for a way to suppport this ad free pod, do consider becoming a paid subscriber on Substack and buying all your food books from the Cooking the Books shop at Bookshop.org by clicking on this link.

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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 result is an adventure in refusing to follow the rules and finding a kindred spirit among the Bohemians of her bloodline.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for a recipe from My Bohemian Kitchen which you can buy from the Cooking the Books shop at Bookshop.org to support this advertising free  podcast.  

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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 paying subscribers. Of course the publishers piled in to scoop up the ready-made market, and Quadrille have produced a thing of real beauty which you can buy here.  It’s a masterclass in writing, observing, reminding yourself of the most important things in life and disrupting the traditional publishing model. 

Click here for Extra Bites on Substack where you can also show your appreciation for this ad-free podcast by becoming a paid subscriber.

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Pop over to Gilly's Substack for a recipe and Amber’s playlist made especially for Cooking the Books. And if you’re looking for a way to support this ad-free pod, do consider becoming a paid subscriber to Substack with access to the entire archive forever.

And you can buy the book from the Cooking the Books shop at Bookshop.org by clicking here.

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 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 Michelin star since 2008, but in The Sportsman at Home, he takes us into his own kitchen, to create the kind of book that taught him to cook back in the day when he was a university student trying out his ideas on his mates.

And you can listen to Stephen’s playlist specially curated for Cooking the Books, as well as try out one of the recipes, on Extra Bites on Gilly's Substack, and you can buy The Sportsman at Home at the CTB shop on bookshop.org by clicking here.

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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 to Syria, Jordan and Yemen becomes particularly heated in the Q&A. Food, travel and geopolitics, food memory and food identity - it's all here among many of the people who understand these issues most.

You can buy Silk Roads from the Cooking the Books shop at Bookshop.org by clicking on the link, which supports this advertising free podcast.

And do pop over to Gilly's Substack for the recipe for kuku and pictures of the live podcast event.

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Made in Hackney is a charity founded 13 years ago by Sarah which teaches thousands the skills to cook with plants for survival, joy, and empowerment. It’s a glorious invitation to put more plants on your plate and be part of real food system change.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack to see some of the wonderful work they get up to at Made in Hackney, as well as one of the recipes from the book.

And you can buy the book at the CTB shop on bookshop.org by clicking here.

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We first met Karen last year when she explained how to arm women with the information we need to dodge the drug industry, understand how food heals and to live in harmony with one of the natural events in our lives.  Have a listen to that episode of CTB here.

This time, it's all about the cookbook as the companion book. Gilly finds out why it's so important to learn to cook up the method ourselves.

You can buy Karen’s The Natural Menopause Method Cookbook at the Cooking the Books shop on bookshop.org.

And head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites from Karen including a recipe from the book.

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We first met Amelia at Cooking the Books Live at Groundswell this summer to talk about her first book, Bold Beans: recipes to get your pulse racing Now, with her own little bean growing happily inside her, we caught up to celebrate the birth of Full of Beans and began by discussing the power of storytelling to change the way we eat.

Click here to buy Full of Beans from CTB's own page on bookshop.org, and here for Extra Bites of Amelia on Gilly's Substack, including a recipe from the book, and a glimpse behind the scenes at its photoshoot.

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Tolhurst Organic, a 20-acre farm on the Hardwick Estate, is a dream of how farming could be – and is about so much more than growing. This is about community, where the growers work the land and live on the river under the famous willows of Kenneth Grahame’s children’s books. Hardwick Hall, the original inspiration for Toad Hall, overlooks the Victorian greenhouses and the 500-year-old walled kitchen garden where the produce is only half the story. Gilly, who has written the foreword to My Vegan Farm Food, finds out why Tamara, who co-wrote it with Samantha Kroes, chose to tell the story of Tolhurst in a cookbook. 

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for a glimpse of that extraordinary community life Tamara describes on Extra Bites

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Her latest book, Fusao meaning fusion, is about more than the melting pot of Brazil’s huge diasporic food cultures; it’s about who she is after a deep dive into her own ancestry, the histories of Brazil and her own connection with food as medicine. Gilly finds out if this weighty book, packed with stories and recipes is an attempt to find her own place in a country which she barely knew at all. 

And you can buy Fusao at the Cooking the Books shop on bookshop.org by clicking on the link.

Head over to Substack for Extra Bites from Ixta including a recipe from the book.

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Tim started his journey in food on an apprentice scheme at Fifteen, with the most iconic of chefs, Jamie Oliver. From there, he rocketed through the food firmament from St John with Fergus Henderson to Moro with Sam and Sam Clarke, before setting up his own restaurants, Trullo and Padella with his mate from the River Café, Jordan Frieda.

With Padella on the bucket list for every tourist coming to Borough Market, it’s no surprise to find Tim’s first cookbook sub-titled ‘Iconic Pasta at Home’. Gilly asks him what iconic means to him.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Tim, and if you'd like to buy the book, head to Cooking the Books page at Bookshop.org

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After co-writing the Ottolenghi big hitters with Yotam and other members of the Test Kitchen, she’s found her own niche in rhyme.  After How to Butter Toast charmed a whole new readership, she’s back with all we  wanted to know about ingredients, cooking and kitchens, but were afraid to ask.

And it's that sense of anxiety, over-thinking and delightful neuroses that makes her stand out in the food writing community. Gilly chatted to her a month about that nail biting bit before publication, and asked her how she thought the cookie’s going to crumble.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Tara. And if you'd like to buy the book, head to Cooking the Books' page on Bookshop.org where you can find many of the books featured on the show.

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This week in a special extra episode, we’re live in Paris at the legendary Belleville bistrot Le Mistral with Chris Newens, the winner of the 2024 Jane Grigson Trust Award for best debut food writer for his gastronomic journey through the arrondissements of Paris, Moveable Feasts.

The name of the book is a nod to Chris’ idol, Ernest Hemingway and his memoir of a struggling expat writer making his way in Paris during the 1920s. And in front of a live audience made up of many of his friends and fans who have already made that left turn and are living the expat dream, we talked about curating the bubble of Parisian gastronomy. We began with an introduction to the evening by the queen of French food, Francophile journalist and author of Amuse Bouche, how to eat your way around France, Carolyn Boyd

And you can buy Moveable Feasts and Amuse Bouche at the Cooking the Books shop on bookshop.org by clicking on the links.

And then head over to my Substack for the photos from the Paris show on Extra Bites. 

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She’s the super-driven restaurateur who started selling satay burgers at a street stall after getting burnt out in corporate law, and who went on to be lauded by all the food critics for her London laksa bar, Sambal Shiok.

As a mum of a three year old now, she’s making it easy on herself, and on the growing number of people who really really want to cook her super tasty laksas and satays in Simply Malaysian. This is about giving yourself a break – as a mum.  

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Mandy's Extra Bites, including some top tips for new mums!

You can buy Mandy's book from the Cooking the Books shop at Bookshop.org which supports independent bookshops.

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After bringing the food of Turkey, Morocco, Lebanon, The Middle East, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and Kenya to an international readership hungry for different flavours and food cultures, Ghillie's latest book, Food Whisky Life focuses more on her own life. It’s a story of resilience, enterprise and whisky, getting on with it as a single mum in the wilds and pulling brilliant ideas out of the bag to make life work deliciously.

You can buy Food, Whisky, Life from the Cooking the Books shop at Bookshop.org which supports independent bookshops. And head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Ghillie.

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Bread and War: A Ukrainian Story of Food, Bravery and Hope  is an exploration of the profound role of food in wartime Ukraine.  Felicity’s trips through devastated villages, bombed cities, family kitchens, and precarious bakeries meeting everyday extraordinary people showed her how food, particularly bread, has become a powerful symbol of Ukrainian identity, resistance, and hope.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Felicity. You can buy Felicity's book from the Cooking the Books shop at Bookshop.org which supports independent bookshops.

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Taking the tourist to see the traditions, the artisans and the produce of our favourite holiday islands, says Carolina, helps to connect them more with the food and the people, an essential element of sustainable travel. As she takes us through four food moments from four of her favourite islands, we learn about how to slow-cook chicken in a tserepa, why to pair Samos wine with poached peaches and how to transform rusks with lemon leaves.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for a recipe from the book and for Extra Bites of Carolina.

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Sami’s first solo cookbook, Boustany, meaning 'my garden', is about the abundance of vegetarian recipes that make up the heart of Palestinian cooking. He and Yotam Ottolenghi, largely through their first book, Jerusalem have done more to bring the food of the Middle East to the world than anyone, and most of us will know our way around a labneh or a pomegranate molasses by now.

Falastin, his cookbook co-written with Tara Wigley took him back to his homeland to begin to tell the story of Palestinian food culture, and in Boustany, he continues that mission. Gilly asks him how he feels about chatting about Sumac roasted plums with cardamom cream and pistachio when food is being weaponised in his own backyard.

You can buy Boustany from the Cooking the Books shop at Bookshop.org which supports independent bookshops.https://uk.bookshop.org/a/2164/9781529916423

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After the kids have left home and as she faces a big birthday, Emily’s tells us how she's changing up her life. She may have left Cornwall where she was the first woman commissioned by the UK Cabinet Office to cook for royalty and world leaders at the G7 summit dinner at the Eden Project in 2021, but she’s on a mission to make the most of life. She’s the Executive Consultant Chef and Creative Director at the Calypso Grill in the Cayman Islands, all while setting up a whole new home in France. In short, she’s living the dream.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Emily.

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After bringing the flavours of Spain to a British readership from the 1980s on, her Classic Spanish Recipes: 75 signature dishes is part of the Hamlyn Classic Recipes series celebrating 75 years of publishing some the most admired chefs and writers in the world for their pioneering approach to food culture - Anna del Conte on Italian food, Ken Hom on Chinese, Chetna Makan on Indian.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack from Extra Bites of Elisabeth's Spain.

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Janakievska and Dina for the Jane Grigson Trust Award in 2023. It's a history of Caribbean cooking with 125 recipes from 23 nations - from Montserrat to Haiti, Antigua to Guadaloupe, capturing the cultures through food in what this Leicester born young writer calls 'resistance through retention'.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Keshia.

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Sabzi, meaning greens and herbs in Persian, the language of her mother, and vegetables in Urdu, the language of her Pakistani father, is about how to reduce the amount of meat in our diet with delicious recipes from the Middle East, Mediterranean and South Asia. It’s as political and environmental as we’d expect from Yasmin, but it’s also a book about her ancestors and the food from their land – as well as a hard-won journey to motherhood. Gilly finds out why she chose vegetables to convey such a big story.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Yasmin

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In front of an audience of farmers and food businesses, pioneers and innovators who are changing the way we eat, Gilly asks a panel of writers with influence, Thomasina Miers of Wahaca, Amelia Christie-Miller of Bold Bean company, Alice Robinson of British Pasture Leather and David Finlay of The Ethical Dairy what a book can do to change the story of food. 

Check out Gilly's Substack here and get in touch on Instagram here

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Regular listeners will know that Gurd is probably the writer who Gilly think's best uses the lens of food to examine life. His first book, Mother Tongue won the Jane Grigson Trust award for Best Debut, and he has become the word on Third Culture food, prising open the liminal spaces between where we come from and who we can be.

His second book, Flavour Heroes is a lighter read, a pantry book giving us technicolour ways to elevate the simplest dishes with 15 superstar ingredients. After the food world clucked around him over Mother Tongue, Diana Henry calling him boundary breaking, Felicity Cloake dubbing him the Willy Wonka wizard of flavour, Gilly asks him in front of a live audience, how he felt about the notoriously difficult second album. 

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of CTB Live with the Q&A

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Peach Street to Lobster Lane is her great American road trip – on a bike. It’s the off-road trip that’s about getting to the heart of American cuisine via a glimpse into everyday life that you just can’t get by car.

The story she finds is about immigration, colonisation and enterprise, from tex mex to creole, fried chicken and real bbq, Chicago deep pan pizza, lobster rolls, clam chowder, Boston baked beans New York bagels and Coney Island hot dogs.  

Click here for Extra Bites of Felicity's epic adventure on Gilly's Substack.

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It’s the story of Ukraine that history can never tell, through the stories of its people - and in particular, Olia’s people, through four generations of her family.  Nigella calls it 'breathtaking', Caroline Eden calls it cinematic, Elisabeth Luard says: ‘Here, in all its beauty and sorrow, is the story of Ukraine as it is, and was and surely will be again.’

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Olia and her photos from the family album.

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Her first book is a series of tales from her clinic exploring how the food we eat reveals who we are – and how we love. Its title? The Kitchen Shrink. Genius.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Andrea.

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He’s the man with the Midas touch – he turned the Hand and Flowers from a rundown pub in Buckinghamshire into the first and only 2 star Michelin pub in the world.  He’s the chef who lost a stack of weight and turned his diet story into books and telly which helped millions of others do the same. He’s the boy who grew up on free school meals who launched Full Time Meals with Marcus Rashford in 2021 and campaigns for free school meals for all children in the UK.  He’s the Michelin star chef whose books elevate the simplest of dishes. But is he the man who can teach Gilly how to love a barbie?

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites

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It’s a book about love and loss, and the magical thinking that so many of us transpose onto everyday objects, often found in the kitchen. As she navigates her way from the despair of a broken marriage to a gloriously happy present via the death of her mother and the inevitable life changes that happen as children grow up, she gathers stories and explores the psychology about our relationship with things – the junk and the treasure – in her most moving book so far. 

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Bee.

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Her debut cookbook, Lugma is her twist on the familiar, to use an Ottolenghi term, of the food from her homeland, Bahrain.

It’s the very first international cookbook of Bahraini recipes, but reflects her own experiences of growing up there, the mix of Persian and Indian flavours infused with her own half Britishness and a brash of new York where she worked before landing in the bosom of the Ottolenghi family.

Click here for tickets to the next Cooking the Books Live with Gurd Loyal, and then pop over to Gilly's Substack for the fascinating Q&A with the audience.

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Sama Sama meaning Same Same is all about food and identity. It’s a book that has been simmering for years as Julie explores her same-same notions of home and all the ingredients of belonging that have come together in the hashtag third culture food.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Julie.

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An actress, a baker with Meringue Girls and Claire Ptak’s assistant at Violet Cakes – which included working on Harry and Meghan’s wedding cake, it was moving into a Carpet Warehouse  in London that shot her to fame on Instagram. The idea of sharing the cost of living with her ware-housemates, cooking and eating communally – as well as the supper clubs with Italian housemate, Virginia - hit home to so many that publishers were queuing up to sign her.  

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Rosie and a recipe from the book.

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Leyla’s debut Pathways is not one but two books about her massive life change to become a farmer in Portugal. It’s a memoir/manifesto/guide to living a purposeful life. Published by The Pound Project, it goes on sale for three weeks only, from 7pm on May 6th - 27th May. She’s in good company - Jess Phillips MP, Dolly Alderton, Pandora Sykes,  Emma Gannon, Sebastian Faulks, Charlie Mackesy, Rita Ora, Richard and Scarlett Curtis are just some of her fellow authors. She tells us about disruption in life, the food system and publishing!

You can purchase the book from the following link, which goes live at 19:00 on May 6th: 

https://www.poundproject.co.uk/shop/pathways

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Stuart’s book Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet gives us the back story of a food system driven by greed and exploitation. But it suggests how to transform it into a food system fit for the future which prioritises global health and justice. And it starts with really understanding that the food system isn’t broken—it’s functioning exactly as designed.

Pop over to Gilly’s Substack for Extra Bites of Stuart, and for her recent posts on what Food Fight has inspired her to do with Cooking the Books.

Click here for The Dark Side of the Plate, the report that Stuart mentions in the episode that he contributed to for The Food Foundation. And click here for the Food Foundation's Pod Bites.

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Poppy is this year’s winner of the Jane Grigson Trust Sous Chef Award for New Food Writers for her memoir – and very practical handbook – about putting down roots and growing a garden while reconnecting with Mother Earth’s infinite power to restore life.

Her beautiful book is a wonderful wake up call to remind us of what’s under our feet, threaded through with fables and folklore from her Nigerian Igbo and British cultures. 

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Poppy.

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The last time we met on CTB, it was to talk about Cold Kitchens, her dream of journeys past during Lockdown, as she tried to make sense of a changing world. This time, she’s putting one foot in front of the other to process the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on this still largely unknown part of the world, her signature edible postcards a wake up call to the sensory adventures of the Caucasus in the last in her colour trilogy after Black Sea and Red Sands.

Head to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Caroline.

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River Cottage Handbook No 19: Bees and Honey is the latest in the practical guides to everything we need to know to live a sustainable life. Rachel and Steve Minshall take us through everything from caring for bees to honey recipes for soothing and healing, but as a former chef, commissioning Editor of Waitrose Food Illustrated and Head of Food for the organic box scheme Abel & Cole, Rachel has carved a niche as a writer who is all about the role of nature and climate change in food. Gilly asks her to trace that journey to River Cottage.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Rachel

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Irina has become the word on Romanian food, and from her home in Wales, she’s committed to exploring her homeland through its food history. Her last book, Tava: Eastern European Baking and Desserts from Romania and Beyond won a James Beard Foundation award in 2023. In Danube, she finds publishing gold in everyday recipes from a part of the world most of us still haven’t discovered. 

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Irina and recipes from the book. 

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Brought up in Cumbria, Roopa spent 20 years as a chef in Delhi before she came home to advise on Rick Stein’s India series for BBC2. She's a woman who knows how to find the story in everyday food, and Indian Kitchens is an extraordinary story behind the recipes of 12 different communities to find the food that makes up a nation.  

Bee Wilson raves about it, Tom Parker Bowles calls it a modern classic, Diana Henry  says, 'The recipes are pure gold.'  

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Roopa and the recipe for the lamb in ginger and orange from her food moments.

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It’s a highly moving and very funny diary about healing a broken marriage and growing enough vegetables to fill her new distraction, an honesty box. But the rickety old receptable outside her garden gate is also a metaphor for the treasure trove she finds as she lifts the lid on the mental health crisis her husband – and the rest of the family – have been living with.

We begin with a question from the audience about the title, and if it was always meant to have such a brilliant double meaning. 

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Lucy and the audience Q&A at Cooking the Books Live. 

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This time she’s telling her own story in Care and Feeding: A Memoir which paints a vivid picture of a bright, sensitive woman beset with anxiety trying to find her way into food writing in a world of celebrity chefs and toxic masculinity in turn of the century New York.

Her work as a food writer for chef, Mario Batali and at Art Culinaire, the glossy magazine about chefs for chefs, gave her a unique point of view on the food scene of the time, and as personal assistant to Bourdain as well as his ghost writer, she’s seen a lot of life.

This memoir feels like a claim on her own story in a narrative that has been haunted by her much-missed boss long after he died in 2018, and Gilly finds out where and who she is without him.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Laurie.

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Her latest book, Kapusta: Vegetable-Forward Recipes from Eastern Europe is a celebration of the humble cabbage (and four other vegetables) in the everyday kitchens of Eastern Europe. Her co-founder of CookforUkraine, Olia Hercules calls it ‘A rare cookbook that engages our thinking and delights our senses’ and Nigella has already propped it up in her Cookbook Corner.  

In a world that is in such turmoil at the moment, a book about the rich history of Eastern European food and its peoples can do much to remind us all of the taste and flavour of a part of the world eclipsed by the headlines of war.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Alissa.

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Saliha is a specialist registrar in gastroenterology with a Masters in Nutrition,an award winning food writer and the 2017 winner of MasterChef. She’s been on this show to talk about Foodology and The Kitchen Prescription, but since we last met, beans have made it back into the mainstream. Gilly finds out if we're on our way to gut health.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Saliha including a recipe from the book.

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The book is a spiritual guide to healing recipes from around the world, and the result of years of travelling, eating with locals, cooking in their kitchens and slowing right down to experience the wonders of the world through eating together.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Sam, and a recipe from the book.

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The Five o clock Apron, as she’s more commonly known was with us to talk about her latest book One Pan Beans, the 10th in her series of how to cook books. In front of an audience of super-fans, she told us how to elevate the simplest of ingredients - beans, chickpeas and lentils - into fabulous weekday meals and weekend feasts.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for the Q&A which has masses of tips from the book.

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Kathy was a high flying executive living the dream in Adland... until it became a nightmare. Burn out gave way to clinical depression and a very dark place indeed. Ultimately hers is a story about nature, dogs and how growing veg saved her, but she doesn’t pull any punches, and trigger warning, she and Gilly do talk about how depression can lead to suicidal thoughts, although thankfully not in her case.

Pop over to Substack for Extra Bites of Kathy, including the recipe from that Pitstop Tart.

And if you or someone you know needs to talk about suicide, here are some useful numbers:

Samaritans 📞 116123

Papyrus- for under 35s 📞 08000684141

And to learn how to have compassionate, courageous conversation that could save a life, click here to Start the Conversation

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This is about food without borders, a cuisine which is under threat as so many are when their people are displaced. But as we hear so often on this show, they can also become the roots to a culture. With only about 200k Zoroastrians living around the world, Niloufer tells Gilly why she has  taken it upon herself to revive this ancient cuisine.

Click here for Extra Bites of Niloufer on Gilly's Substack

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Check into Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Philip.

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Miss Beeton’s Murder Agency is a classic whodunnit, but it’s the protagonist, Alice Beeton’s distant ancestor who haunts the story with recipes from her 1861 masterpiece Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management peppering the plot. Click here for Extra Bites of Josie, including the Q&A from the evening on Gilly's Substack

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The Pipers Farm Sustainable Meat Cookbook came out in 2022 but is one of Gilly's favourite reads and recipe resources. It’s a manifesto for the role of family farms in climate change and a reminder of all the principles that guide Gilly's world, with some of the most delicious ways to enjoy the food that comes from them. Abby and her husband Will took over his father, Peter Greig’s vision of how farming can be 14 years ago, and have continued to raise his bar, stimulating a conversation about sustainable meat that has made them important changemakers as we rethink food and farming.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Pipers Farm with recipes of Abby's food moments.

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Gilly finds out what a philosopher can do to help us out of the mess of our global food system.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Julian.

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She’s all over morning telly and the nationals as the Freezer Queen giving tips from her fantastically useful book which really could help us save waste; as she points out, 70% of global food waste comes from the home.

But this isn’t just about batch cooking and having an endless supply of ready meals; this is a whole new way of thinking about how to use your freezer.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Kate.

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His book, Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Baking is more of a love letter to bread than an instruction manual. It’s a read that makes your heart rate drop, the descriptions of dough making a metaphor for all that is wonderful in life. You can hear the collaboration with his wife, Henrietta Lovell, aka the Rare Tea Lady, in his words. This is about falling in love as much as it about baking bread. Richard says it’s the same thing. 

Head to Gilly’s Substack for Extra Bites including his playlist to bake to.

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It’s massive book reaching deep into the history, peoples and geo-politics of the Balkans, but also into her own family story and her exploration of her own identity through recipes from all Balkan kitchens. 

Most of all, it’s a love letter to Balkan cuisine – one of the most under-explored gastronomies in the world, and overshadowed by conflict.

Head to Gilly’s Substack to hear Irina read the poem that inspired the book cover, and for her recipe for Slatko, one of her four food moments.

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Claire is  a culinary history cook and the author of The Condiment Book. A dual national of the US and France, she splits her time between LA and her family home, a mill in the French countryside where the rituals, traditions and flavours of both have inspired her till-side treasure, The Condiment Book which is bound to fly off the shelves this Christmas.

Check out Gilly’s Substack for Extra Bites of Claire who’s taken us to that mill house in France to make her crème de marrons.

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She’s only just left the Royal College of Art, but her work has already been featured in the V&A ‘s Food: Bigger than the Plate exhibition. Her first book Field, Fork, Fashion has had her on Radio’s 4’s Start the Week to discuss our connection with the countryside - with James Rebanks among the other guests.  

She is an extraordinary advocate of our connection with the land and prods us to think in a whole new way about the provenance of leather. Gilly finds out what the Fork in the title means to her story. 

Check out Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Alice and Bullock 374 – and Sheep 11458 - and click here for more about British Pasture Leather. 

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He's a chef with 885k followers on Instagram, but it all started when as a teenager serving a six and a half year sentence for GBH in a young offenders institution, he was given a job on day release at one of the early Jamie Oliver restaurants.

Now in this mid 30s, he says that it was the Duke of Edinburgh's Award which taught him to cook in prison that changed his life - he was the first person in custody to earn all Bronze, Silver, and Gold awards. 

But with a new book out, prison is still his defining story, despite his dad telling him to change the record. Gilly asks him how he feels about having to keep going back there.

Check Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Jon.

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Emily is a trained chef, a recipe developer, and the content creator behind Myriad Recipes. Her “Around the World in 80 Dumplings” series went viral, gaining millions of views.

They caught up to talk about The World is Your Dumpling, which has over 80 recipes celebrating the diverse flavours and textures of dumplings from just about everywhere across the globe. Iasked her if writing about dumplings was a great excuse to travel the world through the lens of dumplings.

Check Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Emily.

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The founder of Urban Farm It is a passionate grower and educator of alternative agriculture based in the UK.  His goal is become a leader in the global movement to a more sustainable and self-sufficient society by positively disrupting current food production culture. Gilly asks him to dig deep into the history and science of mushrooms to find out why so many people so interested in them right now.

Head over to her Substack for Extra Bites of Elliot in which he finds a brand new species of mushroom while foraging, and three fabulous recipes from Urban Farm It.

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His philosophy is simple but its impact could be massive - He believes that our everyday food choices can and should make  our diet healthier, tastier with a massive impact on the farmers, the soil and the entire food chain.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Franco.

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In Chefs Wanted, she’s on a mission to teach kids not just to play with their food but to cook like the pros. It’s a must-buy for any kids who want to be properly creative in the kitchen and stretch their skills.

But Allegra has a deeper purpose behind everything she does, including this book; Gilly last met her at the Conflict Café in London where she was hosting a Lebanese pop up supper club. As the tanks roll in again across Beirut, she asks her, as someone of real influence, how she feels about hope.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Allegra.

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Since their first meeting for the delicious podcast before Covid changed the world, gut health advice is everywhere, and personalised nutrition is set to become the Next Big Thing. Gilly finds out the back story to Tim's extraordinary rise to fame and influence over the past four years, and how he thinks we can extend the trend for healthier eating to the entire population.

Head to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Tim and Zoe.

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They last met over lunch when she was chatting to him about his book Secret France for the delicious. podcast. This time, it’s about secret Britain, or at least the communities of Britain bursting with flavour and influencing our national diet. Rick Stein’s Food Stories, the book and the BBC show, is about all that we are in Britain and is a subject very close to Gilly's heart. She asks him, after travelling the world – Mexico, Thailand, The Mediterranean, Istanbul to name a few, to find their stories through food, what this book says about our changing nation.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites from the book.

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Royal Food has always been about impressing the most powerful people in the world, and in his book Cooking and the Crown, he tells how it has set trends for centuries, from Victoria to his stepfather, King Charles 3rd. 

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Tom Parker Bowles

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Her book, Between Two Waters: Heritage, landscape and the modern cook is a deep dive into everything that we need to know about food - the philosophy, the politics and the provenance of what we eat. It’s part memoir, part manifesto on the future of feeding the world, as well as a sharp, feminist critique of the power of the global food economy, and has been heralded as a fiercely original work of narrative non-fiction, from one of the world’s most exciting thinkers about food, sustainability and landscape.  

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Pam.

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Pop over to Gilly’s Substack for Extra Bites of Claire and a recipe for Spanakopita.

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Written by the 'four hungries', Yotam, his original co-writer Tara Wigley, Helen Goh and Verena Lochmuller, these are the foods that provide a comfort blanket for them, and mark a departure from the big Ottolenghi books of the past.

In a deliciously raw, often indiscreet chat with three of the 'hungries' while Yotam is out of the Zoom room, we learn what makes Ottolenghi Ottolenghi, the connected nostalgia of their favourite comfort foods and Yotam's guilty pleasure when no-one else is looking.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of the Ottolenghi crew, and a recipe from the book.

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His story is one of a leap of faith, driven by a sense of purpose coursing through his veins and cultivated by his 17 years working with Jamie Oliver, including mentoring chefs at Fifteen who had come from challenging backgrounds.

Gilly first met Danny at San Patrignano, an extraordinary rehabilitation community committed to building a better society on a beautiful farm in Northern Italy. He spoke very little Italian then, but Gilly watched in awe how he communicated through something much more primal, a massive heart, and of course, food. You can listen to that interview for the delicious podcast here.

He’s done the same, against all odds, in Mussomeli, Sicily, and his book, The Good Kitchen, Love and connection Through Food, tells that story. 

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Ben’s latest book Mediterra follows his deep dive into bits of the Mediterranean; Moorish looked at the influence of the moors over hundreds of years on food of the Med, while his book Sicilia was a visceral guide to the street and home food of Sicily. This time, he covers the whole Mediterranean – north, south, east, west to bring us the flavours that Greece has in common with France, Lebanon with Spain, Turkey with Egypt.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for more of Ben, including a recipe from the book.

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This is about the food that helped her recovery from burn out, scribbled in her orange notebooks which, after three years of not being able to cook at all, she would cook only for pleasure. She talked to her just after a piece she wrote about her breakdown for the Guardian prompted an outpouring of love, support and sharing and asked if she felt that she had inadvertently touched a nerve.

Head over to Gilly’s Substack for Extra Bites from Meera including original recipes from her orange notebooks side by side with the finished product in a rather beautiful meditation on process.  

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A delicious reminder of how to unprocess our diet with easy, everyday recipes, the book is an antidote to ultra processed foods. Gilly chats to Melissa about everyday activism, elevating the simplest of flavours and the recipe for joy.

Click here for Extra Bites on Gilly's Substack including a recipe from the book as well as the Q&A from the evening.

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Click here for Gilly's previous chats with Diana  about How to Eat a Peach and Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, but this time, we’re going back to a time when they were both TV producers, intoxicated by the smells and eating habits of an increasingly diverse and exotic capital.

Click here for Gilly's Substack and Extra BItes of Diana.

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Rachel is the author of three books about her life in Italy including the multi award winning Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome which was first published in 2015 and now reissued in 2024.

It’s the story of a 32 year old woman from Harpenden who turned up in Rome with little more than a travel toothbrush and a phone, planning to stay a month, maybe, before heading south and on in search of who knows what.  What she found in Testaccio, the tiny corner of Rome where she put her bag down, launched a career as a mutli award winning food writer.  In front of an audience of fans, food writers and foodies, Gilly finds out what that was.

Click here for more from the Q&A on Gilly's Substack and here for the further reading Rachel mentions.

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Carolyn has guided Gilly through the best food destinations – and therefore THE best destinations in France for the last couple of years though her articles in The Guardian, The Times, National Geographic Traveller Food and BBC Good Food. And that includes a recent trip to Hauts de France, a part of the country most of us scoot past en route to more exotic destinations. But Carolyn argues that food opens a door to some hidden gems - if you know where to find it.

Click here to read Gilly's adventures, inspired by Carolyn's Amuse Bouche

And stay on Substack for Extra Bites from Carolyn, including a mini guide for your summer drive through France.

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Su has lived in Britain longer than she lived in Korea where she grew up, and has raised her own daughter in London. But her latest book, Pocha tells the story of the country she left behind, her family and the food they shared, often in the pochas, the covered markets and food stalls which are about so much more than food. 

Click here for Extra Bites of Su on Gilly's Substack

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Last time we met to talk about the River Cottage’s Good Comfort, his message was to swap out the less healthy ingredients for more, eating healthily not by taking stuff out of them, but by putting more in. This time, he’s upped his game and using the best of the latest science, he’s showing us how to eat 30 different plants a week.

Click here for Extra Bites of Hugh and here for the Food Foundation's Manifesto on how to put your own pressure on the next government to create a healthier nation.

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Now out in paperback, Gilly asks him about power, politics and the ultra processing food industry.  

Click here for Extra Bites of Chris on Gilly's Substack, and here for more information on the various parties' takes on food policy from the Food Foundation.

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A little known fact: the very first book Gilly wrote back in 1993 on the back of a Channel 4 series called Food File was The Mediterranean Health Diet: the delicious way to lose weight and live longer. The TV show and the book was about a village in Southern Italy which scientists  had discovered best diet in the world – and the reflected the interest in what even the Government back then was telling us would save our NHS, already buckling under the weight of diet-related disease. 30 years later, many Western societies are obesogenic s with increasing numbers living in food insecurity, undernourished by an all powerful fast food industry. Gilly asks Giulia why she thinks we’re still trying to work out how to eat well.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for more from Giulia's Happiest Diet in the World

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Anna is a massive part of the story of British food culture, leaving Dublin as a young woman to cook in the steamiest kitchens in London – Shane Osborn’s Pied a Terre, Philip Howard’s The Square and Gordon Ramsay’s London House.

But in 2019, she opened her own, Myrtle in Chelsea, more than a nod – a deep bow to Myrtle Allen, the doyenne of Irish cuisine and the inspiration behind Darina Allen's legendary Ballymaloe Cookery School  

Click here for Extra Bites from Anna at Gilly's Substack

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This is a book packed with ideas about how to get more from food from the land, a journey through the seasons which Ottolenghi calls 'simple, soulful, seasonal.' Bee Wilson calls it 'joyful', and Julius Roberts says it's 'an inspiring veg bible'. But for a gardener like Mark, it was Monty Don calling it 'a wonderful book, something truly inspiring and beautiful' that brought life to full circle.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites from Mark.

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Click here for the Awards brochure and the full set of categories and nominees.

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Her multi award winning book, Invitation to a Banquet is a huge and deep dive into Chinese life through the prism of food. After 30 years of writing about Chinese food culture, she has a seat at the table most of us can have no idea about.

Click here to head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Fuchsia’s China.

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Her book Plant Feasts is about how to live in the concrete jungle or the madness of modern life with the wisdom of the ancients. It’s about slowing down and finding how to live – how to really live by connecting with friends, family and nature – even if, like her, you live in a city.

Click here for Gilly's Substack to get Extra Bites of Frankie's wisdom for life.

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We first met Amber a couple of years ago on Cooking the Books when she told us about her book A House Party in Tuscany, the story of restoring and reclaiming her childhood home. This time, she takes us to some of the hidden gems of her family holidays from Maremma to The Aeolian Islands, cooking up food and memories along the way.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Amber.

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Her latest book, Cook Simply, Live Fully is about the options in life. It’s about cooking consciously, taking time to think about what you really want to eat, and being a little kinder to yourself – and the planet. Following your nose, turning left when everyone else is turning right, and having the guts to say 'hell yes' to an adventure is what she’s all about.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Yasmin, and if you'd like to see her in conversation with Gilly in a Cooking the Books Live at Rockwater, Hove on July 2nd, click here to book.

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We’ve met Ozlem already on Cooking the Books to talk about her 2020 book Ozlem’s Turkish Table, but this time she’s talking about the side of Turkish cuisine that perhaps we don’t know so well, the vegetables, the sebze, inspired by thousands of years of diverse food histories.

Head over to Gilly's Substack to try out one of the recipes from Ozlem's food moments, and have a listen to her special Cooking the Books Spotfiy playlist, inspired by her DJ years at university in Scotland.

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By the time you hear this, the glitz and glamour of these Oscars of the food world will be over for another year. The mass of talent in the room will be nursing their hangovers while the winners will be stroking their crowns. And as one of the nominees recording this before the night, Cooking the Books will, whatever the outcome, be basking in the glory of the biggest food night of the year.

They discuss the nominees and the winners in the food categories: Best Food Book, Best Debut Food Book, Best Cookery Book and Best Debut Cookery Book.

Thanks for listening. Head over to Gilly's Substack for some blurry pictures of the night.

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Her Cold Kitchen in Edinburgh is where we find her comfort cooking up the recipes she remembers from her travels. Her memories take us on the Trans Siberian Railway, through the dark back streets of a winter in Istanbul and the political chaos of a coup in Kyrgyzstan, and remind us of what travel can do for humanity. 

 This is the recipe for food books which Gilly found so compelling when she first interviewed her about her second book, Black Sea for the delicious podcast, and which was the inspiration for Cooking the Books. It was about  all of life through the prism of food.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for a sound of Caroline's travels and a recipe from the her cold kitchen.

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This is about the mash up of all that she is – North London, 2nd generation Greek Cypriot, who with full support from her yiayia, her grandmother, has cooked up a whole story of her family life in the kitchen. Gilly finds out whether the ish in the title has to do with how she feels about spending the last 19 years writing recipes from her intercultural heritage.

Check out a recipe from Greekish on Gilly's Substack.

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His book Baking Sourdough takes us on a sensory journey to the roots of traditional bread making, and as the School prepares for this years’ summer school courses, Gilly finds out why sour dough and artisan food matters so much.

Check out Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites from the School of Artisan Food.

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Her book Sift is an extraordinarily accomplished first book by a pastry chef trained in London and New York by the best - Ottolenghi, Dominique Ansel and Little Bread Pedlar. Her Substack, Kitchen Projects was praised as an ‘incredible resource’ by The Observer, and her recipes have been featured in Serious Eats, The Guardian, Olive, Vogue, and ESMagazine and she hosts sell-out pastry parties with her pop-up bakery, lark!

Check out Gilly's Substack for a recipe from one of her food moments.

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His Symmetry Breakfast account  featured his photographs of symmetrical breakfasts every day for 10 years and has 667k followers. In his latest book Zao Fan, Breakfast of China, it's with his anthropological eye that he looks beyond the dishes to place, people and home.

Check Gilly's Substack for recipes and photography from Michael's book.

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Spasia’s book, Doma, meaning home, is one of Gilly's favourite journeys, back to where it all started. She may have been born in Crawley, but her heart, she finds out through her cooking and her writing, is with the women who fed her soul in Macedonian summers.  

Already spotted as an Observer Food Monthly Rising Star, she took an Instagram lockdown hobby and made it into a supper club and shop in South London called Mystic Burek. The book is a story of a second generation immigrant ,inspired, like so many writers who come on to this show and  to Gilly's How to Cook a Book retreats, by her grandmother, her baba.

Click here for Gilly's Substack and some Extra Bites of Spasia.

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Check into Gilly's Substack to listen to chair of The Jane Grigson Trust, Don Sloan explain what the judges were looking for in this year's nominees.

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Gilly first met Rebecca in 2016 at a conference at the University of California in Berkely about the role of food In the health of everything that we care about. Although Gilly had written a lot about Australia over the years by then, what Rebecca told her over several glasses of wine one evening about the epiphany that led to the creation of her nations company, Warndu, blew her mind.  

Pop over to Gilly's Substack to find recipes from Rebecca's food moments by clicking here.

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This week, Gilly is discussing Easy Wins with the award-winning and best-selling queen of vegetarian food, Anna Jones. Her latest book is packed with stunning recipes and ideas for getting so much more taste and less waste on our plates.

Easy Wins has 125 brand new recipes around 12 hero ingredients, all designed to make our lives easier. But with two small kids, that can’t be an easy win for her. Gilly finds out how she does it.

Do head to Extra Bites on Gilly's Substack to get a taste of some of Anna’s recipes.

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This is so much more than a bit of salt and pepper. It's about how climate is changing our seasons with its earlier springs, longer summers, warmer, wetter winters and the role we play.  It has all the hallmarks of a modern classic, a book packed with the rigour we associate with Angela’s award-winning writing but brimming with flavour and delicious ideas to reduce our waste and get more – much more – out of the here and now. 

Click here for Extra Bites on Gilly's Substack

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Charles is a seasoned environmental journalist, super campaigner, co-author of King Charles’ Highgrove: Portrait of an Estate.  And as co-founder of Blue Marine Foundation, he’s bringing life back to our oceans.

Margaret Atwood calls his book a 'game changer,' Isabella Tree says 'it’s desperately needed', George Monbiot says ‘what if our seas became productive again with giant sturgeon, halibut and skate – it’s closer than you think.’

Head over to Extra Bites on Gilly's Substack to hear Charles tell us another of his massive wins for the sea, this time in Dogger.

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It’s a book for our times. Since Davina’s documentary about HRT, everyone’s talking about menopause. Karen's book is all about food, but it’s not a recipe book. This is about arming women with the information we need to dodge the drug industry, understand how food heals and to live in harmony with one of the natural events in our lives.

Head to Extra Bites on Gilly's Substack to watch Karen make a simple minestrone soup rich in collagen – although she does drop her phone into it.

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His Mayfair restaurant, le Gavroche is a London legend, and its closure last month  57 years after his father and uncle, the Roux Brothers changed the game in British food, is a milestone in the way we eat.  At 63, he’s ready for the next chapter, and he’s marking it with his latest book, Michel Roux at home. I asked him how he’s feeling.

Head to Gilly's Substack Extra Bites for recipes from Michel's food moments.

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Her books Ashia’s Table and Saffron Swirls and Cardamon Dust, and her 3rd, The Laden Table which comes out in April, are about her Indian food culture, born in India, brought up in Malawi and the UK and fused with the best of New Zealand.

Check for the recipes from Ashia's food moments on Extra Bites on Gilly's Substack

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Her first book, Bahari: Recipes from an Omani Kitchen and Beyond is out today, but it’s been a long time coming; the Jane Grigson Trust Award which she won in 2023 is the annual pointer to the best of the brand new food writers before their books are even finished, and the world has been longing to see what the fuss is all about. 

Born and brought up in an Omani community in Portsmouth, she tells us how learning about her own food culture has taught her about herself, and shows us around a country which has become so much more than a homeland.

Click here for Gilly's Substack to find the recipes behind the food moments.

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Gemma's journey through dis-ease led to a career in addiction counselling and nourishing DJs and 24 hour party people back to health in her temporary home in Barcelona. Her simple guide to wellness in her second book, The Healing Cookbook is about long term health, and has catapulted her to fame on Saturday Kitchen and This Morning with its immunity boosting shots and medicinal mushrooms to help us supercharge our every day lives.

Do head to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites from Gem where you’ll find some of the recipes they discuss on the show. 

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Our Wild Farming Life is their story of following a dream, moving from South East England to the Scottish Highlands to regenerate an 150 acre farm. It was more than a dream – it was a calling to reconnect with the land, to find out what role people can play in nature, and to tell their story to people who are aching to know the answer. it started with a mind map around a kitchen table. and Gilly began by asking Lynn if she looked back at it now, would she have followed the same path. 

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Check out Gilly's Substack for Nik's Extra Bites

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To kick off a brand new year of life through the prism of food, Gilly is with the Head of Communications and Marketing at Veganuary, Toni Vernelli to talk about the 2024 edition of the Official Veganuary Cookbook.

It's 10 years since Veganuary first made January its own, encouraging people all over the world to try out a meat free month for the sake of our own health and that of the planet. And it’s been a phenomenal success with only two countries in the world - North Korea and the Vatican City - NOT signed up for this year's month long meat free pledge. Gilly finds out the secret of its success.

Do head to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites from the Veganuary crew. And if you want more plants in your life, do listen in next week to Nik Sharma on his latest book Veg Table.

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He talks about his long love affair with France, and particularly with its food, but it’s the edges that we’re after here, The Italianness of the French Riveiera , the spices of  Provence, melting pot of Marseille. It’s about an adventure in French cooking through the prism of the others that make modern France French.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Alex's Frontieres.

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Channel 5 is showing an hour long documentary on December 28th called the 70s Dinner Party in which Gilly joins Dr Annie Gray to talk about the social history of the TV chef. She and Kevin celebrate by diving deeply into the '70s food world through the prism of Fanny Cradock, and find much more than green mashed potato and mince meat omelette.

Head to Gilly's Substack for some Extra Bites on the Channel 5 show.

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The idea began when Jane and Lucas, hunkered down on a winter’s night, as Jane writes in the introduction, wondered if a collective memoir, featuring the shining lights of the British food scene could raise money for the charity Magic Breakfast. With the help of Clerkenwell Boy’s contact list and influence, it’s become the best anthology of its kind that sets a new standard in charity fund raising. 

Click on the link to Gilly's Substack for more delicious things in Extra Bites, and here to buy it.

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It was first book, Brick Lane which first opened the door on what was happening in the kitchen of our East End curry houses, and propelled her into pole position as authority on British Bangladeshi culture. Gilly explores with her why she chose to take us back to Bangladesh and what she wanted to find.

Check into Gilly's Substack to watch Dina's mum make paan.

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A lot has happened since they first met on Zoom to talk about his first book, Your Daily Veg. While the Ukraine war has rocked his family life – his wife is the Ukrainian food writer and Cook for Ukraine champion, Olia Hercules, their three year old son, Wilf was diagnosed with a mild form of autism, and vegetables have actually landed properly on the British plate. Gilly catches up with him on a bench over looking the sea to ponder on the enormity of it all 

Head to Gilly's Substack to see what Joe has cooked up for us over on Extra Bites

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Alexina's series of cookbooks on the five tastes: Bitter, Sweet, Salty, Sour and Umamia is a step-by-step exploration of flavour, and an impressive start to a what looks like a masisve career for this bright young spark who swapped the trading floor for Masterchef in 2020.  

In the first book, Bitter, she sets out to tame bitterness, showing us how to soothe it with dairy, balance it with sweetness and distract it with acidity. But Gilly quickly became much more interested in this super-driven polymath of a woman who has everything food TV needs right now.

Pop over to Gilly's Substack to hear more of Alexina's hidden talents.

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Brutto, the book, is about much more than the recipes of the restaurant. It’s an ode to Florence where we find what Russell calls the 'ugly but beautiful' food that the Tuscan capital is really all about.

Don't forget to head to Gilly's Substack to see what Russell has cooked up over on Extra Bites

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Donal has moved a lot in his massive career on TV, from Eurovision to Saturday Kitchen and on to Food Network in LA. Now, with wife Sofie and their two young boys, he’s come home to Ireland. His 11th cook book, Home Kitchen, is a meditation on home, nostalgia and who he is now as a food writer.

Check Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites from Donal

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After years of writing about the psychology and history of food, this is Bee’s very first cook book. It’s packed with recipes for an easier life in the kitchen, as the sub title suggests, but the Secret of Cooking is not just a treasure trove of simple dishes, but how food can heal, as Bee learnt from her own experience after her husband left her in the summer of 2020.

Head to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites from Bee

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National Dish is a fascinating book which explores how certain foods become the cultural signifiers of France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Turkey. Mixing academic rigour with chats at bars and cook ups in local kitchens, she stirs up a load of our assumptions, but does she find the answer?

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Giulia Scarpaleggia began her food writing career as a blogger and photographer before becoming one of the most respected writers on Italian food. Her book Cucina Povera is all about her respect for the inguity of peasant cooking which reveals the soul of Italian food at its best.

Head to Gilly's Substack to hear why Giulia loves British food writers so much.

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His debut cook book The Farm Table is a beautifully written story of a young man following his dream from cheffing to farming, with goats who think they’re dogs, pigs begging for a tummy tickle and an idyllic walk through the seasons. An audience of 500k on both Instagram and Tik Tok has followed his insipring journey to find himself, while he’s become one of the most compelling advocates for modern British food and regenerative farming. Give that man a Netflix show, and he will save the planet. 

Head over to Gilly's Substack for an Extra Bite of Julius.

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The new edition of her 2005 book Roast Figs, Sugar Snow is a lyrical walk through the autumn leaves and winter wonderlands of her favourite food places in the world as she shares the delicious finds that have made her one of Britain’s most well-respected and award-winning food writers.

It’s a book that makes you feel warmed to your bones. But Diana has been dogged by depression for years, and has faced some major life challenges recently, including cheating death. Gilly was fascinated in how she created such a work of joy, and the dichotomy of pleasure and pain.

Head over to Gilly's Substack to find Diana's personal photos from her trips for Roast Figs, and to hear an early interview for The Write Songs which Gilly did with Diana in 2017.

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The Knepp estate is an extraordinary pioneering wilding project to restore nature which Isabella captured so beautifully in her 2019 book Wilding.  Chris Packham called it ‘A poignant, practical and moving story of how to fix our broken land'. Now, The Book of Wilding breaks that story down into encyclopaedic form for everyone to refer to, however big or small their garden.  

And if you’d like more from Knepp, head over to Gilly's Substack to hear her 2019 interview with Isabella at Knepp where they were joined by that majestic red stag.

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Her book Nostrana, meaning ‘home grown’ is also an extraordinary story of Italian food heritage in New Zealand. It’s the legacy of her grandparents growing a new world for themselves and their fellow Italians during the economic migration in the early 1900s. But as Bri celebrates its publication in the UK - and Nigella's pick in her Cookbook Corner - she tells Gilly how her Instagram page @iatemygarden was never meant for the book shelves.

Check out Gilly's Substack for much more on Bri's permaculture principles than you'll find in the book!

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His book Wasted is packed with recipes for the kitchen waste we all have in our homes, and it’s ingenius. Check Gilly's Substack for a chocolate cake recipe made from stale bread!

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Have a listen to the resilience of this woman – she’s like a hurdler, jumping the barriers of gender, language, money and envy to open her own restaurant in London. She says that this book is for all the women of her home country, for women everywhere whose struggle can lead to such massive change in the world. 

Head over to Gilly's Substack for more from her guests in Extra Bites.

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Petty brought Indonesian food to a hungry public for the first time 20 years ago as a food journalist and chef, and has been cooking for some of the most influential people in the world since. Gilly met her at the British Library to talk about her book, why she chose this most hallowed of literary venues and being a card carrying member of this very British institution.

Check Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Petty and her Indonesian Table

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She's also wife to Britain’s most famous farmer, James Rebanks whose phenomenal success with his books The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral (as featured on Cooking the Books), changed the way we look at farming. 

Now Helen tells the story of The Farmer’s Wife and looks at the values of an old fashioned way of life rooted in hard work and mothering her children on a farm in the Lake District.

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Her book Gohan is the story of her childhood food, fed to her by her Japanese mother in Australia and by her grandparents in Japan. It's the Japanese word for rice, but it also means ‘family meal’ and for Emiko, the only word as the title for her latest book. As she explores who she is through her food, we learn how mothers can hold the key to a child's sense of self, and how complicated - and how simple - that can be.

Click here for more information on Matrescence, and head over to Gilly's Substack to hear more from Emiko on Matrescence

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Her hilarious and often biting ditties on Instagram have won her a new audience which is interested more in her own voice; when she asked Gilly what she thought of an early idea of a book version, she knew it would be a shoo in. How to Butter Toast is a recipe book without recipes, a rhyming route through the how-tos of cooking, but as Gilly finds out, it's also about putting form to an often chaotic life at home!

For more information on Matrescence, click here.

And head to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites.

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Shivi is the Caribbean Queen of Morning TV. She’s the chef on Oti Mabuse’s Breakfast Show, she was the TV Chef on Garraway’s Good Stuff and cooked with the Kemps on Martin and Roman’s Weekend Best. She's a  regular guest on BBC’s Saturday Kitchen, and ITV’s This Morning and has even appeared on Celebrity Mastermind. Her latest book Cook Clever is packed

with cook hacks for her massive audience.

And as a mother to 7 and 4-year-olds and a 9 month baby, she has plenty to say about matrescence. As we aim to explode the word into the national conversation to describe the process of mothering that really never stops, she tell us how's she's getting on.  It’s estimated that perinatal mental health problems alone cost the NHS and social services around £1.2 billion annually, and Shivi is only too ready to share her journey so far. 

For more information on Matrescence, click here.

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But in this first episode of a special series this summer, we’re talking about food through the prism of matrescence, the raw ingredients which make up the heady mix of motherhood and provide the recipe for life. Like adolescence, matrescence shows us a picture of process, and with it an implicit understanding of what that means. Just as adolescents are always adults in training, so matrescents are mothers in training, and that never stops.

The word was coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973 to describe the experience of half the global population but which is barely known, barely discussed, barely acknowledged. On the contrary, we’re supposed to know it all the minute we give birth.  It’s estimated that perinatal mental health problems alone cost the NHS and social services around £1.2 billion annually. Imagine the impact on families and wider society of way post natal mental health issues – the massive lows that come with the roller coaster of emotions of motherhood – at all ages and stages.

The aim of this Cooking the Books series is to introduce the word into the national conversation.  Chetna is the first of four writers, mothers, matrescents who have much to say on the subject throughout the whole of August. For more information and where to get help, click here.

Check Gilly's Substack each week for Extra Bites from each guest.

And if you'd like support with your own matrescence, click here for information

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Maria came to the UK as a student and grew up with her guardian in a village in Kent, far from the colourful food culture spreading through London’s West African communities. But it was her sense of being different that has led to her becoming the word on Sierra Leonian food. Here she goes back to find the food that it took a lifetime to realise was such a big part of her sense of self.

Check Gilly's Substack for Maria's Extra Bites

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His book, Imad’s Syrian Kitchen is so much more than a book of recipes from Syria. It’s the story of gritty determination to make a better life for his family, of meeting angels even  when he was in the depth of despair, and the extraordinary healing that food from home can provide.  

Head over to Gilly's Substack to hear her very first podcast series Jaibli Salaam which tells the story of six Syrian families in Brighton through their food and music memories.

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Check in to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Amy and her honeybees.

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Her restaurant Emily Scott Food, perched on the beach at Newquay, has settled into the excellence of the Cornish food landscape now and as she finds more time to write, she reveals in her second book,Time and Tide, much more of her inner and outer world on the Cornish coast

Her food memories take her through her early tricky relationship with food. And as she explains her process of writing, we get a sense of how this newer career has given her a sense of calm she’s been chasing much of her life. 

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites of Emily reading an extract from Time and Tide.

#emilyscott #emilyscottfood #timeandtide #eatingdisorderrecovery #anorexia 

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As she explores her own story with food, she unravels the complexities of British food culture in conversation with famous friends, Diana Henry, Bee Wilson and Gurd Loyal, academics and school friends.

Head over to Gilly's Substack for Clare's Extra Bites.

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Her latest book, Comfort and Joy: Irresistible Pleasures from a Vegetarian Kitchen celebrates the legacy of her grandfather and the life he built, ground up, for her family in Kenya

Her writing is surely some of the best in Britain today, and her poetic meditations on where we are with an increasingly plant focussed food culture combined with the stunning photography by Kristen Perers, are deeply seductive. This is a gamechanger in vegetarian cook books.

Check Gilly's Extra Bites on Substack to hear Ravinder reading one of these beautiful essays.

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Gilly and Jenny discuss sustainability, politics and why an island nation has such a problem with seafood.

Head over to Gilly's Substack to find Jenny's suggestion of how to write to your MP to fight for the future of our fishing culture.

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It's a subject particularly close to Gilly's heart; her award-winning book Taste and the TV Chef looked at the influence TV chefs have had and could have in changing the way we eat. Her podcast for Leon How to Eat to Save the Planet and her work for Compassion in World Farming, the Food Foundation and Cooking the Books itself itself are all rooted in the interdependence between where food, health, soil and planet.

Expect then, a good old rant about where we are in the race to save the planet, our junk food culture and an unconscious sleepwalk towards doom! Happily, Jenny has a more upbeat approach!

Check Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites each week.

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For festival goers, upcycling hobbyists and outdoor cooking fanatics, James has come up with genius ways to easily build your own. Before she traces the fascinating dark history of the barbecue with James, Gilly asks why a man who admits he can’t even put up a shelf decided to write The DIY BBQ CookBook.

Check out Gilly's Substack for Extra Bites every episode.

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The original Flavour Thesaurus published in 2011 has been called “a masterpiece” and is widely seen as a modern classic with its flavour pairings format inspired by Roget’s Thesaurus.  This sequel is all about plant-led pairings, giving us imaginative and ingenious ideas to make our plant forward diets so much more exciting.

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Saghar was born in Tehran and moved to Rome in 2007 to study at the Fine Art Academy. But by 2009 protests against the new regime broke out in all the major cities and led to what has become known as the Green Revolution or Persian Spring, and suddenly Saghar found herself unable to go home.  

Gilly asks her about her dedication in the book to those who dare to live a life. to those who move ‘braving the seas and the mountains, the men and their borders’.

Head over to Gilly’s Substack as she takes Saghar’s orange rice cake to Claudia Roden whose legendary orange and almond cake is Saghar’s inspiration.

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And while there's plenty of talk about gut health, this episode focusses on mental health and exhaustion after the interview took an unexpected turn.

Gilly asked Jennifer about a rather throwaway line in the introduction to her book about her own recovery from a long illness, and opened a fascinating discussion about the impact of diet on stress and mental health.

For all those suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, long covid, or just life exhaustion, this is for you.

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She’s a historian, a TV chef and a gastroenterologist with a kitchen clinic, and she’s on a mission to prescribe food to fix our obesity crisis. Gilly first meet Saliha on the delicious. podcast when she took her through the fascinating history of food in the Mughal empire in Khazana. They met again for Foodology,  her often hilarious handbook to healthy eating, and now she’s back with The Kitchen Prescription, her no-nonsense doctor’s guide to the gut.

Check Gilly's Substack for Saliha's video on how to make her prebiotic tabbouleh in Extra Bites

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Her book, The Wild Bee Handbook is a fascinating insight into the world of the 'other' bees, the ones that don't make honey but go almost completely unnoticed. Their role in the protection of the planet is mighty, and as the unsung guardians of biodiversity, we all need to know much more about them and what we can do to protect them against the risk of extinction.  

Click here for Sarah's bee friendly recipes on Gilly's Substack

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She’s one of the most successful black women on British TV, a respected pundit on Caribbean cooking on Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet and rocking it in the best frocks on the telly in the Great British Menu. And after her return to her ancestral home of Antigua with her daughter Miquita for the BBC,  she’s rethinking her connection with who she is. Her mix of musings and recipes from her trip though the Caribbean are captured in her first book, The Pepperpot Diaries, a stirring together of her stories and complex layers of identity. 

And as she and Gilly contemplate what it means to be 60, she tells us what it’s felt like waiting to exhale.

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He’ s a best selling author,  a BBC presenter, a podcaster - his podcast The Doctor’s Kitchen is massive, his Instagram following is in 6 figures and somehow he manages to make it to work as a GP.  If anyone can change the narrative about why heatlhy eating is so important for the whole of society, it’s Dr Rupy.

And of course, it all starts in the gut. For two of the recipes from his four food moments, go to Gilly's Substack for some Extra Bites, and to hear Rupy on the latest episode of the Food Foundation Podcast on 5 years of the Sugar Tax, click here

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Her memoir, Andaza tells the everyday stories about life and food in Karachi. It sees the kitchen as a place where young Pakistani girls learn much more from their mothers and grandmothers than how to make a recipe, but how to feed, how to nurture and how to connect.

For Extra Bites accompanying Cooking the Books episodes, go to Gilly's Substack

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Ozlem found fame as a blogger after moving here in 2009, and her supper clubs, meze nights and her book, Ozlem’s Turkish Table have made her the name in Turkish food.

But since her home town of Antakya  was devastated by the recent earthquake, she’s raised thousands for the relief effort with the help of food influencers like Melissa Thompson, Ravneet Gill, Ixta Belfrage and Clerkenwell Boy, as well as a Cooking the Books fundraiser supper club. Gilly catches up with her after an emotional journey back to Turkey, not least because of the death of her mother. 

To donate to the Disasters and Emergencies Commission Turkish and Syrian relief fund, click here

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Sarah has seen massive changes in how our gardens grow over her 25 years as a gardening pundit.  For anyone interested in food and the planet, growing, even if it’s just a few herbs on the window sill, seems a no-brainer.  Her latest book A Year full of Veg gets to the heart of that relationship and how to grow your own kitchen garden.

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Her book Desi Kitchen is part of the current crop of second generation Indian cookbooks which are hitting the shelves right now. But Sarah’s tells the story of the communities in which Desi people from the Indian Sub continent have enriched so much of Britain with their food and spiritual cultures.  

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