Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith

Updated: 27 Mar 2025 • 260 episodes
cookingthebooks.com

Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith is the winner of The Guild of Food Writers' Best Broadcast or Podcast Award 2022, and was shortlisted for Fortnum and Mason Best Podcast 2022 and 2024. It's about all of life from climate change to culture and politics to people through the prism of food. It's for foodie book lovers who want to hear something more profound about the way we live, making the link between delicious food and the impact of food production on the land - through books. Hear how A-lister food writers have changed the conversation about food as Gilly talks through their four chosen food moments from their latest books. As she joins the dots between stories from the old country and food identity, plant-based recipes and climate change, she shows how a deeper connection with food really could save the planet. Listen to all your favourite food writers from Claudia Roden to Yotam Ottolenghi, Sheila Dillon to Anna Jones, Prue Leith to Elisabeth Luard, Gill Meller to Ravinder Bhogal, Dan Barber to Raymond Blanc as Gilly finds what's cooking in the minds of our food writing stars. Do support the podcast by subscribing, and PLEASE leave a review. You can do this by clicking HERE for the link to Apple Podcasts, click on Listen on Apple Podcasts under the show title and then click on Rating and Reviews! Thank you so much. For more information and to join the mailing list, visit Gilly Smith Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith is rated in the top 2.5% of global podcasts by ListenNotes and in the top 40 of food podcasts globally by FeedSpot Theme music by Willy Zygier Gilly Smith is also the presenter of the delicious. podcast and Leon's How to Eat to Save the Planet which was highly commended in the Guild of Food Writers Awards 2021. She won the Investigative Food Work Award for Right2Food (now known as the Food Foundation Podcast) in the same awards. She also produced The Big Table for Philip Lymbery, CEO of Compassion in World Farming, and is the multi-award winning author of Taste and the TV Chef: how storytelling can save the planet (Intellect Books 2020) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Show episodes

This week, we’re visiting the kitchens of everyday India to find the food behind closed doors with chef, food writer and broadcaster, Roopa Gulati, 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

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This week, we’re back at Rockwater, Hove with River Cottage writer, Lucy Brazier telling a live audience about her memoir, The Honesty Box. 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

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Laurie Woolever is back on the pod, four years since we last met her to talk about the last book she wrote with the late, great Anthony Bourdain.   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

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06 Mar 2025 • EN

Alissa Timoshkina: Kapusta

This week, as Trump tramples over the future of Eastern Europe – and indeed the rest of Europe, we’re with Siberian-born food writer and co-founder of #CookforUkraine, Alissa Timoshkina. Her latest book, Kapusta: Vegetable-Forward Recipes from Eastern Europe is a celebration of the humble cabbage (and four other vegeta

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This week, we’re back with our favourite doctor, Saliha Mahmood Ahmed and her latest book, The 20 Minute Gut Health Fix.  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 T

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This week, Gilly puts her pack on her back and heads to Thailand, Baja California, Sri Lanka and Mexico with holistic chef Samantha Dormehl to explore her Wanderlust Kichen. 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 thei

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