Cold Kitchen is warm with promise. It’s the latest project from Caroline Eden, the award-winning author of a trio of travel-laced cookbooks, including Red Sands: Reportage and Recipes through Central Asia, from Hinterland to Heartland and Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes — Through Darkness and Light. Here, she transposes the equation, interspersing travelogues with recipes. Arranged over the course of a year, stories begin in her kitchen in Edinburgh, Scotland, but soon wind their way across Eastern Europe and Central Asia to Uzbekistan, Russia, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, and elsewhere.

“The kitchen has long been a place of submission and serfdom for a great many people, especially women,” she observes. “But it can also be a source of power, somewhere a timid hand can become brave.”

Eden harnesses that power in this “world within a world,” as she calls it, both for crafting dishes and for composing beautifully wrought prose. She has a deft hand with language, able to sketch foods, places, and experiences in a deeply visceral way, whether she’s chugging through a Trans-Siberian Railway adventure that spans desolation, intoxication, and wonderment; falling in love with Latvian rupjmaizes kārtojums, made with rye bread soaked in dark beer, dried fruits, and plenty of cinnamon (“like trifle crossed with Christmas pudding”); or eating a winter melon in Uzbekistan that tastes first of sherbet, “Then a little honey mixed with almond extract and, finally, pineapple and the smoothness of rum.”

Rare sparks of humor shine through, like when she gripes about our idealization of picnics, how we think of them as picture perfect and elegantly executed. “[I]t never is quite like that, is it?” she muses. “Instead, there is a row, or wasps, or rain.” Preach, sister!

Chapters ping back and forth between the coziness and comfort of her kitchen — where she dotes on her beagle, Darwin, doling out treats and affection — and her far-flung travels, all punctuated with apt quotes and contextualizing historical notes displaying a depth of research too often missing from modern travel writing. At times, Eden gets bogged down in the pedantic and pedagogic but then finds her footing again as some new exploration unfolds. 

The unexpected discovery of a single cloudberry in the Scottish Highlands showcases the potential of Eden’s efforts. It was “wrapped, like a gift, in a gauzy spider’s web,” she writes. “Golden-red, the color of cognac, and shaped like its cousin the raspberry, but with fatter, yet fewer, juice-filled drupelet, its solitariness hinted that its life had begun as a seed dropped by a bird; a fugitive out on its own, not part of a patch.”

After debating whether she should, she pops the lone fruit into her mouth (after taking a picture, of course, because picture or it didn’t happen). “Thick, pale golden juice burst like a tiny rain cloud, tart as a lime and sweet as a peach on my tongue,” she recounts.

It’s a rewarding moment of pure pleasure and soulful satisfaction. However, for all of Eden’s insights into the places she visits, the foods she tries, and the dishes she strives to recreate at home, there is little evaluation of what’s driving her throughout these journeys or the growth she’s experiencing because of them.

As her year of observations and memories draws to a close, we are left with a string of anecdotes rather than an unfurled narrative. Eden’s fractured stories feel like travel photos scattered across a table, each a glimpse of a revelation, an adventure, a memorable morsel but lacking deeper connection and void of an emotional thread on which to cling. Ultimately, unfortunately, Cold Kitchen never warms up to its promise.

Nevin Martell is a DC-area-based food/travel/foraging writer, photographer, and author of eight books, including Red Truck Bakery Cookbook: Gold-Standard Recipes from America’s Favorite Rural Bakery. Follow him on Instagram at @nevinmartell.