Cooking the Books with Gilly Smith

This week Gilly is with Al and Kitty Tait, the dad and daughter team behind The Orange Bakery.

Kitty was just 14 years old when crippling depression didn’t just change her life but her family’s too. Baking bread was just one of the many things they tried to get her back, but it worked. And some...Just three years later The Orange Bakery is already a thriving business run by Kitty and her dad, Al , and their beautiful book,, Breadsong tells the story.

You can read the transcript here.

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This week, is all about The Food Programme, the Radio 4’s mighty series which has been examining our food, its culture and its politics for 43 years, and its first BBC book by Alex Renton taking us through 13 Foods that Shape our World.

Sheila Dillon, presenter of The Food Programme for much of that time has written the foreword. Gilly first met her back in 2017 for the delicious. podcast when the Food Programme was under threat from Radio 4. A mass outpouring of love for the show, new presenters, and now, a book, are just some of the results of that enforced rethink.

Before Gilly chats to Alex about his four food moments from the book, Sheila reveals her own existential pondering, and a surprising fragility considering her role as doyenne of food in Britain.

And if you've been following Gilly's adventures in cookery @cookingthebookswithgillysmith, you can join in. To get 10% off the Essentials online course, go to leithsonline.com/courses/essential-cooking

Click ‘enrol’ on course page and apply the code at checkout: GILLY10

If you fancy a free Hollandaise mini-course, sign up for a Workshop app account or login at: app.workshop.ws/profile, click ‘Redeem Coupon’ on the sidebar and enter code GILLYSGIFT

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This week, Gilly is off to find Christmas – and a whole lot more - in Africana, the debut cookbook from the new voice in pan African food, Lerato who whisks us off on a tour of the latest obsession in culinary cultures.

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Gilly is with Pam Brunton, chef/owner at Inver restaurant on Argyll and Bute, author, philosopher and star of Rick Stein’s Food Stories on BBC1.

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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This week, Gilly is with New York food writer, Sharon Wee whose book Growing up in a Nonya Kitchen tells the story of Peranakan cuisine, a largely unknown type of cookery from Singapore, Malaysia and Malacca which was part of a craft culture binding Chinese women, including Sharon’s mother, into the fabric of a very particular lifestyle.

Sharon’s book which first came out in 2012 in Singapore has become much better known as the subject of plagiarism in an astonishing story that has gripped the food community over the last few months. She’s not allowed to talk about it for legal reasons, and Gilly is much more interested in a food culture that was part of her early childhood in Penang, so here's the story of the nonyas and the babas and a little known cuisine.

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If you'd like to get online access, ckbk has a 50% Black Friday offer on annual subscriptions, giving unlimited online access to more than 500 cookbooks including Growing up in a Nonya Kitchen: https://app.ckbk.com/subscribe

You can access the book online, and pre-order a print copy, here: https://app.ckbk.com/book/9814346365/growing-up-in-a-nonya-kitchen

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