Gilly Smith
speaker
1,281 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 30 Jul
Gilly Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.
Appearances
Hello and welcome back to Cooking the Books with me, Jilly Smith, the podcast which takes us through four food moments from the books of our favourite food writers.
It's about all of life through the prism of food.
And this week, I am with an absolute legend, Anissa Halou and her culinary celebration of Lebanon.
Listed by Arabian Business Magazine as one of the 500 most influential Arabs and the 100 most powerful Arab women,
She's among the greats of modern food writing, with the likes of Claudia Rodin and Elizabeth Luard.
After 32 years of writing about the everyday food of the Middle East and beyond, Lebanon takes her back to where she began.
Because you'd actually left the country at 21.
You grew up in Lebanon.
But you have a Lebanese mother and a Syrian father.
And you were living a kind of a much more sort of bourgeois life in Europe and kind of, you know, being an exciting young woman.
And you were curious about the world and where you came from.
And writing about food from your homeland was driven by that kind of curiosity.
But it was rare then to do that.
There was Elizabeth Luard, who was going into people's homes to find out about regional cuisine.
And Gilly Bojan as well was doing that kind of writing.
Again, you know, sort of a young woman traveling the world.
But going into women's houses, sitting there,
In very humble homes and hearing the stories as they're cooking hadn't really been done.
Claudia Rodin obviously was gathering recipes and she was traveling the world from a historical point of view, gathering Jewish dishes in particular, Middle Eastern dishes.
It is.
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