Winner of the Guild of Food Writers’ Best Food Book Award 2019

Winner of the Edward Stanford Travel Food and Drink Book Award 2019

Winner of the John Avery Award at the André Simon Food and Drink Book Awards for 2018

Shortlisted for the James Beard International Cookbook Award

‘The next best thing to actually travelling with Caroline Eden – a warm, erudite and greedy guide – is to read her. This is my kind of book.’ Diana Henry

‘A wonderfully inspiring book about a magical part of the world’ Viv Groskop, author of The Anna Karenina Fix

‘Part travelogue, part recipe book, this is a love letter to “the sea that welcomes strangers”, soaked in colour, history, myth and the flavours of many cultures.’ Nick Hunt author of Where the Wild Winds Are

This is the tale of a journey between three great cities – Odessa, built on a dream by Catherine the Great, through Istanbul, the fulcrum balancing Europe and Asia and on to tough, stoic, lyrical Trabzon.

With a nose for a good recipe and an ear for an extraordinary story, Caroline Eden travels from Odessa to Bessarabia, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey’s Black Sea region, exploring interconnecting culinary cultures. From the Jewish table of Odessa, to meeting the last fisherwoman of Bulgaria and charting the legacies of the White Russian émigrés in Istanbul, Caroline gives readers a unique insight into a part of the world that is both shaded by darkness and illuminated by light.

Meticulously researched and documenting unprecedented meetings with remarkable individuals, Black Sea is like no other piece of travel writing. Packed with rich photography and sumptuous food, this biography of a region, its people and its recipes truly breaks new ground.

‘Eden’s blazing talent and unabashedly greedy curiosity will have you strapped in beside her. If Sybille Bedford or Patrick Leigh Fermor had included a few recipes in their accounts of their journeys, you’d know exactly where to shelve this gem.’ Christine Muhlke, The New York Times

‘The food in Black Sea is wonderful, but it’s Eden’s prose that really elevates this book to the extraordinary. She captures people, history, and the ineffable soul of cities with astonishing, almost novelistic precision – more than once, even in the headnotes, I felt myself getting lost in the world of the story. I can’t remember any cookbook that’s drawn me in quite like this.’ Helen Rosner, Art of Eating judge