The BBC Radio 6 Music presenter and author of Where the Wild Cooks Go on flamenco, foraging and south Indian food
Cerys Matthews was given two books as a child that she has held on to ever since. The first was Roger Phillips’s Wild Food, the classic forager’s handbook, which first sent her out into the woods and beaches in the west Wales of her growing up. The second was Soodlum’s Selection of Irish Ballads, which inspired a lifelong understanding of music as storytelling, a philosophy that she carried her through her years as “Queen of Britpop” with the band Catatonia, to the present of her much-loved BBC Radio 6 Music show.
The spirit of those childhood volumes also forms a thread through Matthews’s latest creation: a cookbook that doubles as a loose-limbed memoir, traveller’s notebook and poetry chapbook with a built-in Spotify playlist. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of listening to Matthews on Sunday morning radio over the past decade will know that she is equally at home with the music of India, north Africa and the deep south of America, as with the Celtic folk tradition in which she grew up. Where the Wild Cooks Go extends that restless global curiosity to kitchens and flavours.
My father was a huge influence. You don’t realise how much influence you have, even on your most contrary children
I'm just a farmer's wife born out of time
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