In Where The Wild Cooks Go, Matthews discusses food and drink from all around the world, offering simple and sustainable recipes collected during her travels and honed at home. Each chapter is filled with thoughts, history and poetry from the region at hand. Music obviously plays an important role, too: “I’ve always cooked, and I always cook to music, as so many of us do – I get messages from people from their kitchens every Sunday when my radio show goes out,” says Matthews. “This exchange made me want to publish this kooky kind of cookbook: full of the recipes, curiosities and nuggets of wisdom I’d been scribbling in my song book for ever.”
The musical connection is harder to put across in the writing, so Matthews has also curated Spotify playlists of music associated with every culture covered in the book – 15 in total – to listen to as you cook, eat… or any other time. Where The Wild Cooks Go is less a recipe book and more a multisensory travel guide, as well as offering a glimpse into how Matthews herself views the world: “It’s a kind of ‘folk' cookbook, inspired by those who've stirred over fires and conversations shared over the ages. It’s turned out to be almost like a world history book through the prism of food – and makes the idea of hard borders and absolute identity laughable when you read these.”