The World Service Cookbook
The Food Programme
BBC
4.4 • 977 Ratings
🗓️ 4 February 2018
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When the BBC World Service's Language Services moved into New Broadcasting House in central London, different services would take it in turns to host a 'Meet-Your-Neighbour' event to introduce themselves to other parts of the BBC. People started bringing in food that reflected their country or region. Other people took up the mantle and an idea was born. Three years on and this extraordinary collection of recipes has been compiled into a truly global cookbook, available for staff to download.
But this is just more than a collection of recipes - this is food that connects the journalists, correspondents, managers and producers to their homes, and provides a cultural bridge between themselves. Sheila Dillon meets Paula Moio who describes how a fish stew - Calulude Peixe - epitomises long Saturday afternoons in Angola when friends and family come to put the world to rights over long lunches, and how on moving to London a Saturday afternoon could be a poignant and emotional time. Sadeq Saba discusses the flavours of North Iran and why nothing can dampen down the Iranian's love of food. Lourdes Heredia gives Sheila a tour of the fifth floor before unveiling an incredible selection of salsas that has colleges from the African and Middle Eastern sections arguing about which country produces the hottest chilies. BBC Urdu presenter Aliya Nazki talks quinces and Kashmiri food, and Dmitry Shishkin is joined by his daughter Masha to explain how there's a lot more to Russian cooking than meets the eye.
Producer: Toby Field.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the |
| 0:03.8 | podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC. |
| 0:08.6 | It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world. |
| 0:15.3 | What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism |
| 0:19.8 | and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines. |
| 0:23.7 | And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject |
| 0:28.4 | you might not even have thought you were interested in. |
| 0:30.2 | Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment, |
| 0:36.1 | you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:40.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:58.0 | This is Broadcasting House in Central London, which since 2012 has been the home of the BBC World Service. Every week 320 million people all over the world, literally, listen to and watch its broadcasts in English, |
| 1:08.0 | French, Amharic, Pigeon, Vietnamese, Russian, Arabic,, and 32 other languages. |
| 1:15.6 | Doing that takes a lot of people from many countries, |
| 1:18.4 | and what brings them together here on the fifth floor with all their different experiences and histories and |
| 1:26.2 | cultures is food. |
| 1:30.3 | In the fifth floor we always bring food to chair. |
| 1:34.0 | So yesterday for example somebody else brought mamas which is from Nepal. |
| 1:39.0 | I missed that but they said it was amazing. |
| 1:42.0 | Go to African service for what said he was amazing. |
| 1:43.0 | go to African service for one of their celebrations and there will be lots of joll price and |
| 1:47.6 | then Ghanaians and Nigerians would be talking for hours and hours whose j job price is better. |
| 1:53.0 | This curry is very, very Kashmiri, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.