Bee Wilson | Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects
Sun 23 Nov 2025 | 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Look around your kitchen. Which objects keep the past alive – a chipped bowl, a battered pan, a salt shaker that once sat on a parent’s table? Which implements hold hidden stories of the people you love?
In her deeply personal and moving new book The Heart-Shaped Tin, home cook, journalist and writer Bee Wilson begins with her own story: when the tin in which she baked her wedding cake fell to the ground on the day her marriage ended. From this starting point she embarks on a journey across continents, cultures and civilisations, uncovering how everyday kitchen objects can embody memory, identity and even survival.
From an inherited china dinner service to a refugee’s rescued vegetable corer, Wilson explores the powerful meanings we attach to the tools we use to cook and eat. Blending her own experiences with the stories of others, she invites us to reconsider what is junk, what is treasure, and how the most ordinary objects can hold extraordinary power.
Join us for what promises to be a thoughtful, tender and unforgettable event.
In conversation with Gurdeep Loyal.
Venue: Old Divinity School
Duration: 1 hour
Event supporte by
Tickets available soon.
Author Biography
Bee Wilson is a cook, food writer and journalist. Her books include Consider the Fork, First Bite and The Way We Eat Now. She writes the ‘Table Talk’ column in The Wall Street Journal. Her book Consider the Fork on the history of kitchen inventions, from fire to ice to pots and pans, was published in multiple languages including Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Estonian, Turkish and Chinese. Her prize-winning book on the psychology of eating and how children’s food habits are acquired, First Bite, was published in 2015. As well as writing about food, she writes about a range of other subjects, including film and biography, especially for The London Review of Books. Bee’s latest book is The Secret of Cooking. She has three children and a dog and lives in Cambridge in the UK.
Chair Biography
Gurdeep Loyal is an award-winning food/travel writer and culinary trends expert. He is the author of Flavour Heroes – 15 Modern Pantry Ingredients To Amplify Your Cooking and was winner of the Jane Grigson Trust Award for his debut cookbook, Mother Tongue – Flavours of a Second Generation’. He has over 20 years’ experience in food and drink – building his career at food institutions including Innocent Drinks, Harrods Food Halls and M&S Food, where he was the Head of Future Food Trends. Gurdeep is a monthly columnist for Olive Magazine and Scribehound Food, as well as being a regular guest on BBC 1’s Saturday Kitchen. He has written about food, travel and diasporic culinary cultures of the world for the likes of Delicious Magazine, Condé Nast Traveller, The Independent, and Borough Market.
