BRITAIN is late to unearthing the joys of Georgian food, says writer and food stylist Olia Hercules. “Everybody was so busy with the Middle East, and loving that, that we haven’t ripened to the Georgian thing,” she states. “I’m quite surprised it took so long.”

Our lack of Georgian love is set to change though, with the release of her second cookbook, Kaukasis. A follow up to 2015’s Mamushka, which explored Olia’s Ukrainian heritage, this new collection of recipes focuses on Caucasus - the hub of countries packed together like pickles in a jar at the border of Eastern Europe and Western Asia.

For the book, Olia, 34, returned to the countries that she, her parents and elder brother meandered through on a road trip to visit family in Baku in Azerbaijan, when she was a toddler.

“We drove from the south of Ukraine, through Crimea, took a ferry to Russia and Sochi, and drove through Georgia and into Baku without even warning them. We were just like, ‘Oh, shall we go to Baku?’ - my parents are crazy wanderlusts - so we drove and we got there and it was amazing.”

Returning as an adult, Olia retraced as much of that family trip as possible, gathering recipes and ideas along the way. She toured Georgia - travelling in “half-broken marshrutka cars; little vans that you can go to another side of Georgia in for a fiver!” - and Azerbaijan, going as far as Lankharan on the border, which is heavily influenced, both in food and culture, by its neighbour, Iran.

“We didn’t go into Armenia, but I really wanted to go to Nagorno-Karabakh [a region being contested by Armenia, Azerbaijan and Karabakh leaders], where my auntie’s old house is, but it’s probably destroyed now by war,” says Olia sadly. “It’s too dangerous, they’ve started shooting there again. I just thought, ‘I’m not going to risk it’.”

Today, Olia, who trained at the famous Leiths cookery school and was a chef-de-parti at Ottolenghi, is bustling around the kitchen of her East-London flat, pickling huge, shiny unripe tomatoes, but, she says, no tomatoes can compare to the ones you get at markets in the Ukraine and Georgia. “The best tomatoes I’ve ever tried for sure, they’re massive - the size of your head - but flavoursome, juicy, everything you need from a tomato is there.”

Georgian and Azerbaijani cooking were woven into Olia’s childhood, and growing up in the ex-Soviet Union, where ingredients could be really quite scarce at times. She remembers that, if you were eating out, Georgian restaurants “might be OK for food, otherwise it’d be horrible - otherwise you’d really have to go into people’s homes to eat well”.

Meeting home cooks is still something that fascinates Olia, who includes recipes from the people she met on her travels in Kaukasis.

“Especially in rural areas, if you go to visit someone, they will have a massive barrel of cheese that they make every morning and then they salt it, or they make buffalo butter, which is the most delicious thing I’ve ever tried - I could have eaten it with a spoon,” she remembers.

The markets, particularly in Georgia, are as astounding as the tomatoes, too. “Your mind is blown,” says Olia with a grin. “Especially those who love unusual ingredients. You can have little barberries from Tusheti, there’s crazy wild plants and mushrooms I’ve never heard of before, and alycha plums [similar to greengages]. People use them when they’re firm and green and quite sour to make this plum sauce, tkemali; a hot and sour plum ketchup.”

And, if you’re looking for herbs (huge fresh bundles of purple basil, tarragon and dill are used in almost everything, even refreshing fizzy drinks), the trick is to “look for an Azerbaijani lady - apparently Azerbaijanis grow the best herbs”.

For Olia, a season of pop-ups and cookery sessions now awaits as the rest of us slowly come to realise what we’ve been missing when it comes to Georgian and Azerbaijani food.

“I can be very organised in the kitchen as a chef, but in life, I tend to...” she says, drifting off, before adding with a smile: “It’s all very spontaneous.”

Kaukasis by Olia Hercules, photography Elena Heatherwick, is published in hardback by Mitchell Beazley, priced £25.