Silk Road Cooking
Review of Batmanglij’s Adventures in Vegetarian Cooking
Batmanglij's cookbook combines recipes, culinary history, food anthropology and travel adventure on the millennia old Silk Road from China to Italy.
- The Great Silk Road
The map at the beginning of the book shows at a glance the range of the Silk Road, in time as well as in space. It is really a web of many trade routes, on land stretching from The Great Wall of China to Genoa, Italy, and by sea connecting the Mediterranean to India, Japan and Indonesia. It crisscrosses even older trade routes, like the prehistoric Incense Route and the Persian Royal Road, which was built by Darius in the sixth century BCE.
Fragmented sea routes gradually complemented and even replaced land routes. But both declined as of 1498, when Vasco da Gama found the direct route from Portugal, around the southern tip of the African mainland, to the Indian subcontinent.
Still, along these routes the various Silk Road food cultures still persist, and this book ambitiously and successfully sets out to uncover them for us. Indeed, Najmieh Batmanglij traveled along the most important parts of the Silk Road herself. She visited farms, markets, and dined with the locals, noting down ingredients and recipes, stories and age-old food customs.
- Vegetarian foods
The caravans that traveled along these routes carried silk, porcelain, iron and steel, hold, ivory and incense… but also vegetables, fruits and nuts, as well as seeds and cuttings for starting new crops elsewhere, and instructions for their preparation.
There are good historical reasons for the fact that most of Silk Road cooking is vegetarian. First, the early various religions along the routes encouraged vegetarian diets. Second, vegetarian ingredients were cheaper than animals. Third, they were easier to transport across the mountains of the Himalaya and the scorching, endless central Asian deserts.
- The recipes
Consequently, all the recipes in the book are vegetarian, from a simple hummus to more involved curries and pulaus. The book is divided into sections: salads; soups; egg dishes; rice dishes; fruit and vegetable braises; pizza, pasta and bread; pastries, desserts and candies; preserves, pickles and spices; and - indispensable to such a book – teas, coffees and sherbets.
Each recipe is headed by the history and geography of the dish, the etymology of the dish’s name (if known), and tips for variations and preserving. The recipe consists of complete and precise instructions. A dish, once cooked by less able hands, does approximate the mouth-watering photographs that accompany almost every recipe.
- Food anthropology
The book strives to place the dishes in their human and geographical contexts. This there are also plentiful photographs (by many contributors) of raw ingredients, the farmers who grow them, cooks and diners.
It also features poems (many from Rumi, called “the son of the Silk Road), folktales and contemporary stories. Most instructive are the longer sections on the history and culture of the staggering array of foods covered in this book.
And this is what this book does best: it brings a culinary adventure to the palate as well as the mind, the stomach as well as the eye. When Batmanglij elaborates the culture of, say, noodles or the omelet, she is thorough and interesting, avoiding academicism and instead delighting all the senses.
Najmieh Batmanglij’s Silk Road Cooking, A Vegetarian Journey, is a must for any kitchen that prizes international tastes and for any person – cook or not – who has ever wondered along which roads this dish and that spice came to us.
