Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

As much as I love to cook, I’m hopeless at reverse-engineering recipes. I’ve eaten plenty of dishes that I wish I could replicate at home, only to be defeated by my lack of skills. (Also, probably, my unwillingness to use as much butter and salt as the original chef likely did.) I have little sense of how to build flavor profiles, how to identify the key ingredient that ties a dish together, how to bring the tastes of another place back home with me. Give me a recipe and I can usually make something halfway decent, but a lot of the meals I’ve enjoyed elsewhere will have to remain memories.

I’m now a step or two closer to some of my old favorites from China, though, thanks to the recent publication of Silk Roads: A Flavor Odyssey with Recipes from Baku to Beijing, by London-based lawyer-turned-food writer Anna Ansari (who is also my graduate school classmate!). Like me, Anna traveled to China and immediately found that the range of food there was far broader than what was available in Chinese-American restaurants back home. Unlike me, Anna has the skills to translate those memories into recipes like Uyghur Lamb Chops, rubbed with cumin and Sichuan peppercorns, and di si xian, “three treasures of the earth” turned into a hearty main dish with the addition of tofu cubes.

Anna also realized that the flavors she tasted in China resembled those she had grown up with during her childhood in Metro Detroit—not the food of the area’s Chinese restaurants, but the Azeri dishes of her Iranian American father’s family. “The food was simultaneously new and exciting for a 17-year-old American,” she writes, “yet familiar and comforting to the palate of a first-generation Azeri-Iranian. Lamb with toothsome noodles was strange and different, while lamb with cumin tasted like something I had eaten all my life.” And thus, her interest in the intersections of food and flavors with geographic connections and history was born.

Each section of Silk Roads begins with an engaging introductory essay that weaves together culinary research, memoir, and travelogue. Anna explains how ingredients accompanied traders, fighters, and migrants as they moved back and forth along the routes between East, Central, and Middle East Asia that we now identify as the Silk Roads. Throughout the recipes that follow, she’s especially interested in how similar dishes emerged in multiple locations, each one interpreted to suit local tastes and available ingredients. Following in this tradition, Anna emphasizes that the 90 recipes of Silk Roads are her interpretations, not the definitive version of any dish. For some cooks, the book will employ familiar ingredients but introduce new flavors; for others, Anna is offering a twist on fare they’ve been eating for years.

I haven’t tried my hand at any of the recipes in Silk Roads yet (I have my eye on Korean-Style Carrot Salad and An Uzbek Plov for this weekend), but reading through the book reassures me that I can handle anything Anna throws at me. She writes the instructions in a light, encouraging manner reminiscent of Julia Child, instructing readers not to sweat it, for example, if their Perfect Pot of Iranian Rice (with Potatoes) sticks when inverted for serving: “Take a deep breath, life the pot from the platter, and see if you’ve done it. You very well may have a perfectly intact, perfectly golden, presentation-worthy round of crispy rice-and-potatoes on your platter. And you may not. If you don’t, join the club.” She’s casual about suggesting modifications and substitutions, clear that home cooks should make the recipes their own.

At a Monday evening book talk and dinner in Ann Arbor, Anna explained that Silk Roads has roots in her reflections on the stories and recipes that get shared as people move from one place to another. Throughout her travels and relocations, Anna has thought about how missing food and missing home are often intertwined. Regardless of how happy someone is elsewhere, she noted, they will still often long for something—a dish, an ingredient, a flavor, a feeling—from home. Although there are “food and flavors that you cannot take with you,” Anna acknowledged, there are ways to reinterpret and reinvent those memories into new dishes to share in new locations. This is one of the central messages of Silk Roads, “a book to remind us that borders are geopolitical constructions and that authenticity and ownership can oftentimes be shared, fluid, or imagined.”

Featured photo: The Silk Roads city of Xi’an, China, March 2005