Feasting On The Silk Road

When the first weblogs appeared just over a decade ago, they were exactly that - logs or diaries on the web. Food blogs soon emerged in which the authors, keen to share their daily experiences with a global audience, described their home cooking activities and favourite recipes. Some still do that with a consummate professionalism that utterly belies their amateur or semi-professional status - Kalyn Denny's Kalyn's Kitchen and Elise Bauer's Simply Recipes are just two of many shining examples.

After a while, new types of food blog began to emerge. These were the products of writers with a different mission - to educate, inform and entertain in areas of specialist knowledge and expertise. Regular readers of this blog will know that, with no disrespect to the former group, it is this latter group of food bloggers that most turns me on. Especially those who attempt something radically new - those who tread where none have stepped before.

Laura Kelley is such a radical author and I fell in love with her blog the moment I first came across it. So I was delighted to discover that Volume One of Laura's cookbook trilogy, The Silk Road Gourmet, is about to be published by iUniverse and thrilled to be invited to review it. Laura describes herself as a renaissance woman - and as someone who can lay claim to being a writer, public health analyst, anthropologist, photographer, musician, wife, mother and much traveled gourmet, that seems like a well-deserved title. I've been unfair in calling her work a cookbook because it's far more than just a collection of recipes. The Silk Road Gourmet is a voyage of discovery in cultural anthropology that, like the blog that spawned it, examines the cuisines of those societies that flourish along those ancient trading routes between Asia and The Mediterranean that we've come to know collectively by the epithet The Silk Road.

Over some 3,000 years of history, those routes formed a conduit through which thousands of merchants traded silks, satins, perfumes, medicines, jewelry, glassware and human slaves from China in the east to Rome in the west. And they introduced items of food produce and spices - fresh, dried, ripe, in seed form, ground and as oils - to societies which had never encountered them before and which readily incorporated them into their national cuisines. Laura explains: "I began to notice distinct patterns in the use of ingredients by Asian peoples sometimes separated by thousands of miles. For example, pomegranates — the use of which began in Iran in antiquity — are now common ingredients from Georgia... to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.... Successive Persian Empires ruled all of these areas at one time or another... Another example can be found in the distinctly Southeast Asian elements present in Sri Lankan cooking. In this case, lemongrass and roasted rice reveal strong connections between the island nation and countries of that region. Consulting the histories of trade and diplomacy... we find out that there was a vibrant maritime trade... that Sri Lanka had with Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia." Most of us have some degree of familiarity with the food of the Indian sub-continent, Malaysia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam and some of the many distinct cuisines of China. But if you want to discover something of the amazing culinary world of such countries as Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kirghizstan, Nepal, Tibet, Burma, Bhutan, Indonesia, Mongolia, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, The Philippines and Taiwan and how these cuisines have come to be inter-related through the influence of the passage of trade along The Silk Road, then these books are for you. Of course, you don't have to share Laura's anthropological interest in order to enjoy these works. Full of recipes that can be prepared in as little as 15-30 minutes, you can just open a volume, turn on the cooker and settle down for a delicious feast. I'll be doing exactly that! Volume One - Western and Southern Asia - will be available from the end of June 2009 through Amazon online and from Barnes & Noble. Volume Two - The Fusion Cusines of Central Asia, the Himalayas and the Pacific and Volume Three - Eastern Asia and the Pacific - publication dates will be announced later. For more information, see Silk Road Gourmet books section.