Najmieh Batmanglij - Silk Road Cooking: A Vegetarian Journey

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Batmanglij, Najmieh

Silk road cooking: a vegetarian journey / Najmieh Batmanglij. p. cm. ISBN 0-934211-63-9 (alk. paper)

Vegetarian cookery. Silk Road. I. Title.

TX837. B3385 2002

641.5636--dc21

FIRST FIXED LAYOUT EBOOK EDITION

ISBN 978-1-949445-143 ePUB ISBN: 978-1-949445-14-5 Mobi ISBN: 978-1-949445-18-3

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An Uzbek woman offers fresh figs in the Tashkent market. This black variety has been cultivated since at least the fourth millennium bce in Egypt; by bce the tree was domesticated throughout the Middle East and Greece. From there, it spread north and east.

CONTENTS

To my mother, who was a natural herbalist

Our guests the sun that rises in the easttonight,

That glowing heavenly disk will share our feasttonight!

Play us, sweet singers, songs that tell loves secrets, till

Our souls rise up, enraptured and releasedtonight.

Jalal al-Din Rumi / Dick Davis

Come join me on a voyage of culinary discovery, along a path that stretches through the ages and across half the world, from China in the east to the Mediterranean in the west. The path is the ancient network of trading routes known today as the Silk Road.

Cooking traditions are often defined in geographic terms; a cuisine may be associated with a particular province, for instance, or a country or perhaps a wider region such as the Mediterranean. To speak of Silk Road cooking is to invoke spaces and distances far greater, continental in scope. But while the unity is more elusive, it is very real, created by exchanges so slow and subtle as to be almost imperceptible. For centuriesalong with the silk, ivory, incense and other trade goods flowing over the vast networkvegetables, fruits, grains and cooking techniques passed from one civilization to another, to be absorbed and transformed into local specialties. This process of mutual enrichment shaped the cuisines of far-flung cultures in profound ways, especially their vegetarian dishes. It is one of the great stories of cooking yet one of the least known.

I was born in Iran, a country positioned at the center of the ancient trading nexus, looking both east and west. Some of my happiest childhood memories are linked to Silk Road cooking, although of course I had no notion of such a thing at the time. On certain school half-days, when I arrived home early in the afternoon, I would hear distant echoes of a setar and my mother singing verses by the thirteenth-century poet Rumi, a great favorite of hers:

Oh listen to the flute as it complains

The sweet, sad tones drew me to the brightest room in our house, where, sitting on the Persian carpet striped with light and color from the sunshine that seeped through bamboo shades, I found my mother and four or five old

Opposite: A farmer in southwest China embraces rice, the Golden Harvest. The staff of life for half of humanity, rice is sacred throughout Asia.

This page: The Western staff of life is wheat, here being winnowed by an Afghan farmer (top). In a sixteenth- century Persian miniature (bottom), a woman is shown rolling wheat dough for noodles using a technique handed down through the generations.

Introduction /

INTRODUCTION

ladies, all distant relatives. From the crisply ironed white cotton cloths being spread over the carpet and the captivating aroma of fresh dough, I knew it was noodle-making day. Come on in, said the old ladies, tearing off a piece of dough for me to play with.