Silk Road Vegetarian. Dahlia Abraham-Klein
flavors with a tangy zing, unlike any grape leaves I have ever eaten before. As I leaf through these pages I can practically smell the savory soups, taste the crisp salads, and I begin to envision dinner parties revolving around the various main, side, and rice dishes. I’m looking forward to following a sumptuous vegetarian meal with the Baked Lemon Rice Pudding or the tasty Rhubarb Crisp.
“I treasure cookbooks that take me on a journey, that challenge me to incorporate a palette of spices with vegetables and use them successfully.”
I love the array of spices that Dahlia skillfully blends, and the rich historical context that she relates through these recipes. I know that she and her family have made them time and again. Her authority shines through on page after beautiful page. Having started a community-supported agriculture group in her Long Island community, Dahlia is in tune with seasonal eating. The realities of urban life in the cool Northeast, however, have led her to become an expert at freezing fruits and vegetables at their peak to enjoy later. I appreciated the step-by-step instructions explaining how and why to use different techniques to make the most of my freezer.
Savor this book, read the introduction and early chapters, understand how and why these recipes came to be. And then, say grace and enjoy.
Stephanie Weaver
author of the Recipe Renovator blog and
Golden Angels: A Pet Loss Memoir
My Culinary Pilgrimage
Every Wednesday, I anxiously check my watch every few minutes until 2 p.m., the hour I pull my car out of the garage to make room for the load of fresh veggies for my Community Supported Agriculture group. At the stroke of two, Cornelius, the driver from Golden Earthworm, a farm on the east end of Long Island, New York, skillfully maneuvers his refrigerated truck just below the drive. He and Edvin, the farmer, are already exhausted from a long day’s work, but they haul box after box up the steep incline to my garage.
Slowly, the garage blossoms—until every nook and cranny holds a box near bursting with good, organically grown foods, the scent of earth still clinging to the just-picked produce. Soon, the CSA will open its doors and the members will come to collect their weekly boxes, buzzing with excitement to see what’s inside. For a few minutes, though, I’m alone with the bounty of summer, fragrant and ready to eat—ears of silken sweet corn, fragrant summer peaches, ripe red tomatoes, sleek green zucchini, dimpled raspberries the color of jewels.
I’ve traveled a long journey to arrive in the middle of this cornucopia. And though it might sound odd, it was a journey that began before I was born—several centuries before, actually, when my ancestors headed east from ancient Israel to Central Asia, joining countless other travelers on the storied trade route known as the Silk Road, where both commodities and cultures mingled. Sometimes, when I’m cozily ensconced in my home in Long Island, New York, surrounded by the riches of my CSA, I feel as though I am traveling with them, still on a Silk Road of sorts. My parents, Yehuda and Zina, instilled in me a love of learning about the many cultures of the world, and this love was often manifest at our table. Like so many people who love food and its historical aspects, I pick up recipes and ideas everywhere I go, from almost everyone I meet, and I fold them into my kitchen repertoire, just as my ancestors did.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I grew up in New York, in a home where fresh, home-cooked food and enthusiastic entertaining, whether with our large extended family or international business associates, was the norm rather than the exception. Our dinner table regularly sat twenty guests from all over the world and was often elbow-to-elbow full. During the holidays, my parents adopted the literal meaning of the biblical words, “All who are hungry, let them come and eat.” It was a festive tableau of silverware clanking, wine goblets clinking to the words, “L’chaim—To life,” a table overflowing with luscious heirloom rice dishes and stuffed vegetables, aromatic stews and fresh fruits.
What distinguished my parents from those of my classmates was that they were part of the ancient Jewish community of Central Asia. In modern times, our family members were scattered all over the world, in Italy, Israel, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, and the U.S., but they could all trace their ancestry to the Babylonian Exile and Persian conquest, in the sixth century BCE. At that time, the great Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and the Jews were forced into exile in Babylonia (now Iraq), which, in turn, was conquered by Persia (now Iran). For several centuries, my family traveled between Persia, Afghanistan and Bukhara (the capital of a province in Uzbekistan) as merchants; they spoke their own Jewish dialect of Farsi, Judeo-Persian, and cooked a kosher interpretation of the local food. In the early part of the nineteenth century, my family finally settled down in Afghanistan, smack in the middle of the Silk Road.
My paternal great grandfather near the Pyramids in 1914.
A family wedding party in Kabul in 1940.
My father at a 1960s Passover Seder meal wearing a traditional silk brocade called a jomah. He is holding a green onion as an illustration for one of the songs.
My grandfather buying sapphires in Burma in the 1960s.
My sister, being held by my father, at her first birthday party in Bombay.
THE SILK ROAD’S CULINARY HERITAGE
For those in the West familiar with it, most equate the Silk Road with China and its immediate neighbors, when in fact it was an extensive, interconnected network of trade routes across the Asian continent connecting East, South, and West Asia with the Mediterranean world, culminating in Italy. These Silk Routes (collectively known as the Silk Road) were important paths for cultural and commercial exchange between traders, merchants, pilgrims, missionaries, soldiers, and nomads from China, India, Tibet, the Persian Empire, and Mediterranean countries for almost 3,000 years.
The lucrative Chinese silk trade, which began during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) gave the “road” its name. Silk, however, was hardly the only commodity that moved along the route. All sorts of goods were traded—chief among them, spices, which were prized for their culinary, medicinal, and cosmetic value.
It’s the culinary heritage of the Silk Road that most fascinates me. If you could visualize the foods of the Silk Road, you’d see a collection of interconnecting sweeps and swirls revealing similarities and variations among cuisines and cultures. Reflecting the influence of the silk and spice trades, there are tastes of India and China in all the cuisines found along the Silk Road; above all, though, the Silk Road is a rich mosaic—each piece related but distinctly different. The same basic dish may be prepared in several different regions, but will vary depending on what grows in each place, how the local people expressed their nationalism, religion, and culture in their cooking, and how they were influenced by travelers. Many Central Asians, my family included, were a motley crew weaving through the trade routes and picking up their customs and dishes along their travels.
Most of the dishes of the region made use of local vegetables and the fundamental staple of the Silk Road: rice. The grain was first cultivated in China and India, and it was at least 5,000 years before it reached Persia in the fourth century BCE. Rice did not play an important role until the eighth century CE, but after that it became the centerpiece of the festive dishes called polows, known under different spellings in neighboring countries. The Bukharian green rice dish known as baksh is a variation on the Persian shevid polo, while the Bukharian oshi mosh (which looks just