The Silk Road Gourmet: Volume One: Western and Southern Asia [Paperback]

Laura Kelley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 15, 2009

From the shores of the Black Sea to the sands of the Pacific, the foods enjoyed along the Silk Road whisper tales of connections between the cultures, histories, economies, and regions of Asia. In The Silk Road Gourmet, author Laura Kelley brings the breadth of Asian cooking to your door. Spanning more than thirty countries and including 1,000 recipes, the three volumes of The Silk Road Gourmet explore the cuisines of the countries that traded goods and shared culture along that great lifeline of the ancient world. This first volume surveys the cuisines of Western and Southern Asia from the Republic of Georgia to Sri Lanka and examines the cultural links between the countries that have led them to share ingredients, methods of preparation, and even entire dishes. This cookbook includes recipes for delicious and authentic main-course meat and vegetable dishes as well as appetizers, desserts, sauces, and condiments to grace contemporary, globalized tables. Learn how to prepare Grilled Chicken with Garlic and Walnut Sauce from the Republic of Georgia, Meatballs in Lemon Sauce from Armenia, and Cinnamon Potatoes with Pine Nuts from Azerbaijan.With fully tested recipes and step-by-step instructions, The Silk Road Gourmet brings the exotic home to you.

Editorial Reviews

Review

We tried chicken with apricots in lemon pepper sauce: simple to make and assertively delicious, aromatic, and satisfying. If every dish is as good as this Afghani gem, Kelley's book will prove priceless.
--Mick Vann - The Austin Chronicle

The Silk Road Gourmet is one of those workhorse cookbooks, the kind that . . . will be kept on the kitchen counter while others get stored on the shelf. 
--Rose O'Dell King - Ft. Myers News-Post

The first volume of The Silk Road Gourmet: Western and Southern Asia has been nominated for an award by Le Cordon Bleu's World Food Media Awards.
--Le Cordon Bleu's World Food Media Awards

For those who love to learn about history and the origin of foods. The Silk Road Gourmet is an excellent resource.It is a cross between an anthropology textbook and a cookbook.
--Sarah Parkin - The Phoenix Examiner

Silk Road Gourmet is not an ordinary cookbook. It is a culinary exploration of non-European methods of cooking, tastes and - to a certain extent - a different way of life.  --Manos Angelakis, Luxury Web Magazine

About the Author

Laura Kelley is a scientist, writer and seasoned home cook who published the first volume of her cookbook, The Silk Road Gourmet Volume One: Western and Southern Asia in July of 2009. She has been lucky enough to travel widely and has experienced many cultures and cuisines from Helsinki and the Cape of Good Hope to Hong Kong and back again. She is also a serious amateur photographer and a conservatory-trained pianist who dabbles in orchidculture and rare books and prints when she can. The Silk Road Gourmet - both the book and the blog - are about sharing her experiences and passions for food and life with the world. For more information about Laura or her books and other writings, visit silkroadgourmet.com

Product Details

• Paperback: 372 pages
• Publisher: iUniverse (July 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1440143056
• ISBN-13: 978-1440143052
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #606,277 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Laura Kelley is a scientist, writer and seasoned home cook who published the first volume of her cookbook The Silk Road Gourmet in July of 2009. She has been lucky enough to travel widely and has experienced many cultures and cuisines from Helsinki and the Cape of Good Hope to Hong Kong and back again. She is also a serious amateur photographer and a conservatory trained pianist who can draw and sing and who fancies herself something of a renaissance woman. The Silk Road Gourmet - both the blog and the books - are about sharing her experiences and passions for food and life with the world. For more information about Laura or her books and other writings, visit http://www.silkroadgourmet.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Silk Road Gourmet Cookbook, August 4, 2009

By 

Chef Miles Collins - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Silk Road Gourmet: Volume One: Western and Southern Asia (Paperback)

A review of the Silk Road Gourmet Cookbook and my choice for the best food and travel cookbook of the year....

The only time I ever review a cookbook is if I like it and think you should all know about it, I don't throw praise around because it can come back to haunt you which is why book reviews and other blog recommendations tend to be few and far between on here. For what it's worth I have been collecting cookery books since I started my career as a chef twenty five years ago and despite having spent an unimaginable amount on them over the years there are very few I would actually consider buying again. That to me is the true test of a product, would you buy it again?

Laura Kelley has written a book I would buy again in an instant; she has written the kind of book I would love to be able to write. Food, travel and all things Asian combine to bring us volume one in a series of books detailing the food, culture and history of this wonderful continent. I have waited a long time for this book, having been a keen follower of Laura's blog called The Silk Road Gourmet for a long time I knew Laura was capable of producing a book which could put her wonderful writing onto bookshelves around the world. Anyone who has read Laura's blog will know that she writes with great intelligence, authority and a real love for her subject.

Volume one of the series begins with a part of Asia seldom covered in the mainstream of culinary writing, the West and the South. The journey takes in the countries and cuisines which are steeped in history and whose very traditions have quietly transcended into other people's cultural makeup through centuries of trading and exploration. This book offers a thoughtful, intensely researched insight into the cuisines of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It demonstrates how the spice routes of those earliest of traders helped to shape each countries food and how remarkably similar many of the methods and use of ingredients are.

The choice of dishes is considerable, for the keen amateur cook or the professional chef it offers a new and inspiring diversion from well trodden paths, spice and flavour notes jump out from the pages and transport you to those places we rely on the more dedicated to tell us about.

Take Georgia, we are given a brief overview of the main spices and flavours indicative of the country, fenugreek, saffron, sour cherries, oranges, lemons, savory, allspice, pomegranates and marigold, there are recipes for garam masalas from Pakistan and curry powders from Sri Lanka as well as comparisons of spice mixes between different countries which show how close our culinary borders actually are.

Take your time with this book, it's not just a collection of recipes but if it's a quick dish you are after then each recipe takes between fifteen and thirty minutes to prepare. Go straight to Laura's own favourites if you can't decide, meatballs in lemon sauce, lamb chops in sweet and sour pomegranate sauce or orange-chicken koresh with almonds, pistachios, cinnamon and cardamom.

We live in a society which thrives on telling us how crappy everything is, so when a piece of work such as this becomes available we should recognise one person's huge labour of love and commitment to sharing their knowledge with the rest of us. Buy this book!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars needed a copy editor, December 19, 2009

By 

Julie Logue Riordan (Napa, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Silk Road Gourmet: Volume One: Western and Southern Asia (Paperback)

I'm a member of a cookbook club and 13 of us cooked recipes out of the book. We found the directions too vague, some measurements were off, and while she claims to have tested the recipes several times we seriously doubted it. The index was hopeless, generally the intro of a book tells you about how the special ingredients used these were buried in the back of the book. It as interesting to explore and taste but will probably not use it in the future.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Delicious Recipes in Need of an Editor, December 21, 2010

By 

eternal student (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Silk Road Gourmet: Volume One: Western and Southern Asia (Paperback)

These recipes are fantastic! I cannot emphasize that enough. I've tried 10, not counting sauces and spice mixes, from 5 countries. They can be kind of involved, and some of the ingredients can be tough to find, but they're definitely packed with great flavors, and I'm very glad I tried this book.

My only real complaint is that this book desperately needs an editor. None of the recipes say how many people they serve. The format makes it difficult to find the sub-recipes like the sauces (Instead of the author's name and book title at the top of the pages, I think we'd be better served by having the country and food section listed, e.g. Afghanistan and Meat Dishes, so you can keep track while flipping between recipes, which is often called for. In fact, I made this change to my own copy, and it helped immensely.) Some of the instructions are rather vague or inconsistent and could be cleaned up, but I did muddle through to excellent results.

The index is atrocious; it is almost completely worthless.

If my review sounds harsh, let me say that I really like this cookbook, and can't wait to try volumes 2 & 3 when they come out. However, I sincerely hope the author hires an editor for the following books, preferably someone familiar with cookbooks.