Customer Reviews

The Silk Road Gourmet: Volume One: Western and Southern Asia

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

From the same cookbook club as the person who gave a 3-star review: I rate this book a bit higher. The food was absolutely delicious. Some of the author's favorites were mine as well -- the bean salad and meatballs in lemon sauce in particular.

However, several folks encountered problems with recipes that listed ingredients that didn't show up in the instructions (among them, the lemon meatballs -- there was a cup of water listed that was still sitting on the counter when the cook was finished), and one recipe for a dough (apricot crescents) where something was way off (the "dough" you are supposed to knead was more like pancake batter).

We had a number of quibbles about the book's editing, its organization, and the imperfect indexing, we questioned whether the spicing was authentic (foods we think of as very hot, like Vindaloo, were quite mild) and we would have liked more context for the recipes -- the head notes are more about the recipe itself than about how it fits into the culture it represents. But bottom line is, the food tasted great and was easy to prepare. I'd recommend the book, but for experienced cooks who know enough to work around any problems encountered.

My husband and I have been cooking from The Silk Road Gourmet for a little over a month now and simply love it! It brings worlds of food, history and culture together and explains how they are related. It also shows how dishes from one country are related to other dishes. We've cooked seven dishes, 3 meat, 2 rice, 2 veg and really like all of them. Its a wonderful book.

That said, I have a few issues with it. 1.) You have to take your time with the book and actually read it. You will get the most out of it if you spend time with it. Its not a book to pull down from the shelf for a quick or casual recipe, the flavors are very robust and in a couple of cases, challenging in how unusual they are. 2.) Although the author states that its a great book for beginner cooks, we think that experienced cooks will have a better time working with it. Neither my husband or I had any problems with the ingredients, and found some interesting info about their origins in the Introduction and in the Glossary of Unusal Ingredients at the back of the book.

All in all, I recommend this book to anyone who wants to take the time to learn about some of the lesser known cuisines in Western and Southern Asia. The author is apparently planning a second volume on Central Asia - and we are anxious for it to come out!

First of all, I like this book as a book. The design is interesting, and the typefaces are well chosen to complement the text. It's a shame that colour plates are so expensive - this book would have benefited from them, but the monochrome photos are clear and interesting. Maybe this style of binding is unsuitable for a kitchen cookbook, but it's usable.

As to the subject matter: it's fascinating. This is a part of the world I have never visited, and the cuisine is largely unknown outside the area. I live in Japan, so some of the ingredients are a little tricky to find, but happily, there are more and more Indians coming to work in Japan, which makes spices much easier to discover in Japanese stores than, say, ten years ago.

The recipes are clearly explained, with enough "front matter" to give you a clear idea of whether you want to try the recipe or not. For me, measuring in "cups" is very alien (in the UK, we always used grams or pounds and ounces for dry weight or cc or pints for liquid measure). I am still not totally clear what a "cup" means - but I approximate to 200cc, and it seems to work - these are not haute cuisine recipes, anyway. It would be nice to see how many servings are expected from the recipes, as well.

The real joy of the book, though, comes in the explanations of the culinary traditions and the histories and cultures of the different nations. More than just a cookbook. Recommended for anyone who wants to explore different styles of cooking and eating.

Actually I first bought this book at the gift shop after completing the tour of the "Silk Road" at the Museum of Natural History in New York. I had a bit of a head shake when I noticed it was self published, IUniverse, but quick run thru of the recipes convinced me that I needed this book. My wife and I are fans of off-of-the road travelling -- our last 2 vacations have been to the Republic of Georgia and Lebanon. Both countries have fabulous cuisines. I also lived in Afghanistan many years ago, and was excited to see someone who knew a little bit about that cooking.

In other reviews, I've seen riticisms that the book is for more advanced cooks, and perhaps that's a fair cop. It does ask you to find marigold leaves. (But how hard is that?) But the food we've made with the book has been fabulous. Would provide more details, but I'm writing this review enroute to ordering a copy for some good friends, and so must say adieu.

What Laura Kelley does in her cookbook is let us all see how we are truly interconnected - while making us happy with a mouth watering sampler of the REAL Silk Road. Like a Douglas Adams of cookery she teaches us not to be too smug about our ethnic cuisine - all the while telling us to remember the history of the Western and Eastern collisions of what can only be seen as the first global trade... the Silk Road. Asia and the Caucuses, Indonesia, all blend in various regional borrowings one from another - sort of like my kitchen... I had Chinese soup 2 nights ago - with cinnamon and star anise in the spicing - and a quince koresh from Iran tonight.. spiced with saffron and cinnamon. Kelley introduces the reader to the less known Oriental side of the Silk Road - not just the Marco Polo caravans we learn about in grade school - don't worry - there is plenty to cook from the Western end as well as Central Asia. Kelley shows us through food that the Silk Road is the world of trade - of ships - of wealth and cultural borrowing. Recipes jump off the page into the pot and on to the dinner table.. Let's see - for dessert...I'll make.....

Her initial volume begs for an encore .. As we wait - you might want to visit The Silk Road Gourmet Blog for an enlightening walk with one of the most interesting authors I have recently discovered. [...] ( )

The Silk Road Gourmet is a fascinating addition to Asian cook books that I have used over the years. First of all it is a valuable introduction to the foods of many countries, not just the usual subjects. I had never seen much in the way of Afghan or Iranian cook books, let alone Georgia and Azerbaijan (and had never seen cook books from Bangladesh or Sri Lanka). By providing a full complement of recipes from these many countries (not just India, for instance), this book serves as both a wonderful introduction to these wonderful cuisines, but enough options to find something in each that anyone can both cook and enjoy.

But the book is more than just a collection of recipes. Unlike almost any cook book I have come across, reading The Silk Road Gourmet teaches something about the ways Asian cultures have mixed and mingled over the centuries. Laura Kelley shows that what we think of as "national" cuisines--say Indian--are really a reflection of the international contacts that culture has experienced through history. Spices and other ingredients, as well as cooking styles, have spread to all the countries covered in this book by way of trade, migration, and conquest. In other words, there are no truly national cuisines, except to say that a nation's food is truly a reflection of that nation's history. This is an important contribution to the way we should think about food, cooking, and culture.

So, what about the recipes? Well, my wife and I have both cooked a number of recipes from throughout the countries presented in The Silk Road Gourmet and have been thoroughly pleased with the results. We have both traveled extensively in South Asia and have had some of these recipes cooked in fine restaurants and by natives, and the recipes presented here are truly authentic. I recently cooked the Georgian grilled chicken with garlic and walnuts, a dish I had at a leading restaurant in Moscow a few years ago, and the version in The Silk Road Gourmet was better than the restaurant's. I admit I'm not the most skilled cook, but I found the directions easy to follow and the ingredients not too hard to come by, but the results excellent. And since you buy a cook book to cook from, that is the most important criteria.

All in all, an excellent introduction to foods that you may know well (India for instance), some you won't know at all (Armenia or Azerbaijan), and some that you certainly should know better (Afghanistan, Iran).

More than just a cookbook, The Silk Road Gourmet Volume One explores a subject that is culturally univeral in its importance and value. The author provides just enough region specific information to add to the casual reader's knowledge base without becoming too bogged down in details.

The author provides recipes covering the regions of Western and Southern Asia and traces the use and exchange of ingredients along the traditional trade routes. There are a variety of recipes from each country covering appetizers, side dishes, main courses, desserts among other culinary treats.

This book is a wonderful alternative to the traditional cookbook. Pictures of the dishes would be a wonderful addition.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the LibraryThing book review program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255 [...] : "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."