In Silk Roads, food writer Anna Ansari connects areas and cuisines not typically associated in English-language cookbooks, traveling from Beijing, to Baku in Azerbaijan. The closest author/chronicler would perhaps be Paula Wolfert, who is known for her Mediterranean cookbooks spanning France, Morocco, and the “eastern Mediterranean” to include Turkey. Ansari’s food memories originate from her ethnically Turkish family who left Iran and settled in the US.
Cooking
“Deconstructing the layout of China was difficult, but food showed me the way.” At the Chinese Table is memoir by Carolyn Phillips, whose previous book cataloguing 35 regional cuisines of China was nominated for a James Beard award. Books on Chinese cuisine abound, and recently Fuschia Dunlop lay claim to being the Westerner most embedded and prolific on regional Chinese cuisine through attending cooking school in Chengdu, so it was fascinating to learn how Phillips became intrigued by Asia enough to become a self-taught expert in Chinese food, under the tutelage of her very particular epicure husband.
There’s a rather ungrammatical saying which goes “sometimes I eats to live, but mostly I lives to eat.” That’s why we have cookery books; we love to eat and we love the things that go along with eating, namely social interaction and sheer sensual pleasure.
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