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Anna Ansari on Silk Roads: Tracing Food, Migration and Identity Across Asia
Iranian-American writer Anna Ansari joins Lecker to discuss her debut cookbook Silk Roads: A Flavour Odyssey with recipes from Baku to Beijing. Cooking Risotto alla Bukhara in her East London kitchen, we explore how ingredients, people, and culinary traditions have moved along ancient trade routes - and how Anna's own journey from suburban Detroit to China to Scotland connects to these stories of migration and belonging.
We cover:
- The movement of ingredients across the Silk Roads (melons from Uzbekistan, spinach from Iran, apples from Kazakhstan)
- How Anna's Turkic heritage connects to Central Asian and Chinese cuisines
- Experiencing Uyghur food in Beijing as a teenager and recognising familiar flavours
- Adapting traditional recipes like bakhash into dishes recognisable in different contexts
- The immigrant experience: giving up a legal career to move countries and start over
- Cooking rice as a constant across homes and continents
- Authenticity, authority, and whose food stories get told
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