Western Morning News (Saturday)
FOOD WITH A SENSE OF PLACE
Martin Hesp is inspired by a new book which combines place and recipes in far-flung places
Food and drink should be capable of promoting or providing a sense of place. It’s part of a concept that says: this product or dish could only have come from this area or district, because we have just the right conditions in which the essential ingredients can flourish. And it could be anything, from a type of fish to a dairy cow, from a seafood to a cheese, from a fermented fruit drink, like cider, to a type of tea.
In highly industrialised countries like Britain, this somewhat old fashioned link with the food that fuels us sadly disappeared after the Industrial Revolution, but is hopefully beginning to make its way back. Certainly, it’s something which the team at Raw Food and Drink PR works very hard to promote.
But in many corners of the world it never went away. Which brings me to a remarkable new food-related-book which came to my attention via an online event staged by East Devon’s Shute Festival 10 days ago, at which the highly talented writer Caroline Eden was talking about her adventures in the far-flung corners of Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Now, when you hear of such places you might think: “Not even sure where those countries are on the map. So why should I care about what they eat and drink in such outlandish corners of the planet that I will never visit?”
Maybe I was thinking a little along those lines too – but once I’d picked up a copy of Caroline’s Red Sands, I couldn’t put it down. Indeed, I have made at least half a dozen of the recipes from its pages.
Not, I hasten to add, that the beautifully produced tome is a mere catalogue of recipes – if it were, I’d have called it a cookbook instead of using the clumsier ‘food-related-book’. It does contain recipes, but two thirds of the script relates to Caroline’s remarkable travels in those countries.
And, perhaps because she writes so well, I now have a huge desire to visit the aforementioned Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan for myself.
Here’s an example of the style when Caroline is writing of her stay in the ancient city of Tashkent... “Some mornings, I’d go to the shop under my apartment to buy breakfast: a large golden ‘non-bread’, bulbous sugary-pink tomatoes and bottles of thick, ice-cold kefir. Maybe cherries. None of it imported. Here, a seller will tell you his walnuts are from Samarkand, his apricots are from Fergana. Often, I’d buy a potato samsa and eat it messily as I went back up the stairwell.
“In the afternoon, drivers positioned their cars in the thin tree-shaded lanes that snake through the apartment blocks, popping open their boots to show off their produce: snowy-white cauliflowers and buckets of strawberries, the heart-shaped berries of spring, not summer, in Uzbekistan. If cities and districts are like people with their own distinct personalities, souls and quirks, as indeed they often are, then Old Tashkent is the capital at its warmest and most enticing. With ancient fruit trees entangled with kites, tiny fruit shops and narrow canals, this is where lives are more or less played out as they have been for centuries, the atmosphere retaining the air of a small provincial Uzbek town where elders have the last say.
“Deep in the walled mahallas of Old Tashkent, much life is hidden from view but the occasional open door offers glimpses of courtyards filled with families, laundry, caged birds, laughter and food. On corners are quiet vine-shrouded chaikhanas (teahouses), built for contemplation, next to old bakeries with tiny windows and serving hatches. Bicycles go silently through dusty disorientating alleys and lanes of mud brick housing fronted by giant steel gates.”
Now, I don’t know about you, but word-pictures like this make me want to visit that place. And intersperse such descriptions with recipes and I will want to have a go at making the dishes concerned –
if, that is, I am unable to book a plane to Tashkent any time soon.
Which is why I have been making things such as meat-ball, lavash (pitta bread) and chickpea soup, kulich (Russian Easter bread), mushroom khinkali (dumplings) and, best of all, plov.
Plov is a type of pilaf, or pilau. In other words, to quote an online dictionary: “a rice dish, or in some regions, a wheat dish, whose recipe usually involves cooking in stock or broth, adding spices and other ingredients, such as vegetables or meat, and employing some technique for achieving cooked grains that do not adhere.”
The first such dish you come across in Red Sands is called ‘Emil’s lamb plov with chestnuts, apricots and watercress’. I have made it with good Westcountry lamb, and it is really a top-notch dish – ideal for the stronger flavoured grass-fed lamb bred in uplands, such as Dartmoor or Exmoor.
Anyway, you get the picture. This is a book which is as much about place, as it is about the food and drink to be found in that geographic location. The whole point being that the two things are inseparable.
I cannot imagine why there are not more food-related books in this highly readable and digestible
style. Indeed, I believe there ought to be a Red Sands style tome which focuses on the fertile and productive region in which we live. The author might sometimes have to forgo the idea of using traditional Westcountry recipes which have been handed down over centuries – because we have, alas, lost so much of our culinary heritage – but there are plenty of new and wonderful dishes which local chefs have devised, specially
to bring out the best in the region’s amazing ingredients.
Now that is what I call a cookbook-and-a-half. Caroline Eden has inspired me, not only to want to travel to the four somewhat obscure countries which feature in her book – and make most of the dishes she describes – but she has also prompted me to think about writing a similar account of our own food and drink here in the
Westcountry peninsula. But maybe I’d be the wrong person to do it. Perhaps you need the magic and awe of visiting a place and experiencing its aromas and flavours for the first time. Because the essential beauty of such a book is in the sense of wonder a person has when discovering something utterly new and unexpected.