China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Silk Road gourmet
Scientist-turned-foodie explores the exotic cuisines of the world
She’s a scientist — a biologist — and a public-health researcher. But ask Laura Kelley what her driving passion is, and the answer may surprise you.
“Baking bread with Kazak women in primitive ovens, that’s what I love doing,” says the author of The Silk Road Gourmet cookbook and a culinary website and blog based on her travels.
We’re chatting via Skype, and even the remote technology can’t hide the fact that Kelley is thrilled to be grilled about what she’s doing and why.
“I’ve never been a writer — just reports and such,” she confides, “so the book was just a brave new thing.”
How did a biologist who traveled the world on decontamination missions become such a foodie?
“It’s not like I accidentally wandered into it,” she says. “I was born into an old Italian family — we lived in the kitchen. My mother always wanted to feed everybody — if the TV repairman came or 30 relatives, it was all the same: 12 courses and eating all day, meals sort of like you see at Chinese New Year.”
One inspiration: The Viking Cookbook. “That was like combining archaeology, a cooking expert and a sommelier”, noting that the reconstructed cooking for those ancient seafaring Danes was “based on food hints in sagas, etc”. Fascinating, she concedes, but “the best analytical evidence is based on real evidence”.
The Silk Road Gourmet, she says, is really about pattern recognition, recalling her many travels in her public-health career, which began in Thailand working for American Field Service. “I’m trained in pathology, in reading slides to identify types. I saw patterns come together in food.”
One might argue, she writes in The Silk Road Gourmet, that the masalas of western and southern Asia, from Tibet to India, are simply the five-spice powders of the East. She lays out the evidence, first a fullpage table of seasoning mixtures used in the region, then simple comparisons of ingredients.
“Georgians use a combination of coriander, walnuts and lemon juice for meats,” she tells China Daily. “Afghans will change the last ingredient to vinegar and use it on fowl. Indians may change the last item again and use the mixture on fish.”
“I started the website to make those kinds of food connections,” she says.
“For example, pomegranates — the use of which began in Iran in antiquity — are now common ingredients from Georgia to the far northwest to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in the northeast. Examining the political history of the area, we see that successive Persian empires ruled all of these areas at one time or another — often dominating the cultural landscape for hundreds or even thousands of years.”
Identifying markers are shared, she adds.
“The Silk Road was an incredible engine of globalization — we have nothing like it today,” she says. “Well before the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), when the Mongols came to China, people were going all over, traveling, trading.”
Kelley is enchanted by stories of slightly later voyages of the Ming Dynasty’s (1368-1644) seafaring eunuch admiral, Zheng He.
“What a show of China’s power and prestige at the time,” she marvels. “And he brought back mad things — like a giraffe from Africa.”
The Silk Road, she discovered, was not one, or even two or three routes that connected China to the world, but many networks that interconnected — including the seagoing routes documented in the maritime museum at Guangzhou.
“Some of the earliest evidence we have dates from about the year 700, the stone-built grills used by Uygur people,” she says. “Kebabs, in fact, may represent the first West-to-East tech transfer.”
In The Silk Road Gourmet, she says, her mission has been to create authentic flavors. The website is an organic project, and so far she has published one volume of what she hopes will be a four-book set of printed cookbooks. China, she projects, will be the focus of the third volume.
“I found that some cookbook authors are afraid of flavors that are alien, because they assume their readers will be afraid of them,” she says. “But if a dish was a 10 on a scale of hotness, that’s what I wanted to reproduce. Light? Sweet? I wanted to make everything as authentic as I could based on available ingredients.”
Her most effusive food posts at Silkroadgourmet.com are about traditions that Westerners know the least about.
“One of the most interesting things that has happened in the world of food recently has been the publication of a website devoted to the cuisine and food culture of North Korea,” she recently wrote. “It has hundreds of recipes indexed by regions, events and main-ingredient categories and is well-illustrated.
“Be prepared to be surprised,” she says of dishes that range from interesting to “truly delicious”. Pyongyang specialties “include soups with mullet and soft-shell snapping turtle, rice in chicken stock stacked with mushrooms and pickled daikon, and cold buckwheat noodle soup stacked with condiments of sliced meats, kimchi and tofu — a summer dish that is cooled with ice cubes.”
Translation, she concedes, is one reason she has spent “hours” delving into the information and recipes.
“I use a combination of machine translation (Google) and Internet detective work to figure out what in the world the machine translation might actually say,” she chuckles. “If I am really stuck, I have friends fluent in Korean.”
Another cuisine little-known in the world, even though the country is constantly in the headlines: that of Afghanistan, “that wonderful crossroads of cuisines”. A dish of Afghan meatballs “combines cilantro with lemon, garlic and mint for a fantastic offering”, while sweet and spicy butternut squash “is one of the most memorable recipes I’ve encountered, blending ginger with sugar, garlic and coriander”.
For this article, Kelley prepared and photographed chicken kebabs with cinnamon and black pepper with a side of the Afghan cilantro sauce.
“I chose these because you can then talk about the origins of kebabs in the Mediterranean (earliest evidence also in Akrotiri) and their movement into Central Asia and China. The sauce is interesting too, because it has close relatives in both Georgia and India.”
“The legacy of the Silk Road,” she says, “is all around you. You can’t escape it.”