Chris Kimball's Book Reviews
Silk Roads: A Flavor Odyssey with Recipes from Baku to Beijing
By Anna Ansari
The Silk Road, or the trade routes from China west, all the way to Rome and Hungary and beyond, started over 2,000 years ago. It brought goods through Tajikistan and Uzbekistan across the Caspian Sea to Iran, Azerbaijan and Georgia and then into the Middle East and Europe. The Mongols were the most prolific travelers in the early 13th century, extending their reach across 4,000 miles, establishing toll roads, even inventing a form of currency. To view this all through culinary eyes is an interesting proposition but a bit like trying to suss out the history of the universe—the data is incomplete and requires a lot of guesswork. I do not offer up “Silk Roads” as rich scholarly work—the topic is too big and complex for one cookbook—but I do recommend its collection of recipes for inspiration. You can make apple pie with quince, cook yogurt-marinated chicken thighs under a brick, serve warm yogurt soup or a cool yogurt spritzer, or throw together a summer salad of strawberries and tomatoes. You can make shah plov, a rice casserole that includes dried fruit, chicken, nuts, spices and onion, or prepare ab goosht, a lamb stew with potatoes and chickpeas. All the while, you can dream of Samarkand—still there today and worth a visit—as a center for science, the arts and poetry, including the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Who says that you can’t eat the past?
House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home
By John T. Edge
John T. Edge headed up the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) for over 20 years and became instrumental in researching and bringing to light the untold history of Southern cooking. “House of Smoke,” however, is a personal memoir that explores changes in the South through John T.’s lens. The first thing to note is that his writing upholds the rich legacy of Southern authors. About his mother, he says, “At Winthrop, she began to believe that drink could take her where dreams could not.” And then he adds, “Raising me to believe I belonged somewhere else, she protected me from the low horizons of her own childhood.” His childhood was burdened with tragedy—the older brother of his best friend Clinton died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age 12. Years later, someone broke into his family’s house, gouged his dog’s throat with a fire poker and left her to bleed out. He eventually concluded that food and civil rights were related and spent much of his career putting his childhood in Clinton, Georgia, in the rearview mirror while building up SFA. He was ousted from SFA in a culturally politicized changing of the guard. Although John T. seems to have come to terms with his fall from power, his story gets into the belly of the beast—the politics of race and food set in a time of cultural tsunami. At the end of the day the question is, “Who owns history?” As this book reveals, history is a fickle lover, one who has many faces. And where does John T. Edge end up? It’s not Clinton or even his current home in Oxford, Mississippi. Instead, he quotes Flannery O’Connor, “In yourself right now is the only place you’ve got.”
