Silk Road Gourmet – blog

The Lebanese Taverna - Baltimore

I had the opportunity to dine at a really good “Silk Road” restaurant while attending a recent scientific conference in Baltimore, Maryland.  Having picked through a thoroughly unappetizing box lunch at the conference while listening to a series of lectures, I was in the mood for some good food.  I had spotted the restaurant on the cab ride to the hotel and meeting venue and knew I had to try it.   I rounded up a small group of collegial friends – politely accepted the regards of another colleague who said the restaurant choice was too “weird” for him – and set off for the gem of a restaurant on Baltimore’s waterfront:  The Lebanese Taverna.  

The atmosphere of the restaurant was immediately attractive and blended elements of both western and Middle-Eastern design.  The high, curved ceilings were reminiscent of spinnaker sails and the long, low couches set by the tables felt more like a contemporary wine bar than a Levantine restaurant, but the decorative details of traditional glass and pierced metal lanterns and the soft undercurrent of Lebanese music softened the modern edge of the setting.  The scent of grilled meats that wafted from the kitchen also hinted of the great meal that was to follow.

The large menu features an elaborate selection of mezze that can be ordered a la carte for a small or large meal, a small selection of traditional and western salads, and vegetarian and omnivore main dishes that feature kabobs, kofta and schwarma of vegetables, fish and seafood, chicken, lamb and beef. 

Since two of my dinner companions were not well versed in the food of the region, we ordered the Rotisserie Table Mezze which is a sampler of appetizers and main dishes that is a great introduction to Lebanese food.  Our appetizers included an amazing hummus with strong overtones of garlic and citrus; a baba ganoush with a fine depth of flavor; grape leaves stuffed with rice, tomatoes, mint and parsley; a delicately spiced tabooleh, tiny, kibbeh meat balls with pine nuts, almonds in a yogurt sauce; and fatayer b’sbanigh which are small pastries filled with spinach, onions, pine nuts and sumac.  I ordered a side of laban which is a dipping sauce made of yogurt and cucumbers and spiced with garlic and mint and of course there was plentiful amounts of fresh, warm flatbread. 

My third companion was a brilliant and beautiful woman who directs a scientific division in her institution.  Pat sends me marigold petals and hot peppers from her garden, experiments with cooking ethnic food and qualifies as a serious foodie herself.  We both tucked into the platter of delicacies, raving about the tastiness of the dishes.  Our companions were slower to start eating the unfamiliar dishes, but soon outpaced us as the deliciousness of the food overcame their suspicion of the unknown.  As we ate, we also sampled some of the wine on their long wine list.  The portions of the samplers were so large that the two novices thought that the appetizers were the entire meal and were amazed when a large platter of grilled meats – a pile of kabobs – were presented to us as our main course.

The skewered lamb “shish” kebabs were tender and flavorful and accompanied by grilled onions, peppers and tomatoes.  The ground lamb kebabs or kofta were delicious and spiced with sumac, garlic, onions and herbs such as mint and cilantro.  The chicken and fish dishes were also authentic, delicious and like the rest of the grilled offerings gently flavored by the wood fire it cooked over.  The shrimp kabob came with a delicious tahini dipping sauce made from almonds and pistachios.

Alas, we were all too full to sample the desserts, but in all the meal provided delicious and solid introduction to Lebanese food for some and a welcomed return to the foods of the Levant for others.  When compared to the Western Asian versions of these dishes, the tabooleh was more gently flavored and heavier on the herbs than those found in Armenia, while the stuffed grape leaves were similarly delicate when compared to a spicy, citrusy Georgian dolma.  The grilled meats were also of a quieter, gentler variety than those from Afghanistan or Pakistan with copious amounts of ground black pepper, cinnamon or cloves to spice them.  The sumac familiar to some from their adventures in Azeri or Iranian cuisine were found in large quantities as was the spiced yogurt with cucumbers used as a dipping sauce.

We spent the evening dining and talking at a leisurely pace – which I found delightfully authentic as well.  Dinner often goes on for hours in countries of the eastern Mediterranean as it does in the more familiar European countries surrounding the western shores.

If not already evident, I highly recommend the Lebanese Taverna.  The great news is that it has sister restaurants in Washington, DC, and in several locations in Northern Virginia as well.  It is a wonderful restaurant for both omnivore and vegetarian diners or a mixed group.  It is a wonderful restaurant if you want to try Lebanese food for the first time, or if you want to sink in a bit deeper to a rich and varied cuisine that has many relatives along the Silk Road.  (Words by Laura Kelley; Photo borrowed from the Lebanese Taverna – Baltimore website)

The Dark Continent, the Birthplace of Humanity . . . Africa.  All of the lands south and west of the Kingdom of Egypt have for far too long been lumped into one cultural unit by westerners, when in reality, nothing could be further from the truth.  Africa is not one mysterious, impenetrable land as the legacy of the nineteenth Century European explorers suggests, it is rather an immensely varied patchwork of peoples that can be change not only by region and country but by nature’s way of separating people – by rivers and lakes and by mountain ranges and deserts.  A river or other natural barrier may separate two groups of people who interact, but who rarely intermarry, because they perceive the people on the other side to be “different” from them.

African Market

The earliest cultivation of sesame comes from India in the Harappan period of the Indus Valley by about 3500 years ago and from then on, India began to supplant Africa as a source of the seeds in global trade.  By the time of the Romans, who used the seeds along with cumin to flavor bread, the Indian and Persian Empires were the main sources of the seeds.

Tamarind Pods

Another spice still used widely today that originates in Africa is tamarind.  Growing as seed pods on huge lace-leaf trees, the seeds are soaked and turned into tamarind pulp or water and used to flavor curries and chutneys in Southern and South Eastern Asia,  as well as the more familiar Worcestershire  and barbeque sauces in the West.  Eastern Africans use Tamarind in their curries and sauces and also make a soup out of the fruits that is popular in Zimbabwe.  Tamarind has been widely adopted in the New World as well as is usually blended with sugar for a sweet and sour treat wrapped in corn husk as a pulpy treat or also used as syrup to flavor sodas, sparkling waters and even ice cream.

Some spices of African origin that were traded along the Silk Road have become extinct. One such example can be found in wild silphion which was gathered in Northern Africa and traded along the Silk Road to create one of the foundations of the wealth of Carthage and Kyrene.  Cooks valued the plant because of the resin they gathered from its roots and stalk that when dried became a powder that blended the flavors of onion and garlic.  It was impossible for these ancient people to cultivate, however, and a combination of overharvesting, wars and habitat loss cause the plant to become extinct by the end of the first or second centuries of the Common Era.  As supplies of the resin grew harder and harder to get, it was supplanted by asafetida from Central Asia.

Other spices traded along the Silk Road are used almost exclusively in African cuisines today – although their use was common until the middle of the first millennium in Europe and Asia.   African pepper, Moor pepper or negro pepper is one such spice.  Called kieng in some of the cuisines of Western Africa where it is still widely used, it has a sharp flavor that is bitter and flavorful at the same time – sort of like a combination of black pepper and nutmeg.  It also adds a bit of heat to dishes for a pungent taste.  Its use extends across central Africa and it is also found in Ethiopian cuisines.  When smoked, as it often is in West Africa before use, this flavor deepens and becomes smoky and develops a black cardamom-like flavor.  By the middle of the 16^th Century, the use and trade of negro pepper in Europe, Western and Southern Asia had waned in favor of black pepper imports from India and chili peppers from the New World.

Grains of paradise, Melegueta pepper, or alligator pepper is another Silk Road Spice that has vanished from modern Asian and European food but is still used in Western and Northern Africa and is an important cash crop in some areas of Ethiopia.  Native to Africa’s West Coast its use seems to have originated in or around modern Ghana and was shipped to Silk Road trade in Eastern Africa or to Mediterranean ports.  Fashionable in the cuisines of early Renaissance Europe its use slowly waned until the 18^th Century when it all but vanished from European markets and was supplanted by cardamom and other spices flowing out of Asia to the rest of the world.

The trade of spices from Africa to the rest of the world was generally accomplished by a complex network of merchants working the ports and cities of the Silk Road.  Each man had a defined, relatively bounded territory that he traded in to allow for lots of traders to make a good living moving goods and ideas around the world along local or regional.  But occasionally, great explorers accomplished the movement of goods across several continents and cultures.  Although not African, the Chinese Muslim explorer Zheng He deserves special mention as one of these great cultural diplomats and entrepreneurs. 

Traditional Chinese Ship

In the early 15^th Century he led seven major sea-faring expeditions from China across Indonesia and several Indian Ocean ports to Africa.  Surely, Chinese ships made regular visits to Silk Road ports from about the 12^th Century on, but when Zheng came, he came leading huge armadas of ships that the world had never seen before and wouldn’t see again for several centuries. Zheng came in force, intending to display China’s greatness to the world and bring the best goods from the rest of the world back to China.  Zheng came eventually to Africa where he left laden with spices for cooking and medicine, wood and ivory and hordes of animals.  It may be hard for us who are now accustomed to the world coming on command to their desktops to imagine what a miracle it must have been for the citizens of Nanjing to see the parade of animals from Zheng’s cultural Ark.  But try we must to imagine the wonder brought by the parade of giraffes, zebra and ostriches marching down Chinese streets so long ago – because then we can begin to imagine the importance of the Silk Road in shaping the world.  (Words by Laura Kelley. Photo of African Market by Lucavanzolini@Dreamstime.com; Photo of Tamarind Pods by Espion@Dreamstime.com and Photo of Traditional Chinese Ship by Vangelis@Dreamstime.com).

The brilliant polymath of a Chef, Miles Collins, has given a favorable advance review to Silk Road Gourmet Volume 1.  His review begins:

Silk Road Gourmet Cookbook

A review of the Silk Road Gourmet Cookbook and my choice for the best food and travel cookbook of the year….

The only time I ever review a cookbook is if I like it and think you should all know about it, I don’t throw praise around because it can come back to haunt you which is why book reviews and other blog reccomendations tend to be few and far between on here. For what it’s worth I have been collecting cookery books since I started my career as a chef twenty five years ago and despite having spent an unimaginable amount on them over the years there are very few I would actually consider buying again. That to me is the true test of a product, would you buy it again?

Laura Kelley has written a book I would buy again in an instant, she has written the kind of book I would love to be able to write. Food, travel and all things Asian combine to bring us volume one in a series of books detailing the food, culture and history of this wonderful continent. I have waited a long time for this book, having been a keen follower of Laura’s blog called The Silk Road Gourmet for a long time I knew Laura was capable of producing a book which could put her wonderful writing onto bookshelves around the world. Anyone who has read Laura’s blog will know that she writes with great intelligence, authority and a real love for her subject.

To read more of Miles’ review, click here to visit his website.

Here it is! The soon to be published cover for The Silk Road Gourmet Volume 1! I spoke recently with the publisher and she expects the book to start to become available by the end of June – that’s in just a few short weeks! I am thrilled! For me it represents a lot of hard work and, well, pieces of a long-held dream – to share my passion for Asian food and cultures with the world. I’ve snared my first interview and hope to do more of that as the weeks roll out as well.  

Silk Road Gourmet Volume 1 - Book Cover

Your lips drop sweetness like honeycomb, my bride, syrup and milk are under your tongue, and your dress had the scent of Lebanon. Your cheeks are an orchard of pomegranates, an orchard full of rare fruits, spikenard and saffron, sweet cane and cinnamon.”

What substance was revered by the ancients, was used in Cleopatra’s baths to enhance her beauty and pleasure, was used to treat melancholy and a multitude of gastrointestinal ailments and fetched is weight in gold in Philadelphia markets when brought in by Pennsylvania “Dutch” farmers?  The answer is, of course, the stamens from the Crocus sativus flower also known as saffron. 

Akrotiri Fresco of Saffron Gartherers

The earliest pictorial reference we have of saffron cultivation comes from the Minoan civilization on Akrotiri which has a number of frescoes of women cultivating the flowers and using them to treat various illnesses.  The eruption of the Santorini volcano that destroyed their civilization provides the date of around 1600 BC as a fixed point in time for the cultivation of saffron by the Minoans.  The cultivation and use of saffron is probably much older than that, however, because the flower that yields the precious spice hails from Southwest Asia.  The Minoans likely came to saffron as a traded item from the east as part of their great network of sea and land traders that ranged the ancient Mediterranean.   Native to Southwest Asia, the Crocus species that produces the valuable reddish-orange hued stamens treasured by cooks around the world to color and flavor their dishes was created by men and women who used directed selection to breed a new species of flower with extremely long stamens.  That this occurred some 20 centuries before the Common Era is worthy of a bow to the agricultural and commercial sophistication of the early civilizations involved in its use and trade.  

Fine Persian Saffron

The peoples of the Fertile Crescent used saffron as a pigment in cave paintings as early as 40,000 – 50,000 years BCE, and later the Sumerians used it medicinally in remedies and potions.  By about 4000 years ago, the culinary use of saffron had begun, as witnessed in the early Hebrews revering it as a sweet-smelling spice in the words of the Song of Solomon that open this post.  The first scientific documentation of saffron’s use was noted in an early botanical produced for Assyrian King Ashurbanipal in the seventh century BCE. 

Although it is unclear when the cultivation and trade of it began, Persian use of the flower as a dye, perfume and medicine was truly prolific and by the 10^th Century BCE, there is evidence of mass cultivation at Derbena and Isfahan.  By 500 BC, the Persians had spread cultivation of the saffron Crocus corms throughout the Persian Empire along Silk Road routes and cultivation in Northern India and Kashmir was formally underway. 

How saffron reached China is a matter of debate.  Some sources (the Bencao Gangmu) place its arrival as early in the 16^th Century BCE and brought by Persian merchants along the Great Silk Road.  Other sources attribute the arrival in China as later in the 3^rd Century CE and attribute Kashmir as the source of the flower.  It’s likely given the skew of time between the two documents that there were multiple introductions of the spice into China with the earliest coming in 1600 BCE or sometime before.

In Greco-Roman times the Phoenicians dominated the Mediterranean trade of the spice, and when the Romans conquered and later settled Gaul at the dawn of the Common Era, they brought saffron with them into Europe.   European centers of cultivation grew up after the decline of the Roman Empire and the Crusades cut European traders off from important sources of cultivation and trade.   First Basel then Nuremburg, and then by the 14^th Century, trade centers sprung up in the coastal regions of Eastern England.

Modern Saffron Cultivation

Saffron cultivation came to North America with the arrival of Anabaptists originally from Eastern and Central Europe who settled in the Susquehanna River Valley and later became known as the Pennsylvania “Dutch”.  These settlers set up a profitable trade in saffron in the 1730s and 1740s with Spanish settlers in the Caribbean that earned its weight in gold for the saffron farmers.  This trade persisted until the war of 1812 ruined the trade by the destruction of the American merchant vessels that had been used to ship the spice to the Caribbean.  

So once again trade along the land and maritime routes of the Silk Road was instrumental in spreading the use of saffron throughout the ancient known world.  From Fertile Crescent and Persian roots use of the herb for dyes, perfumes, medicine and culinary purposes spread first to Greece and other Mediterranean countries and then to the rest of Asia, Europe and North America.  Highly valued as a drug and aphrodisiac and used by Alexander the Great to heal his battle wounds, saffron’s golden hues and rich blanket of gentle flavor has been used as an ingredient in wine, rice, curries and stews for millennia.  It is a spice that has roots as old as human civilization and was an integral part of the early globalization brought about by the Great Silk Road. (Words by Laura Kelley, photo of Modern Saffron Cultivation © Viperagp | Dreamstime.com)

In previous posts I’ve extolled the virtues of Arab traders in keeping the engine of global commerce and subsequent cultural exchange alive along the Silk Road.  Although the Arabs were indeed an important part of trade along the Silk Road, many other nationalities and ethnicities were as well.  There were Chinese, of course, Greeks, especially along the maritime trade routes, Europeans, and Jewish merchants situated in strategic outposts of both the land and the maritime Silk Road lines.

Chinese Jews Reading a Torah Scroll

Dating back almost three millennia, the Jewish community in Iran is the oldest in Asia. Originating as enslaved subjects in ancient Babylon (now, Iraq), Jews first settled within the territory of modern-day Iran after the Persian emperor Cyrus conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, freeing the Jewish slaves and making them an integral part of the Persian Empire. As Persian subjects, Jews traveled widely and did business in Persian dominated lands from Afghanistan, the Caucasus and Caspian through Central Asia. 

In the Caucasus, the Jews traded with many of the displaced Turkic tribes that were wandering westward and southward, but they formed a special association with the Khazars.  Evidence of great glassworks factories can be found in Orbeti,  Georgia which dates to the 7^th and 8^th centuries.  These factories were likely under Jewish control, because the designs of the glass produced in these factories and especially the shape and the coloration of the beads can be traced to Near-Eastern Jewish glass designs.    Around this time the Khazar king “converted” to Judaism and by the 8^th and the 9^th Centuries, most Khazars followed Judaism as they continued west and south into the Danube basin.

The largest settlements of Persian Jews in Central  Asia was to be found  in Uzbekistan, and Jewish merchants worked the important hubs of commerce along the Central Asian Silk Road in places like Bukhara and Samarkand, helping to establish them as major trading posts.

Mediterranean Jews were great entrepreneurs who controlled a considerable part of the trade in that region and played an important role in developing the economies of those nations. In Alexandria, they monopolized shipping; in Syria they controlled many of the markets and as early as the first few centuries AD, they set up their own silk production industry based in Beirut.  Other arts and crafts that were dominated by Jews in this region were textile dyeing and glassworks – with glass beads often being used to pay for incoming shipments of foreign goods.

Synagogue at Kaifeng

Possibly as early as the first few centuries of the Common Era, large merchant settlements of Jews could be found along the Eastern Silk Road, reaching even into Kaifeng, China.  Early trade documents in a unique form of Hebrew from the area dating from around 400 CE have been found in China that suggest the community was not only in existence, but thriving by that time.   Remains of a great synagogue have also been found in Kaifeng and have been dated to the 11^th and 12^th Century CE.

So the mixing and blending of goods, foods and cultures in countries touched by the great Asian trade routes was accomplished by a wide variety of different types of people – most of whom were merchants – out to make a buck along the Silk Road.  For thousands of years, Arabs, traded with Africans and Greeks and Jews, and Jews traded with Persians, Georgians, Uzbeks and Chinese, and Chinese traded with Indonesians and Thais and Sri Lankans and Arabs who traded with . . .

As bloodlines merged, imported cultural practices became integrated into those held dearly for millennia and modern cuisines emerged from the crucible of history – all blended and formed along the Great Silk Road. (Words by Laura M.Kelley; Photo of Chinese Jews Reading a Torah Scroll from a Lantern Slide in the Michael Blackman, Ltd. Catalogue; Recontruction of the Synagogue at Kaifeng from a website on the Chinese Jews hosted by Kenyon College.)

A recent article in the journal Archaeometry tells of a new discovery of ancient silk in Pakistan’s Indus Valley. The ornaments that contain the fibers have been dated to 2450 – 2000 BC. The really fantastic thing about the find is that analysis of the fibers by electron microscope suggest that the fibers were produced by Antheraea moths indigenous to South Asia. In other words, this is not Chinese silk, this is Pakistani silk.

Since evidence for silk production in China can be dated firmly to the Longshan culture to 3000 BC and a bit less firmly to the Yongshan 5000 – 3000 BC, the find of Pakistani silk is indirect evidence for early trade between China and the Indian subcontinent.  The Harappan people of the Indus Valley apparently valued silk enough and knew enough about its production to create an early indigenous industry in its manufacture.  Until this find, the earliest known production of silk in India was dated to around 1500 BC – so this find in the Indus Valley is indeed significant.

Cooking Silk Cocoons

 The Harappan silks seem to have been made by a process called reeling, in which the strands are collected on a bobbin (more like a wool spinning process) rather than being twisted in short segments into a thread. This produced a coarser, looser and lighter weave than that which is characteristic of Chinese silk.

It is fascinating to speculate about what fueled the origins of this native Pakistani industry.   Were the prices for the Chinese silk too high?  Were traders visits unscheduled and unreliable?  Did Chinese manufacture or weaving technologies change to produce a silk that was in some way unappealing to the Harappans?  So many questions.

Silks and knowledge of its production flowed over the Silk Road as did other elements of culture – beliefs, social customs, as well as food, ingredients and methods of preparation.  In this earlier period of globalization, the Silk Roads were the great information highways of their day.

 Words by Laura Kelley; Photo of Cooking Silk Worm Coccoons by Snappahed| Dreamstime.com;  Special thanks to Shannon F for sending the article to me.