The Silk Road Gourmet: Volume One: Western and Southern Asia: 1 [Paperback]

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 recommendations 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.

Volume one of the series begins with a part of Asia seldom covered in the mainstream of culinary writing, the West and the South. The journey takes in the countries and cuisines which are steeped in history and whose very traditions have quietly transcended into other people's cultural makeup through centuries of trading and exploration. This book offers a thoughtful, intensely researched insight into the cuisines of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It demonstrates how the spice routes of those earliest of traders helped to shape each countries food and how remarkably similar many of the methods and use of ingredients are.

The choice of dishes is considerable, for the keen amateur cook or the professional chef it offers a new and inspiring diversion from well trodden paths, spice and flavour notes jump out from the pages and transport you to those places we rely on the more dedicated to tell us about.

Take Georgia, we are given a brief overview of the main spices and flavours indicative of the country, fenugreek, saffron, sour cherries, oranges, lemons, savory, allspice, pomegranates and marigold, there are recipes for garam masalas from Pakistan and curry powders from Sri Lanka as well as comparisons of spice mixes between different countries which show how close our culinary borders actually are.

Take your time with this book, it's not just a collection of recipes but if it's a quick dish you are after then each recipe takes between fifteen and thirty minutes to prepare. Go straight to Laura's own favourites if you can't decide, meatballs in lemon sauce, lamb chops in sweet and sour pomegranate sauce or orange-chicken koresh with almonds, pistachios, cinnamon and cardamom.

We live in a society which thrives on telling us how crappy everything is, so when a piece of work such as this becomes available we should recognise one person's huge labour of love and commitment to sharing their knowledge with the rest of us. Buy this book!

I'm a member of a cookbook club and 13 of us cooked recipes out of the book. We found the directions too vague, some measurements were off, and while she claims to have tested the recipes several times we seriously doubted it. The index was hopeless, generally the intro of a book tells you about how the special ingredients used these were buried in the back of the book. It as interesting to explore and taste but will probably not use it in the future.

These recipes are fantastic! I cannot emphasize that enough. I've tried 10, not counting sauces and spice mixes, from 5 countries. They can be kind of involved, and some of the ingredients can be tough to find, but they're definitely packed with great flavors, and I'm very glad I tried this book.

My only real complaint is that this book desperately needs an editor. None of the recipes say how many people they serve. The format makes it difficult to find the sub-recipes like the sauces (Instead of the author's name and book title at the top of the pages, I think we'd be better served by having the country and food section listed, e.g. Afghanistan and Meat Dishes, so you can keep track while flipping between recipes, which is often called for. In fact, I made this change to my own copy, and it helped immensely.) Some of the instructions are rather vague or inconsistent and could be cleaned up, but I did muddle through to excellent results.

The index is atrocious; it is almost completely worthless.

If my review sounds harsh, let me say that I really like this cookbook, and can't wait to try volumes 2 & 3 when they come out. However, I sincerely hope the author hires an editor for the following books, preferably someone familiar with cookbooks.