Peter Frankopan’s “The Silk Roads” has been on my night stand for some months now. It’s a hefty presence, nudging me whenever I reach past it for my phone and lighter sorts of entertainment. It’s a book with such intellectual weight that it invites both eagerness and a sort of low-grade anxiety. There is something about reordering your entire view of world history at 9 p.m. that feels … ambitious.
Recipe: Spiced Couscous With Fragrant Steamed Fish
And yet I keep picking it up. Frankopan tilts world history eastward, and the ancient routes of Central Asia become the center rather than the periphery. He traces how these pathways carried not just luxury goods but ideas, religions and diseases, connecting far-flung kitchens and cultures long before we started talking about “globalization.” Among all the accounts of silk merchants and military campaigns, I’m drawn to the ones of barley, wheat and millet, traveling in saddlebags across mountains and deserts.
It’s the kind of book that makes me ask questions that haven’t occurred to me before. Who first decided to mix cardamom with rice, or cinnamon (originally from China) with tomatoes (from the Americas)? What possessed them? What were they looking for? Who first tasted the result and declared it good?
We have a tendency to draw history in straight lines. We want clear origins, neat progressions, definitive end points. This came from there, traveled here, became this. But life is rarely that tidy, is it?
And slowly, I realize that every time I cook, I’m standing at these ancient crossroads.
Take what we broadly call “couscous” — semolina pearls that appear in different forms all over the world. I grew up in Jerusalem eating giant couscous simmered in tomato sauce. My father would make those and serve them with whatever he had around: white beans, a slice of fried fish, simple meatballs seared in olive oil with a sprig of rosemary.
Later I discovered this wasn’t the only way. In North Africa, fine-grained couscous steams over stews of vegetables and lamb. Travel east to Lebanon, and there’s moghrabieh — larger pearls simmering with warm spices and chicken that falls apart. Cross to Sardinia, and there’s fregola, swimming in briny clam juices. In Palestinian cooking, it’s maftoul — hand-rolled and slightly irregular — that makes a bed for roasted eggplant or squash.
I realize that every time I cook, I’m standing at an ancient crossroads.
The same messy reality shows up in cooking techniques. When you leave the couscous undisturbed against heat for a while, a golden crust forms at the bottom of the pan. It reminds me of the foods in other cultures that celebrate this crusty tendency of another grain, rice: Persian tahdig, Spanish socarrat, Korean nurungji.
Maybe there are some universal truths about what tastes good to us humans, regardless of geography or history. Most of us seem to add something sharp and bright at the end of cooking — a squeeze of lemon, a handful of herbs, a drizzle of good olive oil. In this recipe, the finishing touch of hot garlic oil over the fish is borrowed from Cantonese cooking, where ginger and spring onions are an essential part of the mix. The oil hits the fish with a gentle sizzle, the skin tightens slightly and the flesh beneath takes on the flavor of the aromatics.
I find myself wondering now about the hands that have passed these techniques along. We’re all cooking on the shoulders of countless others, most of them entirely unknown to us. It’s a strange kind of inheritance, passed not through bloodlines but through the universal acts of feeding.
This is what keeps drawing me back to Frankopan’s book, I think — this recognition that our kitchens are, in their way, as much products of ancient exchange as our religions or languages or art. When I reach for cinnamon to add to a tomato sauce, I can only assume that I am part of a chain that stretches back hundreds of years and thousands of miles. There’s something both humbling and liberating in that. My cooking isn’t truly mine — it’s just my particular iteration of a much longer story.
I’ll finish “The Silk Roads” eventually, probably in the same piecemeal fashion I’ve been reading it so far. For now, I have this: couscous crisped at the bottom, fish steamed on top — my offering at the crossroads where we all cook.
Yotam Ottolenghi is a writer and the chef-owner of the Ottolenghi restaurants, Nopi and Rovi, in London. He is an Eat columnist for The New York Times Magazine and writes a weekly column for The Guardian’s Feast Magazine.
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