(reprint from the 60th Anniversary Commerative, SYA Kaleidoscope)

by Anna Ansari CN’99

On one of our first days in Beijing in September 1998, a group of us set out on our newly purchased bicycles. A classmate who had been to Beijing before wanted to introduce us to a restaurant at which he had previously eaten. As a 16-year-old, Paul’s Mandarin was already impeccable and his charisma unstoppable; we would follow him blindly and trust that he wouldn’t lead us astray. And he didn’t. We wound up down an alleyway in a small restaurant with signage in a script that looked vaguely familiar and not at all Chinese, and gorged on noodles and lamb. This was my first taste of Uyghur food. Though I had only been in Beijing for a short time, from the first bite I knew this food was something different. 

Our meals up until that point had typically consisted of wilted mystery greens with garlic, sautéed tomatoes and scrambled eggs, aubergine stewed so long it nearly liquified, diced and fried tofu in a brown sauce, kung pao chicken, clear brothy soup and, of course, a bowl of steamed white rice. Don’t get me wrong – it had all been delicious. I didn’t know what I was eating most of the time, but I loved it. It tasted somewhat similar to the Chinese food I’d eaten at my favourite Michigan Chinese-American restaurants, but better, fuller, more exciting and flavourful.

The Uyghur food, on the other hand, was something else. No bowls of white rice appeared. No stewed aubergine and mystery greens. Instead, platters were piled high with skewers of lamb, glistening with fat, partially charred from the coals, speckled with cumin seeds and red chilli flakes, a freshly baked round flatbread underneath to catch the dripping lamb juices. Then, a large bowl of noodles that looked like tagliatelle appeared, coated in a faint tomato sauce, topped with chopped red and green peppers, sliced onions and chunks of lamb. 

This was not the Chinese food of suburban Michigan, and this was not the Chinese food of China. And yet there I was, eating this seemingly non-Chinese food in an alleyway in China’s capital city, my teenage mind and world expanding with every bite. This was a whole new world of flavour –but they were flavours I knew and loved almost intuitively. This food was simultaneously new and exciting to a 17-year-old American, yet familiar and comforting to the palate of a first-generation Azeri-Iranian. Lamb with toothsome noodles was strange and different, while lamb with cumin tasted like something I had eaten all my life. 

In Beijing, starting with that first bowl of Uyghur noodles, I discovered that I was connected to something much bigger than I had previously understood. This was a food culture whose proliferation, transmission and evolution could be traced back generations and centuries to intrepid travellers and traders who moved across the routes and roads that would one day be dubbed the Silk Roads by a German Baron. It was my Iranian father’s food culture. It was my food culture. And it was the Uyghurs’ food culture. All at the same time. 

The food culture that I connected to in Beijing in 1998, with that first bowl of Uyghur noodles, is one that spans thousands of miles, from the shores of the Black Sea, over the Caucasus and Pamir Mountains, and across the Tamalakan and Gobi deserts. It is a culture that encompasses ancient Mongol emperors, Kazakh eagle-hunters, Persian tea merchants, Zorastrian prophets, Chinese imperial envoys, and all those who have travelled and lived along the so-called Silk Roads, including myself, my father and my family. These routes carried not only individuals and trade goods, but ideas, flavours, ingredients and memories – all informing and linking to each other across time and space, to this day. Indeed, the Silk Roads take us through the arteries of Asia in centuries past to my father, a 20th-century Iranian immigrant in Detroit, Michigan, and all the way to me, an Iranian-American putting dinner on the table for my family in east London. 

Influences, ingredients, flavours and foods have criss-crossed the world since time immemorial. Tomatoes made their way from the New World to Italy. Chillies crossed oceans to arrive in India. Cinnamon. Corn. Potatoes. They have emigrated and integrated, become embedded in and integral to cultures and cuisines where, to start with, they were nothing more than foreign and unknown imports. Books on food and books on history and even books on trade focus generally on the sea routes, trading patterns and economies of Western European empires and nations and, later, America. Little time and few words have been spent on the transmission of food, flavours and ingredients over land and by non-Western, non-Judeo-Christian travellers, traders, empires and nations, at least in the English language. 

Guide-posted by the fabled routes once traversed by merchants, travellers, adventurers and pilgrims, my forthcoming cookbook, The Silk Roads: Recipes from Baku to Beijing (to be published by DK in October 2025) traces the flavours, ingredients and dishes of the Silk Roads, from Baku to Beijing and beyond, across generations and continents. Together, we travel from the mountainous region in northwest Iran where my father was born and raised, across the Central Asian plains, mountains and desert oases, and into the Uyghur neighbourhoods of China where I spent formative years of my youth and early adulthood, starting of course with my year on SYA. 

Mine is a book about food and cooking, but it is also one about leaving home – and coming home. It’s a book about the flavours, dishes, ingredients and people that have travelled across the most romanticized of those ancient roads. It’s also an immigrant story: a story of what gets taken with us when we leave our homes, what we introduce to others as a way of introducing ourselves, and what remains when we are gone – what pieces and tastes of one culture are introduced and absorbed into new ones. It’s a book about what we bring to the table, and about what we leave behind. It is a book to remind us that borders are geopolitical constructs, and that authenticity and ownership can sometimes be (and oftentimes are) shared, fluid or imagined. 

I hope everyone who reads and cooks from my book comes away with a deeper understanding and enjoyment of not only the foods of the Silk Roads, but also of its people, history and legacy. I hope they feel connected to a region, a route, an imaginary road that they may have only intangibly, fuzzily, dreamily pictured before, if at all. I want to take everyone on a journey across cultures, generations and continents. And, of course, I want to feed everyone some incredible food in the meantime.

To that end, I offer you this recipe which I call “A Memory of Lamian.”  The dish is a translation of a memory. It is as close to that early September day in 1998 as I will ever – can ever – get. And that’s OK. It’s life. We cannot go back. I learned that right around then as well, while reading my forever favourite book, Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, for the first time—an SYA assignment, of course.

I have tried, since then, as did the novel’s main character, to be a traveller – not a tourist – when I leave home, to confront both myself and my native culture, to reevaluate my values, assumptions and worldviews based on experiences, sights, scenes, smells, tastes, conversations and feelings encountered when I travel. SYA gave me that. Paul Bowles gave me that, as well as this maxim to live by, a reminder to cherish the present, to relish in the now – because you can’t go back, ever: “One never took the time to savour the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and fatal, that there never would be a return, another time.” He also gave Kit the fuzzy end of the proverbial lollipop, if you ask me, but that’s neither here nor there.

In any event, I can’t go back to that 1998 alleyway in Beijing-- I can’t be back on SYA, on Xinjiekouwai, at Erfuzhong, no matter how I sometimes wish I could. And I will never have the mind-blowing epiphany of a teenage girl from Michigan, tasting her first bowl of Uyghur lamian; but at least I can have this, and at least I can give it to you. 

I’ve also given you a recipe (download here) and method for making hand-pulled noodles, but feel free to use pre-packaged noodles. There are so many great ones available at Asian supermarkets these days that I only pull my own noodles when I’m really feeling nostalgic. While you can easily use lamb here, I urge you to use mutton instead, as the more mature meat lends the dish a much-deserved deeper, richer flavour.

About Anna's cookbook

Silk Roads: A Flavor Odyssey with Recipes from Baku to Beijing is being released this October

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