Travelling the SILK ROADS to arrive in Ludlow.
A long held ambition of the senior Nethertons to visit Uzbekistan was finally fulfilled last autumn and decades of anticipation were met with awe and wonder at such a fascinating and beautiful country. However, we were thwarted in our search for an English language Uzbek cook book.
So we are particularly thrilled to be talking to Anna Ansari about her book SILK ROADS: A flavour odyssey with recipes from Baku to Beijing on the Netherton Foundry castle garden stage at Ludlow food festival this Friday 12/9/25 11.00am. Described as the story of the world’s most famous trade routes, retold through recipes; Iranian-American cook and writer Anna Ansari takes us on a culinary, historical, and personal odyssey across the Silk Roads.
She weaves essays, family photography and 90 recipes together, bringing life to the flavours of the Silk Roads – from the walnut groves of her father’s Iranian childhood, across Central Asian markets brimming with fragrant melons and thronged with fat-tailed sheep, and into the neighbourhoods of modern-day Chinese cities.
The descriptions are so evocative that you can almost smell the fragrant Uzbek melons. If like Anna you are “comfortable with blood, guts, and bodily function”, you may still wince at her visceral account of the despatching of a Chinese chicken, but will be comforted by the recipe for Uyghur Big Plate Chicken. And we will be making her Central Asian bread and eating it with strained yogurt to replicate the non and suzma we ate on repeat on our trip.
You will have to put up with a little mutual love bombing, because Anna is almost as big a fan of Netherton Foundry cookware as we are of her writing. This is one of those “in real life” meetings that was destined to happen and we cannot wait to share the tent with Anna and learn more about her travels, her heritage, her family and especially her food.
And a big thank you to Dorling Kindersley and Laura Edwards for the stunning photo of the Quince Bakewell Pudding featured in the book.
