Red Sands: food writer Caroline Eden’s journey through Central Asia, chronicling its flavours, people and sights
- More travelogue than conventional cookbook, it is beautifully written an explores how food so often suits its surroundings
- It contains recipes for dishes that Eden tasted along her way, including those for halva, plov and sour cherry borscht
The book is subtitled Reportage and Recipes Through Central Asia from Hinterland to Heartland and in it Eden, who has written two other award-winning books – Samarkand (2016) and Black Sea (2018) – takes the reader on a journey, chronicling the foods she eats, the people she meets, and the sights she sees.
In the “Prelude and Setting” introduction, she writes about travelling through the Kyzylkum (“red sand”) Desert.
“Life’s usual urban markers – glass, advertising, people and concrete – had vanished. Every mile crossed felt acute because, even in the safety of a car, deserts trigger intensities: uneasy mirages of lost directions and fears of supplies running short. But, despite imagined terrors, deserts also excite awe […]
“At some point during this six-hour drive, I don’t recall when exactly, a flat-roofed structure appeared. In front of the rough, squat building a group of men reclined on a steel tapchan, a raised platform for tea drinking, topped with a thinly padded floral mattress, and upon that, a small table on four legs where cups, spoons and teapots glinted. A desert café: an island of comfort in a sea of saffron-coloured scrub and sand […]
“Walking past the lounging men, through thick grey shashlik smoke corkscrewing up from the grill, I went into the kitchen to order what I could smell (for there wouldn’t be anything else). Inside the walls of the clay tandoor were roundels of non bread, each one slowly baking and expanding until golden on top, chewy in the middle and crispy underneath […] Nothing is more soothing than the scent of bread […]