6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
This Easy Dinner Merges Histories (and Fish and Couscous)
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?
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