Anna Ansari on Silk Roads: Tracing Food, Migration and Identity Across Asia

Iranian-American writer Anna Ansari joins Lecker to discuss her debut cookbook Silk Roads: A Flavour Odyssey with recipes from Baku to Beijing. Cooking Risotto alla Bukhara in her East London kitchen, we explore how ingredients, people, and culinary traditions have moved along ancient trade routes - and how Anna's own journey from suburban Detroit to China to Scotland connects to these stories of migration and belonging.

We cover:

The movement of ingredients across the Silk Roads (melons from Uzbekistan, spinach from Iran, apples from Kazakhstan)
How Anna's Turkic heritage connects to Central Asian and Chinese cuisines
Experiencing Uyghur food in Beijing as a teenager and recognising familiar flavours
Adapting traditional recipes like bakhash into dishes recognisable in different contexts
The immigrant experience: giving up a legal career to move countries and start over
Cooking rice as a constant across homes and continents
Authenticity, authority, and whose food stories get told

About Anna Ansari:
Anna Ansari is an Iranian-American writer with a background in Asian Studies. A former trade attorney, she now writes at the intersection of food, family and history. Her debut book Silk Roads: A Flavour Odyssey is out now.

Find her: Substack - Where in the World is Anna Ansari? / Instagram @thisplacetastesdelicious

Find all of the Lecker Book Club reads on my Bookshop.org list. [aff link]

Further Listening:
What is a National Dish? with Anya von Bremzen
Gastro-Spirituality with Jenny Lau

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Lecker is a podcast about how food shapes our lives. Recorded mostly in kitchens, each episode explores personal stories to examine our relationships with food – and each other.

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Music by Blue Dot Sessions

Silk Roads with Anna Ansari: Tracing Food, Migration and Identity Across Asia

Lecker

Silk Roads with Anna Ansari: Tracing Food, Migration and Identity Across Asia