The Silk Road Table

Afghanistan and the Khyber cook from one larder. Lamb is the meat and its fat is the cooking medium. Bread comes out of the tandoor at every meal, rice is for guests, and raisins, carrots and pistachios go into the savoury food. Chilli is barely there. What seasons the table is cumin, coriander, black pepper and a bowl of garlic yoghurt with dried mint, and after the meal there is always green tea.

Why it cooks as one zone

The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan runs through the middle of this kitchen and changes nothing about it. Pashtun families on both sides grill the same salted lamb, fry the same flat chapli kebab and argue over which side of the Khyber invented it. Peshawar’s grill houses and Kabul’s kebab stalls are the same idea a day’s drive apart.

The zone sits where three cooking traditions met on the caravan roads. From Central Asia came the dumplings: mantu, steamed around raw minced lamb, belongs to a family that runs from Turkey to Mongolia. The rice is cooked the Persian way, parboiled and then steamed in stock under a cloth-wrapped lid until every grain stands apart. From the subcontinent came the karahi. The Silk Road stopped here, and the kitchen kept a little of everything it carried.

Restraint holds it together. A Shinwari karahi is lamb, salt, black pepper and green chilli and nothing else. Namak Mandi lamb is threaded between cubes of fat and seasoned with salt alone. Where sweetness enters a savoury dish it comes from fruit: carrot and raisin on kabuli pulao, sour cherry in a qorma, candied bitter orange on a wedding rice.

Dairy does the work that spice does elsewhere. Yoghurt is strained thick into chaka, or dried hard into qurut for winter, and turned into the garlic and mint sauce that dresses mantu, aushak, borani and half the table. The sweets lean on milk too: firnee set with cornflour, sheer yakh churned over ice, sheer pira cut into diamonds, all scented with cardamom and served with tea.

The pantry

The ingredients that make a dish belong to the Silk Road Table:

• Chaka and qurut. Yoghurt strained thick, and yoghurt dried hard to keep through winter. Garlic, salt and dried mint turn either one into the sauce that goes under dumplings and borani.
• Dried mint. Rubbed between the palms over yoghurt, soup and doogh, and used far more often than fresh.
• Lamb fat. Ghee or rendered tail fat, dumba in Pashto, is what karahi and chapli kebab are cooked in, and why both taste of lamb first.
• Gandana. A flat-leaved allium somewhere between a leek and a chive, the green in aushak and bolani. Abroad, spring onion, leek and garlic chives stand in.
• Kishmish. Long Afghan raisins, dark or green, in pulao, in haft mewa, and on the plate beside fresh cheese.
• Pistachios and almonds. Slivered over rice and milk puddings, ground into the green dust on gosh-e-fil and kulcha.
• Sella basmati. Parboiled basmati that survives a second steaming whole, which is what a palaw needs.
• Green tea and green cardamom. Qehwa after every meal; boiled dark and turned pink with milk for qymaq chai on occasions.
• Anardana. Dried pomegranate seed, the sour crunch in a Peshawar chapli kebab.

Where to find it

Most of this zone cooks from a supermarket and a good butcher. The rest is at an Afghan, Iranian or South Asian grocer.

In the UK, the Afghan grocers of Southall, Hounslow and Ilford carry kishmish, qurut and gandana when it is in. An Iranian grocer covers qurut as kashk, along with dried bitter orange peel and dried sour cherries. Any halal butcher will cut lamb on the bone for karahi and pulao, and most can find tail fat if asked; lamb dripping or ghee does the same job. South Asian grocers sell sella basmati, anardana, black cardamom and moong dal. For aushak, garlic chives and wonton wrappers come from Wing Yip or See Woo.

In the US, Afghan grocers in Northern Virginia, Fremont and Queens are the reliable source for gandana and qurut. Persian grocers carry kashk, dried bitter orange peel and Sadaf aush noodles. Patel Brothers covers sella basmati, anardana and moong dal, H Mart has garlic chives and wonton wrappers, and a halal butcher handles the lamb.

Two things are worth knowing before you start. Supermarket yoghurt is far milder than the yoghurt of an Afghan home, so several of these recipes add lemon to bring the sharpness back; taste and add more if it needs it. And rice here is judged on separate grains: drain parboiled rice while the centre is still firm, because it finishes cooking in the stock.

The recipes

Thirty-nine Silk Road Table recipes are live: the everyday cooking of Kabul, Herat and the Khyber, the rices and dumplings that mark Eid and a wedding, the kebabs and street snacks of Peshawar and Kabul, the milk sweets and Nowruz dishes, and the teas that close every meal.

Everyday & Weeknight

Celebration & Occasion

Street Food & Snacks

Sweets & Desserts

Drinks