Anna Ansari on the Silk Roads and the origins of everyday foods

The Good Food podcast

Did you know every apple in the world can be traced back to Kazakhstan? In this episode, Samuel Goldsmith sits down with Anna Ansari — Iranian-American cook, former trade lawyer and author of Silk Roads: A Flavour Odyssey with Recipes from Baku to Beijing — to explore how food has connected cultures across Central Asia for centuries.

Anna shares how a plate of Uyghur food in 1990s Beijing tasted unexpectedly like home, why Uzbek plov is far more than the sum of its five humble ingredients, and how cooking Iranian stews became a way to root her blended British-American-Iranian family in tradition. Along the way, they talk nasi goreng technique, the myth of culinary authenticity, and why a Tootsie Roll is her ultimate guilty pleasure.

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