Book Review: With Our Own Hands: A Celebration of Food and Life in the Pamir mountains of Afghanistan and Tajikistan by Frederik van Oudenhoven and Jamila Haider

 

This co-authored book provides the description of the recipes of a longlist of dishes prepared in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan and Tajikistan. It also gives details of the various days of celebrations in this region. I found many interesting points in this book.

A day without Shirchoy in the Pamirs is impossible to imagine. Shirchoy isn’t from these valleys and tea cannot even be grown here. Shirchoy has become more Pamiri than most Pamiri dishes.

In the book the authors inform the reader that farmers in Tajik Rushan tell how, during the Civil War (1992-1997), foreign aid agencies promoted a high-yielding wheat variety to help prevent famine. Later they realized that they made a bad choice as the new variety rotted when placed in the field to dry and the taste was also poor. According to some people the best tasting mixed floor comes from Ghund valley in Shugnan.

One of the apple species found in the area is the ancestor of all cultivated apples in the world. Malus sieversii belongs to the Pamirs and the Tien Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan further to the north. Other fruit trees in the region includes Walnut. The oldest Walnut tree in the Pamirs is a 700-year-old tree in the Tajik valley of Yazguliam. A group of Cuban scientists did the measurements.

Talking about the factor of dependency one farmer from Chidz says: “We became lazy because we received everything”. “We became dependent on Soviet fuel and we are still dependent today. Afghans aren’t. The war has given them an instinct for survival. They are always ready to work. They are ready for everything. When we have a problem, we go and look for a development agency and ask for help. When Afghans have a problem, they look for a development agency and ask for help. When Afghans have a problem, they look for a solution. We feel powerless, because we have become linked to a global system which is entirely out of our control. If oil prices go up, we suffer. If Moscow hits a recession, we feel it here.”

In the book there is also mention of the Haji Rehman Qul. Russian soldiers came to Haji Rahman Qul’s tent at night. He and his father were given the option of getting shot or drink poison. They preferred poison. As soon as the soldiers left the khan fetched a large bowl of yoghurt and drank from it. They vomited it up and rid their bodies of the noxious fluid.

The Amu Darya is a very fast flowing river; only the Mississippi and the Indus move more quickly. As far as irrigation is concerned many villages were quite autonomous in the way they maintained and used their water supply, but as governments, and their thirst for water, changed, so did the freedom communities had over their water. During the Soviet collectivization of land in Tajikistan, first under Lenin then under Stalin, water managements continued to be collective, but its control was taken out of the hands of the people and transferred directly to the central state. Today very few Tajik Pamiri villages have a proper system of water management at all.

This heavy book has a lot of pictures and I doubt if anyone has more encyclopedic information on the subject of food in the Pamir region of Afghanistan and Tajikistan.