On the flavor trail

The Silk Road, she discovered, was not one, or even two or three routes that connected China to the world, but many networks that interconnected - including the seagoing routes documented in the maritime museum at Guangzhou.

"Some of the earliest evidence we have dates from about the year 700, the stone-built grills used by Uygur people," she says. "Kebabs, in fact, may represent the first West-to-East tech transfer."

In The Silk Road Gourmet, she says, her mission has been to create authentic flavors. The website is an organic project, and so far she has published one volume of what she hopes will be a four-book set of printed cookbooks. China, she projects, will be the focus of the third volume.

"I found that some cookbook authors are afraid of flavors that are alien, because they assume their readers will be afraid of them," she says. "But if a dish was a 10 on a scale of hotness, that's what I wanted to reproduce. Light? Sweet? I wanted to make everything as authentic as I could based on available ingredients."

Her most effusive food posts at Silkroadgourmet.com are about traditions that Westerners know the least about.

"One of the most interesting things that has happened in the world of food recently has been the publication of a website devoted to the cuisine and food culture of North Korea," she recently wrote. "It has hundreds of recipes indexed by regions, events and main-ingredient categories and is well-illustrated.

"Be prepared to be surprised," she says of dishes that range from interesting to "truly delicious". Pyongyang specialties "include soups with mullet and soft-shell snapping turtle, rice in chicken stock stacked with mushrooms and pickled daikon, and cold buckwheat noodle soup stacked with condiments of sliced meats, kimchi and tofu - a summer dish that is cooled with ice cubes."

Translation, she concedes, is one reason she has spent "hours" delving into the information and recipes.

"I use a combination of machine translation (Google) and Internet detective work to figure out what in the world the machine translation might actually say," she chuckles. "If I am really stuck, I have friends fluent in Korean."

Another cuisine little-known in the world, even though the country is constantly in the headlines: that of Afghanistan, "that wonderful crossroads of cuisines". A dish of Afghan meatballs "combines cilantro with lemon, garlic and mint for a fantastic offering", while sweet and spicy butternut squash "is one of the most memorable recipes I've encountered, blending ginger with sugar, garlic and coriander".

For this article, Kelley prepared and photographed chicken kebabs with cinnamon and black pepper with a side of the Afghan cilantro sauce.

"I chose these because you can then talk about the origins of kebabs in the Mediterranean (earliest evidence also in Akrotiri) and their movement into Central Asia and China. The sauce is interesting too, because it has close relatives in both Georgia and India."

"The legacy of the Silk Road," she says, "is all around you. You can't escape it."