Uyghur Roast Lamb

Georgia Freedman brings us this holiday-ready recipe for Uyghur roast lamb (kao yang tui, 烤羊腿) from Anna Ansari's new book Silk Roads: A Flavor Odyssey with Recipes from Baku to Beijing. (See photo at top as well.)

A first-generation American of Azeri-Iranian descent now living in London, Anna takes us on a culinary tour of the Silk Roads with recipes, history and personal stories from Iran to Central Asia and on to China. Here's an excerpt from Georgia's review of the book:

While all of the stories and recipes in this book are wonderful, I keep coming back to the way Anna writes about her time in China as a teenager: to that first taste of lamb and the connections it opened up for her between her ethnically Turkish heritage and the Turkic peoples of far Northwestern China.

"In Beijing, starting with that first bowl of Uyghur noodles, I discovered that I was connected to something much bigger than myself than I had previously understood,” she writes. “Together, my father’s food habits, his memories of food, and the flavors of Uyghur cuisine built a bridge for me to a rich and complex food culture—one that simultaneously existed in Iran, in China, and in immigrant communities across the globe. This was a food culture whose proliferation, transmission, and evolution could be traced back generations and centuries to intrepid travelers and traders who moved across the routes that would one day be dubbed the Silk Roads…. It was my father’s food culture. It was my food culture. And it was the Uyghur’s food culture. All at the same time.”

Here, Anna has shared her version of Uyghur roast lamb with us, a recipe that is based on meals she ate while living in Shanghai. “It was a rare occasion when I ate this dish,” she tells us in the headnote, “but, my goodness, it was memorable. Every time. The leg would arrive on the table and we would ooh and ahh, and we would dig in. Meaty. Lamby. Cuminy. Spicy. Goodness. Exceptional, tender, juicy Uyghur roast leg of lamb.” Obviously, I had to try this dish for myself.
 

We agree with Wirecutter when they recommend our Sichuan Starter Collection and Fuchsia Dunlop's Food of Sichuan as the perfect gift for someone who loves Sichuan dishes but is new to cooking them.