Food Customs of Kashgar
by Billie Dunn-McMartin, Christopher Collins, Delaney Davis, and Zachery Gruenberg
With Silkworm Anna Kelly
Ässalamu äläykum! Qarshi alımız!
The Tongue Team would like to cordially invite you to a seat at our table. This table stands in a home in the city of Kashgar, located in Xinjiang, China. As you look down to the meal, you start to wonder at how each dish came to be, how it was cooked, where the spices came from; this curiosity takes you beyond the table and into the unknown. This unknown is exactly what our team hopes to uncover for you.
As a guest at our table, you will be transported through time and space to better understand how you and the meal before you got to this moment. It is easy to forget the significance of something as small as a cumin seed or as commonplace as black tea, but the culture and history lies just beneath the surface of everyday life, waiting for the opportunity to be noticed and shared. Take a moment to step into a culture you may know nothing about and share in the universal language of food, the unique and complex nature of cuisine and food customs in Kashgar.
In no way does our presentation or StoryMaps do Kashgar justice. The immense amount of information available is overwhelming, and we merely scratch the surface of food customs in the region. As our professor Eric would say, “our research is a drop in the ocean.” To provide a little insight on how we arrived at our individual interests, we’ve each written pieces highlighting our thought processes and passions. Check them out!
Greetings, readers! I’m Delaney a.k.a. the Lokanta Locator.
In the initial stages of this project, I felt a mite out of place in the Tongue Team: all of the other members were vehemently interested in food, whereas I thought it was interesting, but wasn’t enthralled by it. I’m more drawn to linguistic and cultural studies. However, within our topic, the cultural and historical significance of a meal in Kashgar, I found my niche: teahouses and lokantas. Even here in the United States, I’ve always been fascinated by the welcoming, intellectual feel of cafes, and was thrilled to discover that there was a rough Uyghur equivalent in Kashgar. Lokantas, stemming from the Italian locanda, are the crux of communication in blue-collar Kashgar, mostly avoiding the taint of tourism. I also investigated tea from a narrow view centered on Kashgar: how tea circulated, its history and characteristics in China and Turkey, and how these combined to form the unique tea culture found in the teahouses of Xinjiang. In the beginning I was striving to find academic sources on these establishments and peer-reviewed evidence of their cultural influence. However, most of my information ended up coming from travel blogs and websites or Uyghur associations because lokantas have yet to be presented to mainstream academia. For teahouses, I used some primary sources of travelers in the 18th and 19th centuries, published research novels, and blogs once again. One unexpected aspect of the whole project was the plethora of videographic evidence! Written accounts were scant, but real-life illustrations were plentiful. After preparing this project for the deadline, I don’t feel whole because I don’t feel that my research is whole. However filling in the gaps would be outside of the scope of this course. I hope to continue my research and add on to my maps in the future, and hopefully visit Kashgar to see for myself!
Explore my journey through the histories of tea and lokantas.
It’s me, Billie, the A-naan-ymous Artisan!
Student-generated projects can start out chaotic and frustrating in many ways, due to an excess of ideas and differing interests. The Tongue Team started out much the same; we were practically a group of students thrown together based on small overlaps of interest. While the goal of a cohesive narrative and StoryMap seemed daunting at first, it was miraculous how quickly the Tongue Team unified around one idea: a meal in Kashgar. It took hours of brainstorming and bouncing ideas off of each other, but the concept of tracing elements of a meal and food cultures in Kashgar out along the silk roads stuck. From this topic stemmed a million possible avenues to pursue, many of which we each felt drawn to. I originally felt inclined to look into the preparation of food in Kashgar: the equipment used and the methods of cooking. Bread also became an area of focus for me because of its importance within a meal and the unique ways in which bread, particularly naan, was cooked in Kashgar. In some ways, the core elements to these initial foci stayed the same, but in more ways have I felt my research and interests shift, morph, and evolve into what you see now. My research was wrought with frustration as I found tiny tidbits of juicy new aspects of food culture in Kashgar scattered through all different types of sources, yet very few topics with a depth of information. As time was running short, I had to look at where I was (which in all honesty was all over the place) and limit myself to only two topics of research. I honed in on porcelain and naan. Once I had narrowed my scope I was able to properly do each topic justice in their own ways. The history of porcelain in China and along the silk roads proved more fascinating than I could have expected, leading me to create a StoryMap through time and place. Naan bread, on the other hand, had neither the history nor research I had hoped, but instead held a depth of cultural significance. To me, this project opened up the possibilities of what it means to create research products as well as group work. The passion and creativity within the Tongue Team’s process and end product was rooted in the ability to self-direct and redefine what it means to engage in and convey research. I hope you enjoy the product as much as we enjoyed creating it.
Travel with me and uncover the secrets of porcelain.
Hi! This is Chris a.k.a. The Cumin Cartographer.
That alias will make sense in a minute. From the very beginning, I was interested in spices. In fact, our project almost began focusing entirely on spices, looking at the diffusion of different seeds, peppers, and flowers across the silk road. Thus, when we shifted our focus to the idea of a meal, I was still able to follow my spices hither and yon. The spice I chose to follow was cumin. Not only is this a key spice in traditional Kashgar dishes, it is one that has circumnavigated the entire globe. In many places it was used as a seasoning but, as I was intrigued to find out, was not only limited to food. In my chronological StoryMap, I examine the ways in which cumin infiltrated cultures around the world and how it affected individuals in their daily lives. While some of my characters are fictional, their situations are based on historical facts; the scenarios that I narrate could very well have happened. Regarding background research, I found the history and diffusion of cumin to be surprisingly well-documented around the world. How people used cumin how people used cumin across continents more impressive. I touch on several of these in my Storymap, but there are hundreds more out there that I did not include. Initially, I expected to be hunting through journal articles and cookbooks from different cultures. However, my research ended up being a balance between archeological findings, blog posts by fellow cumin fanatics, and stories told long ago.
Follow my path along the diffusion of cumin!
Hey I’m Zach a.k.a. the Tandoor Technician.
The use of tandoor ovens in Uyghur food customs and the value I place on experiential learning led me to focus on researching how to build the oven. Tandoor ovens were significant to the silk roads because they were easily constructed and could be fueled by practically anything combustible, typically coal. In my part of the project, I focused on the different aspects of food preparation, mainly on the construction of a tandoor and the experience of cooking with it. Experiencing another culture’s food the way they do allows one to better understand and relate to that culture’s lifestyle and values. Finding information on the construction of tandoors was fairly easy; many cultures have their own iterations on earthen ovens that can be traced back to pre-Harappan Indus River Valley. Most of my sources for the historical origins of the tandoor have been from scholarly texts, while the information on construction could be found on various food blogs and Youtube channels. The perspective gained by creating one of these ovens has allowed me to further appreciate the skill and craft that goes into creating and cooking with a tandoor. Additionally, I am amazed by people who are able to use a tandoor commercially. Cooking one meal for a group of four people was a tremendous amount of work; catering a large party, wedding, or other gathering would require an astronomical amount of labor and super heat resistant arms! One thing I am very curious to see is if there are still any outdoor tandoors being used in Kashgar today, and if so, how their exterior surface is maintained. After creating the tandoor oven, filming the process, and preparing a beautiful meal, I feel as though my research into the food customs of Kashgar has just begun.
Watch my dream come to life as our group builds a tandoor oven and cooks a delicious meal in it!
Hello, hello. I’m Anna a.k.a. the Cookie Contributor.
Over the past two and a half months, I have had the pleasure of directly supervising this project as a silkworm. Frankly, I feel like I got the best part of the deal—I got to be a part of two different teams: the teaching team and the student team. From the very beginning, before the students were even involved, the teaching team (made up of 2 professors, 3 library/tech specialists, and 4 TAs/silkworms) knew that we wanted the center of this course to be a research project on a student-generated topic completed as a group and presented online. We were not sure how to get to this end goal, but we knew that this was where we were aiming. I served as the middle-man between my group and our professors, an overseer of group dynamics and timely progress, a strict editor, and a morale-booster (hence my alias). At times, the only help I could provide was asking if they were being overly ambitious given our time constraints. At others, my contribution was sitting at a round table in the library proof-reading for six hours straight. There were bumps along the way, as to be expected, but, standing here at the end, I am amazed at how magnificently this project came to embody our dream for the course. We hoped that students would find a topic they could really be excited about; we hoped they could create something that they could share with the world. I genuinely hope that they are as proud of themselves as I am of them. I anticipate that digital humanities will continue to gain momentum and evolve throughout my lifetime. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
What’s Next? Check out the other projects on The Digital Silk Road at Guilford College!
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