One Kashgar noodle seller boasts that the people of Xinjiang make some 70 different varieties of pasta. The various types of läghmän, which can be pulled round or flat, thick or fine, are just the beginning. In the backstreets of Kashgar, I’ve seen Uyghur men snip macaroni-size bites from strings of dough (dingding somän), and pluck squares from a long ribbon of pasta and toss them through the air into the wok (somän). I’ve watched them pinch the paste into coarse ribbons with wavy edges, or roll it into sheets which are cut into strips once they’ve become dry as leather. And in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, I’ve shared with a group of Kazakhs the most famous Kazakh pasta dish, silky hand-cut sheets served with boiled mutton (narin chöp).
After leaving Sopel’s house, I wander through a clutter of donkey carts and a haze of kebab smoke into a teahouse where Uyghur men gather in the afternoons. Potted plants and a hanging birdcage flank the veranda, where they sit on carpeted platforms that look like old-fashioned bedsteads, smoking hand-rolled tobacco leaves and breaking their nan into bowls of tea. Some unwrap little envelopes of spices, slipping in ground pepper or safflower. I sit among them, eating fresh figs and pomegranates, and before long fall into conversation with Mehmeti Yimin, a lively man in his fifties with a charming manner and sparkling eyes. He tells me he plays in a troupe of musicians who perform at Uyghur weddings.
“There’s one tomorrow—come with me,” he says.
We meet at the teahouse the following day, and soon he is leading me deep into the old city, which calls to mind Marrakech far more than Beijing. The scents of rice and mutton mingle around the entrance to the bridegroom’s house, where a few men are preparing food in an ad hoc kitchen. A vast wok is filled with the essential wedding food, polo, a rich pilaf made with pearly rice, chunks of mutton, and strips of yellow carrot; in another wok a hot-and-sour vegetable stew is simmering.
On an upstairs veranda, Yimin and his band set up their instruments and begin to sing and play, filling the air with rousing, passionate music. Little children run up and down the stairs, and soon a girl has brought me a bowl of polo, to eat with my fingers in the traditional way. (The Chinese call this dish, which is Central Asian in name and style, zhua fan, hand-eaten rice.) “It’s very heavy and rich,” warns Yimin as he sips his tea between songs, “so you should never eat it in the evening, or you won’t sleep soundly.”
As the musicians play on in the bridegroom’s house, a young girl leads me through the lanes to the home of the bride. Surrounded by her girlfriends, she is posing for photographs in a white, Western-style wedding dress, her hands patterned with henna, her hair speckled with glitter. In the next room, the older women of the family sit around a tablecloth on the floor, feasting. They help themselves to deep-fried pastries served with sweetened kaymak cream; almonds, sultanas, and dried apricots; mutton samsa; spongecakes and dough twists; watermelon slices; and towering heaps of nan.
Nan is the staff of life in Uyghur culture and has an almost sacred significance. In the distant past it sustained the Silk Road merchants on their desert journeys. Today, it is used in wedding ceremonies, when the imam invites the bride and groom to share a piece of nan dipped in salted water as a sign of their pledged fidelity, as well as at the wedding feasts. “You can’t have a wedding without nan,” Yimin tells me.
In every village, the circular nan are piled up on stalls along the roads. Some are as wide as dinner plates, pricked into patterns of concentric circles with a gadget made of chicken quills. These large nan serve not only as food but as platters, soaking up the juices of a handful of skewered kebabs or a pile of steaming mutton dumplings. Other nan are smooth and golden, and resemble bialys. And then there are the nan brushed with chopped onion or scattered with sesame seeds, stained green with chopped chives or sweetened with sugar. Fresh from the tandoor they are irresistible. The Uyghurs share their nan-baking craft with a swath of food cultures across South and Central Asia, from India to Afghanistan, Iran to Turkey.
Sitting outside Intizar restaurant the following evening, I look on as a young man tends the grills in a haze of smoke and spices, assembling skewers of raw meat marinated in salt and egg, and sprinkling the kebabs with chile and cumin as he fans them with a wooden board. My kebabs, when they come, are juicy and fragrant, the chunks of lean meat threaded with morsels of delicious fat from the tail of the sheep. Like the Iranians and Central Asians, the Uyghurs prize the meat of the fat-tailed sheep, whose football-size lumps of tail fat hang, obscenely exposed, above the butchers’ stalls in the markets. Whole sheep are slaughtered and cooked for the major Muslim festivals; in the night markets, they are also roasted in tandoors or boiled up with secret-recipe spices into aromatic stews.
The manager of Intizar, a mustached Uyghur called Egiber, stops on his rounds for a chat. He is jovial and flirtatious, assuring me of the aphrodisiac properties of his pigeon and chickpea soup. When his friends pass by, he greets them with an almost Mediterranean warmth, clasping their hands in his own. Yet again, I find it hard to believe I’m in China: it’s only the bilingual menu, where Chinese characters sit alongside the Arabic Uyghur script, that brings me back to reality.
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