Central Asian Republics

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About

Central Asian Republics a convenient grouping which includes one trio of cuisines, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, plus one pair, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. (Tatarstan is another republic to the north in the Volga region of Russia, but tatar cuisine has its own entry.)

The Russian author Pokhlebkin (1978 in Russian, 1984 in English) has given a conspectus of the foods and foodways of all the constituent parts of the Soviet Union as it was when he wrote, including these five republics. This is a valuable reference (and almost the only one for some areas), but things have changed since then; and, as Pokhlebkin was intent on displaying diversity rather than uniformity, his account does not always give sufficient prominence to the strong Soviet/Russian influence on other republics.