Bukharian Cuisine: A Taste of the Silk Road

By Josh Tapper for Moment Magazine

Bukharian Friday night dinner is an elaborate affair: Plates of carp doused with garlic sauce and cilantro, garlicky fried fish and mushroom salad flecked with dill, array the Shabbat table, enveloped in the fragrant aroma of non-toqi, a broad, flat, matzoh-like cracker. Nearly always prepared by women, the dishes are exercises in over-indulgence, a relic of days when large, kosher meals were organized to feed families in insular courtyards, hidden from non-Jewish neighbors.

That was the meal one recent Friday at Arsen Abramov’s Toronto home, where several of the more than 200 known Bukharian recipes graced the Shabbat table. Once the plates of fish were cleared, Abramov’s wife, Yelena, brought out platters of lamb-filled samsi, baked puffs similar to the Indian samosa, and a triangular pastry called bichak, filled with stringy orange squash. Those preceded the centerpiece of the Bukharian Friday night table: bakhsh, a brownish-green plov—or rice pilaf—with cilantro leaves and chunks of lamb that was served sliced from a log and packed loosely into the ribs of a roast chicken, where the rice continued to warm.

Plov, in many respects, is the lifeblood of Bukharian culinary identity; children learn at a young age how to scoop the oily rice from the platter into their palms and thumb the morsels into their mouths. Saturdays call for two other varieties: one, called osh-savo, with cumin, cilantro, tomatoes and lamb, and another, khalti-savo sweetened by green raisins. Both are a sort of Bukharian cholent, left to simmer overnight Friday and, like bakhsh, they’re traditionally prepared in a cotton bag submerged in a pot of boiling water, a method likely borrowed from Persian and Iraqi cooking. Bukharians have the “only Jewish cuisine that has so many canonized dishes cooked in a cotton bag,” quips Yochai Primak, who researches Bukharian culinary history at Hebrew University’s Ben-Zvi Institute.

Bukharians are believed to be the descendants of Babylonian Jews who stayed in the empire after it was conquered by the Persian king Cyrus in 539 BCE instead of returning to Jerusalem. For more than two millennia, these Jews lived in an isolated region between Kazakhstan’s northern steppes and the Hindu Kush mountain range, primarily in the former Emirate of Bukhara, in modern-day Uzbekistan.

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