Jane Merryman

“Don’t eat that!”

I have just expressed a desire to order my first helping of plov, the Uzbek national dish of rice and various combinations of vegetables, fruit, nuts, and meat—each region proud of its unique concoction.

“It’s too heavy, too oily, for your American stomach. Work up to it,” says my guide, Nail, in his version of tough love. “Start with some soup. Chicken soup. It’s very good.”

Nail, our driver Vartan, and I are sitting in the leafy courtyard of a café in a working-class neighborhood in Samarkand. We have spent the morning exploring ancient mosques and tombs of Moslem holy men. Now it’s time to let our eyes and brains rest from the fantastical arabesques that writhe across the traditional blue and green tile work.

A young man takes our order and places in the middle of the table a pot of green tea (chay), three china cups, and two large rounds of non, Uzbek bread.

Non, shaped like a wheel about twelve inches in diameter and one or two inches thick, graces the table at every repast. The women don’t bake it at home. They send their men to collect it at the neighborhood ovens just before the meal. Sometimes the loaves have a hole in the center, and in the evening I have seen boys hurrying down the street carrying a dowel strung with half a dozen wheels of bread.

I tear off a handful of the crusty loaf and lean back in my chair to watch the street life. Our little café—on a rise above the bus station that is smack up against the outdoor market—looks out over the busiest and most colorful spot in town. Here, at this table, is the place I want most to be, why I have come halfway around the world to spend three weeks in Uzbekistan . I first read about its fabled oases along the ancient Silk Road in Marco Polo’s book when I was a child. Now, here I am, fifty years later, with an English-speaking guide and a Toyota SUV instead of a camel. I watch the noisy traffic creep by: women on bicycles balancing their purchases, small vans that serve as local buses, dump trucks overflowing with the grape harvest.

My American travel agency and its partner in Tashkent found my guide, the redoubtable Nail. He usually takes trekking expeditions into the mountains that crowd the southern borders of the country, in Kyrghizstan and Tadjikistan. Nail speaks English well, and French, Uzbek, Russian, and Tadjik. Besides leading me around to architectural monuments, arranging visits to schools and carpet factories, and providing plenty of shopping opportunities, Nail is especially watchful of my health.

“Westerners can have a difficult time with our food,” he says. “We make it with lamb grease. Cottonseed oil is also used a lot in cooking and it’s hard to digest. In some places the water is salty—the tea tastes terrible.”

As he speaks, he lifts the lid of the white china teapot and peeks inside. With a nod of approval, he pours a stream of pale liquid into one of the handleless cups. He pours the tea back into the pot and repeats this sequence two more times. Then he fills each of our cups to the brim. We raise them to each other and sip the hot, fragrant drink. This is our mealtime ritual, with one of the men doing the honors.

We are not yet in the land of the salty water, so our tea is delicious. Nail’s warning refers to Uzbekistan’s cotton industry and the diversion of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers to water the desert. The irrigation projects, although tremendously important for the country’s economy, have made much of the soil saline and reduced the Aral Sea to twenty percent of its original size—one of the greatest ecological disasters of the planet.

But Nail is pondering other disasters. “They want to eat everything,” he says, grousing about his trekking clients. “And they think they know how to eat. A group of surgeons from New York said they knew all about the stomach and ignored my advice. We lost two trekking days when they got sick.” He seems pleased to be vindicated by this manifestation of “Timur’s revenge.”

Timur, or Tamerlane as he is known in the West, ruled from Samarkand in the fourteenth century. He razed most of the cities of Central Asia and enslaved whole populations. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Uzbek towns pulled down their statues of Lenin and installed a different national hero in his place—gold-covered, larger-than-life effigies of Timur. I feel uneasy about a nation whose most well known historical personality is a cruel and predatory tyrant. But this nasty fellow seems an appropriate metaphor for the consequences of unwise food choices.

Our carefully chosen lunch arrives—steaming soup, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, seared lamb kabobs on wooden skewers. With the fresh bread and delicate tea, surely one of the great meals of the world. I was right, after all, when I insisted that we eat, not in tourist hotels and restaurants, but where the truck drivers go.

The only drawback of this is that few women eat in these places. I am the only female and the only foreigner. In one café we saw several tables pushed together for about twenty men and, nearby, a table for eight women. Nail eavesdropped on their conversation and learned that they were the faculty of a high school out for a start-of-the-semester luncheon, men and women teachers sitting at separate tables.

Even though I feel out of place in neighborhood cafes, I love their unpretentious atmosphere. Smoke from the kabab barbecue floats lightly under the trees. The kitchen is in plain sight—you might be invited to inspect the bubbling pots of soup before making your choice. For me, the menu has but one fault—no chocolate desserts. However, here is the real Uzbekistan. Here, and in the outdoor markets.

A department store sits opposite the open-air marketplace in Shakhrisabz. The building is dark inside, with a creaky wooden floor and bulky wood and glass counters. Plenty of sales men and women stand behind the counters, but there are no customers. All the action is across the street, on a shirt-sleeve afternoon in late September, where concrete colonnades form a neutral backdrop for the swirl of color. All is sun and the brightly patterned clothing of the Uzbek women amid piles of red tomatoes, golden loaves of bread, white pyramids of yogurt, green striped watermelons.

This Saturday the market is jammed. The food section fronts the main road and segues into the makeshift stalls of the sellers of scissors, embroidered hats, used textbooks, carburetor parts, amulets, and whatever you need. I especially like the tobacco sellers—women who squat on the ground in a sea of legs and feet, in front of piles of loose brown stuff in different shades and grades. They also sell small carved gourds for carrying the tobacco. Nearby, a woman offers kohl, a preparation of black color used to darken the edges of the eyelids. Behind these women several truckloads of fat yellow onions have been dumped onto the asphalt.

I love to wander through this citywide garage sale, but it is the food market that charms me. I am drawn to one of the vendors. The man is toothless and has gray stubble on his cheeks and knobby chin. No hair shows beneath the black and white doppe hat set far back from his high forehead. His white shirt is open at the collar revealing a bony Adam’s apple, and his black suit coat, several sizes too big, hangs shapelessly from his narrow shoulders. Under black, bushy eyebrows, his slightly slanted eyes sparkle like a naughty sprite, and his smile pushes up his cheeks into rosy pouches. He clasps four large red-ripe pomegranates, a few green leaves still clinging to their tops. His neighbor, almost as old, grins at me and proudly holds up a bunch of grapes, translucent yellow with a modest blush of pink. They look delicious, but I have to refuse them.

“Peel it, cook it, or forget it” is the first rule of a traveler off the beaten path. Unless I have time to deal with my gastrointestinal tract’s tussle with new bacteria, I must pass by those watercolor grapes, that handful of deep red cherries, and all kinds of tempting street food. But, in Uzbekistan, there is always the bread, always just made, and the tea, freshly brewed. And the second rule, “Enjoy!”