.jpg "Giving a recipe to the world")
The Director of the Azerbaijani Cuisine Center, Tair Amiraslanov, has given an interview to Vestnik Kavkaza. He spoke about special features of Azerbaijani cuisine, its development during the post-Soviet period, eutrophy and many other things associated with cookery in Azerbaijan. We publish the second part of the interview, where Mr Amiraslanov explains why the Azerbaijani cuisine stands on a par with French and Chinese traditional cuisines.
- What is the main occupation of the Azerbaijani Cuisine Center today?
- Today there are only 15 employees in the Center, but we work in close cooperation with Azerbaijani Chef Association. We are conducting a lot of various research projects, we travel to collect traditional recipes and adopt them to use in restaurants as well as register as our historic and cultural heritage. We edit a lot of cooking books in English, Japanese, Romanian, Hungarian, French, etc. We also work with mass media.
Last year a new cooking center was created in Nakhichevan, they also published a book on Nakhichevan traditional cuisine.
We also collect and analyze old books mentioning some traditional food thus studying our cuisine’s history.
Azerbaijani government, the President and the Heydar Aliev Foundation grant us their support, including financial help.
Azerbaijan has made a considerable progress in the field of cooking, joining the world’s principle trends of collecting and restoring regional recipes for restaurant menus, thus sharing these recipes to the whole world.
- You’ve participated in a great number of cooking expos and festivals. Who do does the world perceive Azerbaijani cuisine?
- I think that over these past 20 years a hundred of world’s countries discovered Azerbaijani cuisine. And in all these festivals the people loved our dishes. We once treated the European Parliament in Brussels: they really loved our cuisine. We presented our food to representatives of 200 countries in Shanghais. Those who had a chance to get to know our cuisine say that it stands on par with French and Chinese.
In 2009 President Heydar Aliev proposed to create a chain of Azerbaijani cuisine restaurants, and now his successor, Ilham Aliev, supports and promotes this initiative.
-What is the favorite dish of Azerbaijani cuisine among foreigners?
- They like all our dishes. And it all depends on how you serve it. Our cuisine is unique due to our extremely tasty products: we almost never serve mixed salads as all their ingredients are too tasty by themselves to mix them. Our meat is so good that it almost doesn’t need spices. Our high quality products are our main advantage. I’m sure we’ll be able to find a place on the world’s restaurant market.
To be continued…
Interview by Ramin Naziev, exclusively to VK
