The Director of the Azerbaijani Cuisine Center, Tair Amiraslanov, has given an interview to Vestnik Kavkaza. He spoke about the special features of Azerbaijani cuisine, its development during the post-Soviet period, and many other things associated with cookery in Azerbaijan. We publish the final part of the interview, touching upon the health-related aspects of cooking.
-What Azerbaijani dishes and drinks can be used for treatment and prophylactics?
- Each and every dish could serve as a treatment: it depends on how you cook it and what ailment you want to cure. One diet helps with gastrointestinal diseases; another heals cardiovascular disorders, etc. You can choose out of 3,000 of our traditional dishes. Traditionally, khinkali, noodle pilau and cornel and blackberry jams are considered to improve health. And there are hundreds more. For example, khash is believed to help with broken bones – both traditional and clinical medicines use this dish nowadays.
- Do you believe that the fast food that’s so popular today can have a negative impact on a person’s health?
- The notion of ‘fast food’ is completely alien to traditional Azerbaijani culture. We don’t like eating in haste. If one hurries somewhere, the blood should flow to their feet, if one eats, it should flow to their stomach, and if blood circulates in the wrong way it might have negative consequences for a person’s health. And one usually eats fast food alone, while our cultural traditions suggest that we always share our meal with someone. Moreover, there’s not many natural products in fast food, which also isn’t healthy, especially if the products are genetically engineered.
If you go to a fast food joint you have nothing to choose from, while restaurants offer choice.
Moreover, fast food makes people eat more than necessary and drink high-calorie drinks, which leads to obesity. This problem is particularly acute in the US.
Fortunately, there’s a new popular trend – so-called ‘slow-food’ (the opposite of fast food). It comes from Italy, and there’s a certain philosophy to it – enjoy life, love and food slowly. Europe couldn’t follow this philosophy before for a number of reasons.
First of all, medieval Christianity considered love to be a sin and didn’t regard women as personalities, while Turkic tradition has always granted women this right and accorded respect.
Secondly, love of good food was also considered to be a sin, and the Inquisition prosecuted gourmets as much as beautiful women. Thirdly, scientists, artists and philosophers were also perceived as enemies of religion. But if someone doesn’t love, doesn’t create, doesn’t enjoy food – they don’t live at all.
- Which Azerbaijani dish would you call unique?
- It’s hard to say. All 200 kinds of pilau are unique, and the same can be said about all traditional dishes and their offshoots. Even though many eastern countries have the same dishes in their traditional cuisines, Azerbaijani ones are still unique. And the best dishes are not necessarily the most complex ones.
Cuisine is like music, and our dishes are very similar to musical pieces. Moreover, each region of Azerbaijan has its own unique set of recipes. And all our products are natural, unlike their analogues from the West.
- The month of Ramadan is sacred for Muslims. Some fast for 16-17 hours a day. What food and drinks are suitable to be consumed in the morning to keep such a long fast?
- God never demands anything super-human. Today its easier to keep fast than it was 20-30 years ago. People should eat something that will help them spend the rest of the day without water. Our traditional dishes – khash, shorba – are quite capable of this, as it is salt that conserves water in one's body. And one should drink something warm. Honey, eggs and vegetables are also good. And of course one should abstain from working in the hot sun.
Ramadan isn’t a hunger-strike, it’s a change in diet regime – one eats at night rather than during the day. But it is about spirituality, not diet, and one should remember that.
Interview by Ramin Naziev, exclusively to VK
