Two things to sort out before you buy anything. First, several of the strongest books here are travel writing with recipes attached rather than cookbooks — you cook from them occasionally and read them constantly. Second, the region is defined loosely on almost every English-language shelf. Central Asia proper means Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, plus the closely connected food cultures of Xinjiang and northern Afghanistan. Several books on this path are Russian, Persian or Caucasian, and they earn their place by adjacency, not by title.
The core dishes are worth knowing by name because every book organises around them: plov or osh, the rice pilaf cooked in a kazan that functions as the region's ceremonial dish; laghman, hand-pulled noodles; manti and samsa, the steamed and baked dumplings; non, the stamped tandyr breads; and the dried yoghurt balls called qurut that turn up in everything.
Start here
Caroline Eden and Eleanor Ford's Samarkand is the best first book: a genuine recipe collection with a real Uzbek and wider Central Asian core, photographed beautifully, and with the travel writing kept in proportion. Eden's Red Sands is the opposite balance — mostly narrative travel through the region with recipes punctuating the chapters — and it is the better book to read, not the better book to cook from. Buy Samarkand first if you want to eat, Red Sands first if you want to understand.
Laura Kelley's The Silk Road Gourmet is a recipe volume organised by country along the Silk Road, broad rather than deep, and useful mainly for the sheer number of dishes it gets into print in English.
The Soviet inheritance
Anya von Bremzen's Please to the Table is an encyclopedic cookbook of the Soviet republics, decades old now and still the most complete English-language collection of Central Asian recipes inside a general volume — its Uzbek and Georgian chapters are the reason to own it. Her Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a memoir with recipes rather than a cookbook: a family history of Soviet life told decade by decade through food, and one of the best food books of its generation, but you would not plan dinner from it. Darra Goldstein's Beyond the North Wind is Russian rather than Central Asian, focused on the north and on preserving, fermenting and grains; it is on the path because the Russian and Central Asian kitchens have been entangled for a century and a half.
The deep end
Frederik van Oudenhoven and Jamila Haider's With Our Own Hands is unlike anything else here — a large ethnographic record of the food of the Pamir mountains in Tajikistan and Afghanistan, gathered from the households that cook it, with agricultural and cultural context around every recipe. It is a serious documentary project and it is the single most valuable book on this list for anyone wanting the region on its own terms rather than a visitor's. Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's Flatbreads and flavors is a world bread book whose Central Asian chapters are excellent, and it teaches the tandyr and griddle techniques the other books assume.
The neighbours
The last four books are adjacent cuisines, and each is worth having if the interest extends. Najmieh Batmanglij's Silk Road Cooking is a vegetarian collection running the whole route from China to Italy, more Persian in emphasis than Central Asian. Naomi Duguid's Taste of Persia covers Iran, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kurdistan, reported and photographed on the ground. Darra Goldstein's The Georgian feast is the standard English book on Georgian food and the one to buy for khachapuri and walnut sauces. Olia Hercules's Kaukasis covers the Caucasus from a cook's perspective and is the most immediately usable of these. Caroline Eden's Black Sea returns to travel writing, tracing Odesa, Istanbul and Trabzon.
If you want a version of this shelf that is only the books you will actually cook from, build one in the path builder.
Follow the full ordered path here: Central Asian Cooking: The Best Books to Read, in Order.
Ready to learn something deeply?
Build a reading path — free
