Bread

One of the things all foreigners in Uzbekistan learn about is the local bread – non, or lipyoshka in Russian. There are regional variations, but all on the same theme of a circle of bread with a crisp, flattened centre and a thick rim. Bread, we are told, is an inescapable part of every meal: the stuff of life.

Quite soon after we arrived we found our local bread shop, over a bridge and down a small side street, where there’s an unmarked window behind which there’s always warmth and activity. One winter’s day we asked if we could come inside and watch the bread being made.

Even on a cold day it was hot inside the bakery. The baker worked fast, pummelling the dough into shape and flattening the centre with a heavy stamp, a couple of dozen loaves in a batch. They go into a barrel-roofed gas oven, slapped by hand against the walls and the ceiling. A few minutes’ wait, and as they begin to come loose they are caught in a long-handled pan and deposited on the table to cool. The whole process from dough to fresh warm bread takes about half an hour, and the baker keeps it up from early in the morning to late in the evening, assisted by his grandchildren when they are not at school. It’s a family business: our baker moved to Tashkent from the Fergana valley a few years ago with his daughter and her children, and one of his sons is also a baker in Tashkent.

Not long ago, I read a book about the meaning of food in Uzbekistan, that suggested that food – who eats what when; who prepares it; how it is served – reflects key issues in society including economic structures and gender relations. I didn’t agree with all its conclusions. But there’s no doubt that food and people’s relationship with it can illuminate important aspects of the way people live, what they value and why. There’s no doubt too that in an urban, supermarket society it’s easy to lose touch with the relationship between what we eat and its origins in the natural world, and to treat food as the product of an industrial process. It’s good to see bread made by hand, and treated with respect.