Erin Levi
When Lilian Cordell walked through the streets of old Bukhara late September wearing her grandfather’s joma and yarmulke, carrying her father’s kiddush cup, she began to sob.
“I had felt in my heart that it’s likely my grandparents and family would do the same walk,” she recalls. “Walking through the streets of old Bukhara, maybe meeting up [with or] visiting family. I mean, who else would have that experience?”
For Cordell, cooking two sold-out dinners at the inaugural Bukhara Biennial, Uzbekistan’s first international art fair, which runs through November 20, 2025, wasn’t just a professional milestone—it was a deeply personal homecoming. The London-based chef and author of Miriam’s Table, a cookbook celebrating Bukharian Jewish cuisine (I ordered a copy last year because of our paper’s Recipe Series) had been invited to present recipes from her book at the very source of her family’s culinary traditions.
The journey began months earlier when Diana Campbell, artistic director of the Biennial, discovered Cordell’s cookbook. After sending a copy to New York via Campbell’s PA in London, Cordell received an unexpected invitation. “He said, ‘We’d love for you to be part of the Biennial; you’re the last chef we’re asking, and we’d like you to cook for the weekend,’” Cordell remembers.
The Kosher Challenge
In Bukhara, Cordell faced the daunting task of preparing traditional Friday night Shabbat dinner for 50 guests, followed by another meal on Saturday— the Friday night was all to be 100% kosher in a city with limited resources. The challenge began with finding kosher meat in Uzbekistan.
“I met the rabbi in Bukhara on the Tuesday. He had a secret stash of kosher meat in his freezer,” Cordell explains. But she was still three kilos short, so kosher meat was flown in from Tashkent along with two chefs who would assist throughout the Biennial. Then came an unexpected problem: “We couldn’t find one kosher chicken in the whole of Uzbekistan.”
This meant adapting her recipe for bakhsh, the famous green plov—rice infused with spinach, cilantro, parsley, and traditionally made with minced meat and chicken livers. “I had to lose the chicken livers and made it with mushrooms, which have the same texture,” she says.
Even the traditional muslin bags used to cook the bakhsh proved difficult to source. “I couldn’t find them anywhere. I went on Amazon, they’ve got the plastic cooking bags, but not the muslin bags. So the rabbi found them for me, and they were delivered to the kitchens on the Friday morning.”
Cordell’s determination to maintain kashrut extended to the equipment itself. “I asked Diana, ‘Are they very religious?’ Because I’m using utensils that could’ve been with non-kosher meats,” she explains. Cordell’s solution? Putting the meat mincer “in a boiling pot of water for three hours.” People came and asked her, “What are you cooking?” “They’d see this meat being koshered up,” she said, “because I felt if I was going do it, [I wanted to] do it properly.”
She even had to ensure the puff pastry was pareve. Taking her Bukharian assistant to the bazaar, she explained to the bakers: “We can’t have any milk or butter—five ingredients: flour, yeast, salt, pepper, water. And they made the dough up for us while we were waiting.”
The irony? After all that effort, one of the Jewish guests told her after dinner: “We don’t always eat kosher meat.” Cordell laughs at the memory. “But then in my heart I thought, ‘You did the right thing.’ I felt I did the right thing.”
A Shabbat to Remember
The Friday night menu was authentically Bukharian: samsas with minced meat, the adapted bakhsh with its vibrant green rice, eggplant boyjon (chargrilled and chopped with fresh herbs from the market), chopped salad, and bichuk (triangular pastries with pumpkin).
“And of course, to start off, we had shots of vodka,” Cordell adds with a laugh. “It was an authentic Shabbat dinner, and that’s what Miriam’s Table is all about.”
Among the 50 guests was one Jewish family of 36 people—friends of the curator hosting a birthday celebration. “They were from everywhere—South Africa, Belgium, Paris—all their families reuniting in Bukhara on a Friday night,” Cordell recalls. “That was very special. So they were included with the bruchot, the prayers and everything. And the rest of the group had heard about it and wanted to be part of it.”
For Cordell, the authenticity was paramount. “I needed to make sure every recipe, that any Bukharian would taste it and recognize it as being like home.”
The Saturday night menu featured osovoh, stuffed peppers, and tehomi osovoh (brown eggs)—all dishes from Miriam’s Table. The cookbook, which Cordell created as a tribute to her mother Miriam, preserves traditional recipes passed down through generations and kept alive across the diaspora.
Her husband, though Ashkenazi, proved invaluable as her senior crew member, helping calculate quantities and organize logistics. “Nobody weighs anything, it’s just, you know, you see it and you sort of estimate how much it is going to be for 50 people,” Cordell explains. “But he came along and he was very organized.”
Immersed in Community
What made the experience truly special was the immersion in Bukhara’s community. Shopping at the bazaars with her assistant Otabek, Cordell felt worlds away from her usual routine.
“It’s not like going to Waitrose,” she laughs. “We’d make a shopping list, translate it into Uzbek on WhatsApp, and Otabek would stride through the bazaar like the Bukharian mafia, phone in hand, shouting out quantities.”
She watched vendors scoop whole peppercorns into grinding machines, inhaling the scent of freshly milled spice and warm earth.
“The women there had gold teeth and scarves tied tight—my age but looking a hundred years older,” she recalls.
And she could speak with them in Bukhori—the phrases she remembered from childhood. “I’m talking about, ‘You’re the son of a donkey. You’ve got a big stomach,’” she says, laughing. “It’s like all the things that I remember. I needed my sister or my cousins to be with me because my husband had no idea what I was talking about.”
In the kitchen at the madrasa, she worked alongside local women, including one who shared her life story in broken Bukhori while stuffing peppers. “She’s talking to me about how she’s widowed and she’s got children to look after and that her life is very difficult,” Cordell recalls. “It was an opportunity to actually hear everyone else’s story as well. Very special.”
Rosh Hashanah in Samarkand
As if her Shabbat homecoming weren’t moving enough, Cordell’s journey took an even more spiritual turn the following week.
The cooking demonstrations were scheduled for the weekend before Rosh Hashanah, allowing Cordell to extend her trip to Samarkand, where her father was born in 1913 and had his bar mitzvah. It was at the Gumbaz synagogue in old Jewish quarter—the original, protected synagogue that still serves the city’s small Jewish community of about 200 people—that Cordell experienced an extraordinary moment.
Inside the sanctuary, the Torah stood upright in its silver casing, as it does in the Bukharian tradition, gleaming softly in the morning light. The shofar sounded—but without the usual announcement, like “Tekiah.”
“You only hear the shofar itself, no words around it,” she explains. “It forces you to focus on the sound alone.”
Sitting beside the rabbi’s wife, Cordell opened her family tree books filled with photographs of her Bukharian relatives. “She says to me in Bukhori, ‘This is my grandfather,’ and I said, ‘Well, this is my grandfather.’ And she replied, ‘Brothers?’” Cordell laughs. “I said, ‘Hello, cousin!’
Standing in the same synagogue during services, Cordell was transported. “Every man that prays in Bukhori sounds like my father,” she says. “So I’m like gushing tears. It was the most beautiful, beautiful connection.”
A Legacy Continues
This trip to Uzbekistan marked Cordell’s second visit. She first returned in 2011, six years after her father’s death, bringing family members from Israel, America, and London. “We all fell in love with Uzbekistan,” she gushed.
Her father had left Samarkand around 1928, traveling through Tashkent, Moscow Istanbul and eventually settling in London, while many family members emigrated to Israel, where a large Bukharian community thrives today.
“My father was one of 15 and my mother was one of nine—God bless the Bukharians,” Cordell says. “They were all into marriages and everything. That’s why I sold quite a few of my books because I made sure every member of the family gets this book for the next generation.”
Miriam’s Table has now sold out after three printings, raising over £20,000 (about $26,228) for North London Hospice and Noah’s Ark Children’s Hospice. With the book’s success and her experience cooking in Bukhara, Cordell sees new opportunities ahead. “I’ve got an advantage to sell myself as a Bukharian chef and to do various events,” she says. “I feel there’s lots of ways to promote Bukharian cuisine.”
She’s already been in touch with Uzbek tour operators about incorporating food education into tours, discussing the Silk Road’s influence on the region’s cuisine, the varieties of rice, seasonings, and herbs. “They’re always asking for people to talk about the food and Silk Road, so I said, right, I can do that!”
For Cordell, the journey comes full circle with a deeper understanding of her heritage and a renewed mission to share it. “I want to keep that authenticity,” she says. “I feel that’s my USP—being the daughter of Bukharian parents, cooking these traditional recipes. It’s about preserving something precious and bringing it home.”
After hearing her story, I know exactly where I’ll be having Shabbat dinner next time I’m in London—around Lilian’s table, where every dish tells a story of homecoming.
Photos provided by Lilian Cordell