“You may additionally attend school in America,” my mum often instructed my brothers and me. At the same time, in the Nineteen Eighties, we were youngsters in our local San Diego, “but while you come domestic, you’re in Iran.”
Accordingly, we spoke Farsi and attended Persian school on Saturdays to discover ways to examine and write the language; we listened to classical Persian setar songs and celebrated Nowruz, the Persian New Year.
But truely, the most effective form of cultural immersion we were skilled in became culinary. My mum, who left Iran in 1976, steeped us inside the smells, tastes, and traditions of Persian delicacies. She spent hours upon hours every week traversing not simply San Diego but additionally Orange County and Los Angeles, over a hundred miles away, looking for the flavors that reminded her of Iran. She taught us that irrespective of what is taking place in the news, domestic is domestic, and nothing can deliver you there like flavor.
In Irvine, she found a bakery making sparkling sangak, a giant dimpled flatbread named for the pebbles that line the oven ground on which the slabs of dough are baked. She’d like us all up there on weekend mornings so that each folk ought to order the three-consistent with-individual maximum – 12 portions being enough to justify the hour-and-a-1/2-long force for bread.
She systematically sold and tasted each emblem of simple yogurt at the grocery store, on the lookout for the thickest, sourest one. She often packed us into our blue station wagon and drove across the metropolis to the international grocer, in which she could have her desire of seven sorts of feta and buy sparkling herbs by the pound instead of by the bunch.
The cornerstone of every Persian meal is rice. Each day, my mum would unzip a five-kilogram burlap sack of rice—always basmati—and component out a cup according to man or woman into a huge bowl, rinsing and soaking it for hours before giving it a quick boil. Then she’d begin the sorcery required to make tahdig, the crispy rice crust by which each Persian cook’s worth is measured.
Sometimes, she’d like the pot with lavash for a bread tahdig. When a special ride for bread wasn’t possible at different events, she’d use a comfortably available flour tortilla, which also yielded glorious results. Either manner, she’d divide and serve the rice and tahdig, encouraging us youngsters to delay gratification and face up to gobbling down that gloriously crunchy crust first. I in no way could.
Persian delicacies are about stability – of tastes and flavors, textures, and temperatures. In each meal, even on each plate, you’ll find each candy and sour, smooth and crunchy, cooked and raw, hot and bloodless. In the wintry weather, we ate khoresh-e fesenjoon, a hearty, sweet-and-bitter pomegranate and walnut stew to heat us from within. In the summer, we might peel eggplant for the khoresh-e bad moon, a vibrant tomato and eggplant stew made surprisingly tart with lemon juice and hoorah, or unripe grapes.
