A Bejeweled Feast

By Heidi Noroozy

The holiday season is upon us. I know this because Christmas lights, Santa Claus figures, and candy canes are winking at me from store-front displays all over town. And it’s not even Thanksgiving yet. But the turkey feast is just a few days away, so naturally my thoughts turn to food.

Thanksgiving is probably our most quintessentially American holiday. Even recent immigrants will set aside the familiar flavors of the old country and serve a roast turkey with all the traditional trimmings. One of the best Thanksgiving meals I ever tasted was prepared by my husband’s Iranian cousins in Los Angeles. You can read all about it here.

I like to mix things up culturally, so my holiday feast has Persian flavors along with the American ones. There will be some sort of roast fowl on the table this coming Thursday, but it won’t take center stage. That exalted position will be occupied by a big platter of javaher polo, a Persian rice dish that looks like the cook scattered brilliant gemstones over a mound of snow.

Javaher polo is traditionally served at weddings, and for good reason. It is a joyful dish that offers a celebratory blend of colors, flavors, and textures. White rice sparkles with pistachios, orange peel, and ruby-toned barberries (zereshk), finished off with a splash of golden saffron. This dish is good hot or cold, paired with chicken kebabs or Thanksgiving turkey, served on its own for a quick snack or with a spoonful of yogurt on the side.

Like the holiday meal itself, I’ve messed with the traditional recipe for this dish by replacing some of the traditional orange peel with tangerine, which makes the rice even more fragrant. And I’ve added a secret ingredient. I’ll share it if you promise not to tell.

Come closer, and let me whisper it in your ear…

Rosewater.

Not too much. Just a drop or two. You don’t want your rice to smell like a summer garden. It’s November, after all.

So if you’d like to add a bit of Persian flair to your holiday meal this year, hold the mashed potatoes and serve a platter of javaher polo. Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients:

1 orange (peel only)

2 tangerines (peel only)

2 medium-sized carrots, julienned

½ cup sliced pistachios

1 cup slivered almonds

1 cup zereshk (barberries), available in Middle Eastern markets*

½ cup sugar

½ teaspoon powdered saffron dissolved in 3-4 tablespoons of hot water
Splash of rosewater (optional)

3 tablespoons butter

For the rice:

2 ½ cups Basmati rice

8 cups water

3 tablespoons oil

¼ teaspoon ground saffron dissolved in 2 tablespoons water

Directions:

1.   Rinse the rice in several changes of water. Cover with more water, add 2 tablespoons of salt and soak for at least one hour.

2.   Cover the barberries with cold water in a bowl and let stand for at least 20 minutes so any grit will sink to the bottom.

3.   Quarter and then peel the oranges and tangerines. Remove the white part with a sharp knife and discard. Cut the remaining peel crosswise into strips. Cover with cold water in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Drain and rinse in cold water.

4.   Melt the butter in a large frying pan. Add the carrots and sauté until they start to soften, about 5-10 minutes. Add the citrus peel and nuts and sauté for another 5 minutes. Add salt to taste.

5.   Scoop the barberries out of the water, making sure that the grit remains at the bottom of the bowl, and add to the carrot/orange peel/nut mixture along with the sugar. Stir until the sugar dissolves. Add the saffron water, bring to a simmer, cover the pan and simmer on low heat for 20 minutes, adding more water if the mixture gets too dry.

6.   Bring the 8 cups of water to a boil in a large non-stick pot and add the rice. Cook until al dente (firm to the teeth, but no longer hard). Drain and rinse with cool water.

7    Heat the oil in the same pot and layer the rice with the carrot/orange peel mixture in a pyramid shape, starting and ending with rice. Poke some holes in the top to let the steam escape and sprinkle 1/4 cup of warm water over the top. Cover with a tight-fitting lid wrapped in a clean dish towel, lower the heat and cook for 40-50 minutes. Uncover and pour the saffron water over the top. Cover again and cook for another 5-10 minutes

Noosh-e jaan! Bon appetit!

* Dried cranberries or cherries can be substituted for the barberries, but you’ll need to use less sugar. Barberries are very sour.

Seasonal Traditions, Old and New

Christmas is not a huge celebration in our house. We don’t trim a Christmas tree, bake holiday cakes, or hang colorful lights around the eaves. There are no milk and cookies waiting for Santa to come barreling down the chimney, hungry and thirsty from his sooty exertions. But before you get the idea that we’re a couple of Scrooges who do our best to ruin the joy for everyone else, let me reassure you that Christmas doesn’t pass us by entirely unnoticed. We have a rather eclectic set of holiday traditions, mixed and matched from my childhood memories and my husband’s Persian culture.

So even though Christmas is fairly low-key around here, we still manage to get into the holiday spirit. Here are my favorite ways to celebrate this joyful time of year.

My favorite ancient Persian ritual:

A few days before Christmas, we celebrate Shabeh Yalda, a winter solstice celebration whose roots go back to ancient Persia and its Zoroastrian rulers. (I blogged about it here last year.) On this longest night of the year, we stay up late eating pomegranates, preserved peaches, watermelon, and pistachio nuts, while reading Persian poetry, usually Hafez or Rumi. There is something about eating summer fruit in the deep freeze of winter that makes me think of people long ago who hoarded fragile produce as an offering to the sun god in hopes that it would give him strength to overcome the darkness and bring back spring. In our modern age, with our confidence in science and knowledge of the ways of nature, it doesn’t hurt to remember people who lacked such certainty yet paid greater attention to the world around them.

My favorite holiday meal:

Christmas dinner at our house is a far cry from the meal I grew up with. My mother used to serve a ham baked with pineapple slices and a brown sugar glaze. After the feast, the bone and remaining scraps of meat would go into a German-style split pea soup that would last us well into the new year.

Ham is not a big hit in my household today, so I make javaher polo instead, a Persian dish whose name means “bejeweled rice.” It may come from a culture that doesn’t celebrate Christmas, but I can think of no more festive dish to serve on a holiday table. The white rice sparkles with ruby-toned barberries, slivered green pistachios and creamy almonds, glistening orange peel, and a splash of golden saffron. No matter how much I prepare, this dish never lasts as long as my mother’s pea soup did, but paired with a roast chicken and served with a glass of sparkling wine, it looks and tastes just like Christmas should.

My favorite holiday decoration:

I may not deck the halls with boughs of holly or my house with garlands of lights, but my one nod to the neighborhood decorating frenzy is that I hang an evergreen wreath on my front door. I love wreaths of all kinds – herbal ones in the summertime, fragrant with mint, lavender, and thyme. Fruit wreaths in the fall as a tribute to bountiful harvests. A circle is such a comforting shape, with no beginning and no end.

My favorite family tradition:

Throughout the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I slice up a Christstollen, a dense German cake filled with dried fruit and almonds and iced with melted butter and powered sugar. Arranged on a special plate along with a few decorative rosemary sprigs (which are usually putting out their tiny blue blossoms at this time of year), it makes a sweet addition to breakfast.

This tradition started many years ago with a crotchety old aunt of mine. She lived in Dresden, a German city that at the time lay well behind the Iron Curtain in the German Democratic Republic. This aunt despised my mother (and, by extension, my sister and me) and never wasted an opportunity to criticize everything we did, from the way we dressed (not fashionably Parisian enough – and this from a dyed-in-the-wool Communist) to where we lived (in the decadent heart of Capitalism). But she saved up her kindness for one act of generosity at Christmas, when she’d send us an authentic Dresdner Christstollen, purchased from a famous bakery whose holiday confections were intended only for export. You had to have serious political connections to buy one in its city of origin.

The pastry arrived in a metal box with a picture of a medieval city sketched on the side, and it took metal cutters, a hammer, and a chisel to pry the container open. But the treat inside, a gift from one of the most unpleasant people I’ve ever encountered, always reminded me that everyone, no matter how nasty they may be, has the capacity for kindness. Isn’t that what the holidays are all about?