Learning to Cook in Farsi

By Heidi Noroozy

My introduction to Persian cooking came in the form of a cookbook called The Food of Life by Najmieh Batmanglij. If you’ve ever browsed the Middle Eastern shelves in the cookbook section of a well stocked bookstore, you’ve probably seen this volume. It’s a classic, filled not only with recipes but also cultural details about wedding and holiday traditions, even poems and folk tales. My Iranian-born husband brought The Food of Life home one day when he was feeling particularly homesick for the flavors and textures of his native cuisine. In preparing these recipes, I learned a whole new vocabulary: polo (rice pilaf), khoresh (a meat and vegetable stew served over rice), tadigh (the crispy crust at the bottom of the rice pot).

At first, I was baffled by the unusual combinations. Green beans and lamb mixed with rice and served with a generous sprinkling of cinnamon, a spice I’d previously associated with dessert; pastries and puddings scented with rosewater, saffron, or cardamom; stews packed with what seemed like an entire herb garden, in which the meat was the seasoning not the main event. This cuisine was like nothing I’d encountered before, and yet it thoroughly intrigued me. I tried out dish after dish. The best I can say about those early efforts is that the meals were edible.

Later, when I visited Iran for the first time and met my husband’s extended family, my culinary horizons burst wide open. I learned another culinary term: cadbanoo, an honorary title that literally means “the village chieftain’s wife” and is bestowed upon a woman of remarkable culinary skill.

Photo by Fabien Dany
(www.fabiendany.com)

My mother-in-law reigns as the queen of cadbanoos in the Noroozy family, due in large part to her instinct for the right combination of herbs. Her signature dish is koofteh Tabrizi: large globes of ground lamb, rice, yellow peas, and five different herbs (parsley, chives, savory, tarragon, and dill), with a dried plum (aloo), raisins (keeshmeesh), and caramelized onions (piaz dagh) at the center. These fragrant balls are braised in a tomato/saffron sauce and served with bread, yogurt, and pickles (torshi). Biting into a koofteh fills your mouth with layer upon layer of flavor and texture, from the knobby grains of rice and pungent herbs on the outside to the juicy, sweet fruit in the middle. Like the rest of Persian culture, where nothing is simple or straightforward, the cuisine is mysteriously complex.

I’ve also learned some wonderful tips from my sister-in-law, another family cadbanoo. One of her specialties is tah cheen, a dish whose name means “layered from the bottom of the pot.” It is a “sandwich” with chicken, eggplant, almonds, and dried barberries packed between two crusts of rice. Tah cheen is the perfect dish for a party, a feast for both the tastebuds and the eye.

Persian food is meant to feed a crowd. It’s almost impossible to prepare a recipe in small quantities and have the dish taste right. Even a laden table feels oddly incomplete unless it’s covered with three different kinds of rice dishes, several meat and vegetable stews, a mixed salad, a platter of sabzi khordan (mixed fresh herbs), and bowls of yogurt, olives, and pickles. Of course, you also need a horde of guests to eat it all.

Here’s the recipe for my sister-in-law’s version of tah cheen. Give it a try and let me know how it turns out.

Filling:

2 chicken breasts or 4 thighs, on the bone, skins removed

1 cup water or broth

1 large onion, thinly sliced

1 tablespoon tomato paste

pinch ground saffron

2-3 Italian eggplants, peeled and sliced lengthwise

1/2 green bell pepper, chopped

1/2 red bell pepper, chopped

Salt to taste

Place the chicken and half the onions in a pot, add the water or broth, and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and cook over medium-low for 30 to 40 minutes until tender. Remove the chicken from the pot, debone, cut into chunks, and return to the pot with the tomato paste, some salt, and saffron. Add more water if necessary. Simmer for another 30 minutes.

Sauté the rest of the onions and bell peppers separately with a bit of salt and set aside. Fry the eggplant slices until soft.

Rice:

3 cups rice

1 cup yogurt

4 egg yolks

4 tablespoons oil or melted butter

1 teaspoon ground saffron in 3-4 tablespoons hot water

salt and pepper to taste

1/4 cup dried red barberries (zereshk), soaked for a few minutes in water to remove grit

2 tablespoons each slivered pistachios and almonds

Bring eight cups of water to boil in a large pot. Add the rice and cook until al dente, about ten minutes. Drain and rinse with cool water (makes the rice fluffy).

Beat egg yolks, mix in yogurt, oil or butter, saffron water, and season with salt and pepper. Add rice and mix carefully until blended, being sure not to break up the rice kernels (or you’ll end up with mush).

Layer half the rice mixture in the bottom of a greased oven-proof glass baking dish. Arrange eggplants, chicken chunks and peppers/onions on top. Sprinkle barberries, pistachios, and almonds over filling. Layer the rest of the rice on top.

Cover dish with tin foil and seal edges well to keep steam from escaping. Bake for 45 minutes to one hour at 375 degrees until the bottom crust is crispy and golden. Place the plan in cold water for a few minutes to loosen the crust and turn out onto a serving dish.

Garnish with more barberries and nuts, if desired.

Noosheh jaan! Enjoy!

Garlic in My Socks

By Heidi Noroozy

One winter many years ago, I took a job at a Benedictine monastery atop a windswept mountain in Vermont. Deep into this frozen season, I battled a cold that wouldn’t quit and one afternoon dragged myself into the monastery kitchen in search of a hot drink to soothe my raw throat. There, I encountered one of the monks, who took in the sorry sight of my red nose and bleary eyes. On hearing me croak out a miserable “hello,” he offered this bit of medical advice: “Put garlic in your socks.”

I opted for a hot lemonade with honey, an old family remedy. To this day, I don’t know if the monk was serious or only pulling my leg with his garlic-in-the-socks remedy, but I never waste an opportunity to pass on his advice. It’s usually good for lightening the mood when the other person is feeling like death warmed over.

Although no one in my family ever used garlic to cure a cold, an illness had to be pretty serious before we would resort to drugs. With the exception of aspirin, over-the-counter-medicine was a rare sight in my childhood home. We had hot lemonade with honey for sore throats and mint tea for stomachaches.

We were not the only ones to rely on traditional remedies. The small Vermont town where I grew up was populated with rugged farm folk who swore that the only way to survive the near-tropical summer heat was to swig copious amounts of a vile home-made brew called switchel. This concoction consisted of cider vinegar diluted with water and rendered almost, but not quite, palatable with maple syrup.

Later, when I got married, my new Iranian family had their own medicine chest (or pantry, if you will), full of home remedies. I learned entirely new “prescriptions,” like yogurt and honey for insomnia or nabat (saffron-flavored rock candy) dissolved in hot water (or tea) with a splash of arak-e nana (distilled essence of mint) for nausea.

One of my mother-in-law’s favorite remedies is a tiny yellowish brown seed called khak-e shir. She uses it to cure two birds with one stone, so to speak. Steeped in cold water, khak-e shir will treat a bout of diarrhea. Brew it in hot water and it’s a cure for constipation.

Over time, I discovered that my Iranian family and friends take the whole idea of food as medicine a giant step beyond anything I could have imagined. In Persian tradition, all foods are assigned to one of two categories: sardi (cold) and garmi (hot). This has nothing to do with temperature, but refers to the type of energy contained in the food. The idea is that a proper balance between “heating” and “cooling” foods is necessary for good health.

To complicate matters, according to this Persian philosophy, people also have these same energies, with some of us being more sardi and others more garmi. So if you’re a person with an abundance of warm energy, eating a lot of garmi foods could make you sick, or at least give you serious discomfort, such as a stomachache or heartburn. (Think of that huge chocolate fudge sundae [garmi] that made you just a bit nauseous.) Seasons can aggravate the situation, which means that eating too much garmi food in warm weather or too much sardi food when it’s cold and damp can make you feel unwell.

This philosophy goes back thousands of years to Zoroastrian times in ancient Persia, although some historians say it is based on ancient Greek medical texts. Traditional Chinese medicine, with its yin and yang, and India’s Ayurvedic practices have similar beliefs, so who knows where the idea originated.

Whether garmi/sardi began in Greece, China, India, or Persia, the 10^th-century Persian physician Abu Ali Sina (known in the West as Avicenna) was one of the first to compile a complete list of “cold” and “hot” foods. Avicenna wrote over 100 medical treatises, including his most famous compendium, the Canon of Medicine, and Iranians revere him as the “father of modern medicine.”

While I struggle to remember which foods are heating and which are cooling, my mother-in-law can rattle them off as easily as one of her favorite recipes. What helps is to remember that garmi foods are on the sweet end of the taste spectrum (peaches, cream, chicken, and eggplant), while sardi foods tend toward sour and bitter tastes and are also harder to digest (vinegar, beef, beans, kale, and hard cheeses).

All of which makes me reconsider my take on switchel. Since vinegar is cooling and Vermont summers can be sweltering, maybe there is some truth in the old-timers’ claim that their favorite summer beverage makes the heat more bearable.

As for garlic in my socks, I’m still not sold on that one. Garlic is garmi, but I can’t see how putting anything in my socks will keep me from sneezing.

Ice in Heaven and Other Culinary Imponderables

Cha'i por rang

By Heidi Noroozy

When I first began learning Farsi, my “lessons” often focused on the names of food and their methods of preparation. This is because I spent a great deal of time in the kitchen, helping my Iranian mother-in-law prepare Persian meals. She’d teach me words in her language, while I’d supply the English equivalents. After a time, our conversations sounded like a form of pidgin, with comments like, “Heidi-joon, water joosh amad!” (“The water is boiling”—a signal for me to add the rinsed and soaked rice for making chelo.) Learning another language means discovering a new way of thinking, and the art of cooking can be an adventure in cross-cultural communication.

 Take tea, one of the major food groups in Persian cuisine. In English, we describe how we like to drink this beverage in terms of taste. Tea is either strong or weak. But to an Iranian, color is paramount. “Do you like your cha’i por rang (with color)?” a hostess may ask, “or kam rang (with little color)?”

 

And don’t get me started on rice. English speakers make do with only one word for this versatile grain. But such simplicity is far too vague for a Persian cook. In Farsi, rice is berenj when it’s raw, polo when it’s mixed with vegetables, meat, and sometimes nuts and dried fruit. Steamed with butter or oil, it’s called kateh. Cooked in a two-step method, where the rice is first parboiled like pasta then steamed and served with a splash of golden saffron on top, it’s known as chelo. And let’s not forget tadigh, the crispy rice from the bottom of the pot.

Santa Claus melons

Then there are the names of things. The most puzzling one for me is kharbozeh, a melon with sweet, pale flesh and a mottled green and yellow rind. It takes its name from two animals—khar (donkey) and boz (goat). Donkey-goat melon? Trying to figure this one out gets me tangled in a confusion of mental images. Shaped like a football, it looks nothing like a goat. And since it’s easy to cut, peel, and serve, I can’t say it’s “as stubborn as a mule”—like a coconut, for instance.

The English equivalent is no more enlightening: Santa Claus melon. At least that’s what the vendors at my local farmer’s market call it. This moniker gets me wondering what St. Nick really does in the off-season. Raise melons in his North Pole greenhouse?
 

One of my favorite regional dishes is a garlicky appetizer from Gilan Province on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. To prepare it, you sauté some onions and lots and lots of garlic with tomatoes and grilled eggplant. Then you add some eggs and whisk it all together on the stove until you have a pan of vegetable-packed (and very garlicky) scrambled eggs. It’s called mirza ghasemi, a name that refers to a person called Prince Ghasem. “Mirza” is an aristocratic title that dates back to the 19th-century Qajar dynasty. I haven’t a clue who Ghasem was, or even if he was a prince, since the title is also used to show respect for a prominent statesman or scholar, just as Hajji (someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca) can refer to any older man, whether or not he actually went on the Hajj. Perhaps Ghasem was a chef of such admirable skill his name became associated with Gilan’s most beloved dish. Or maybe he was a distinguished academic with a special fondness for eggplant, tomatoes, and garlic.

I can’t end a post on unusual culinary names without mentioning dessert. In this category, we have cookies called zabon (tongue) and gush-e fil (elephant’s ears), both flaky pastries made with lots of butter and a sugary glaze. Or bahmieh, a fried pastry, drenched in date syrup, which is named after a vegetable (okra).

Ice in Heaven
Credit: Sholeh (Flikr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Another delightful Persian confection is yakh dar behesht, or Ice in Heaven, a creamy pudding made of wheat or rice starch, milk, and sugar, flavored with cardamom and rose water. Usually it’s served in a soft, custardy form, which makes me wonder how it got such a frigid name. But some recipes call for a lot of starch, giving the dessert a chewy texture, much like Turkish Delight, so that it’s firm enough to be cut into individual, sugar-dusted “ice” cubes.

I may spend a lot of time pondering the origins of these culinary names, but there’s no mystery about how the dishes taste. Garlicky, refreshing, or sweet, they are all delicious enough to be served in heaven.