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.

The Well-Traveled Cucumber

By Patricia Winton

What could be more British than afternoon tea with cucumber sandwiches and cake? There might be other things served as well, scones or buns, sandwiches with fillings of fish or meat, but the cucumber variety is de rigueur. However difficult they are to eat with their leaky, slippery filling, cucumber sandwiches are as British as, well, the Queen.

So how did it all start? Cucumbers, it seems, first traveled to Britain with the Roman invaders (ca. 43-400 AD). By the time their conquest began, cucumbers were standard fare in Rome. The Emperor Tiberius (42 BC–37 AD) was a great cucumber lover. Pliny writes that he ate them every day. In fact, Tiberius created movable frames mounted on wheels that could be rolled into the sunshine and moved back to protected space during the cold. This device enabled him to eat cucumbers year round, a precursor to the modern greenhouse.

Cucumber sandwiches did not appear on the scene until long after the Romans departed. Anna, seventh Duchess of Bedford, began the custom of afternoon tea in the early 19th century. A greedy gal, so the legend goes, she found it impossible to wait until dinnertime and had her servants prepare a snack for her in mid-afternoon. Her friends duplicated her repast, and a tradition was born. By the height of the Victorian era, afternoon tea had become an ingrained habit, and these little cucumber treats ruled the tea table.

Proper cucumber sandwiches have three ingredients: thin slices of dense white bread with the crust removed, butter, and cucumbers slices—also thin. The first time I saw someone British make them, she spread butter on the unsliced bread before cutting it. This method, she explained, allowed her to cut thinner slices which would have crumbled if she had tried to spread the butter after cutting. The cucumbers are placed on the buttered bread and topped with a twin. Each sandwich is cut in half, usually diagonally, then in half again to produce four small tidbits.

These little bites accompanied tea in the drawing room and on the cricket pitch for a couple of centuries, though the tradition may be waning now. When the British colonized India, they took their cricket with them, though it was some time before the locals were allowed to play. With cricket came the tea break and cucumber sandwiches.

The sandwiches came with the cricket, but not the cucumber. You see, the cucumber is a native of India. It made its way to Rome when trade routes opened between the two during the reign of Augustus, who preceded Tiberius as Roman emperor. So Tiberius was enamored of a new, trendy vegetable when he created his growing frames.

Today, cucumbers are grown on almost every continent and global production in 2010 reached 57,559,836 tons. How they traveled to other countries I can’t say, though probably without armed intervention. They certainly went from India to Rome without military might, but the trips to Britain and back to India again resulted from conquests.

Please join me on alternate Thursdays at Italian Intrigues where I write about Italian food and wine, mystery and crime.

The Tea Smuggler of Gilan

Photo by Reza Rezaei

When you drive north along the Chalous Road through Iran’s Alborz Mountains, the craggy cliffs and narrow ravines eventually give way to green forests until finally you spot a glimpse of the Caspian Sea, cobalt blue on a clear day, dusty gray under cloud cover. Drive west on the coastal road that hugs the seashore, and you’ll watch the misty mountains of Mazandaran Province descend to the rice paddies of Gilan. An hour or two later, the landscape changes again into rolling hills covered by a knobby-shaped vegetation. The countryside here is a vast mat of camellia sinensis—better known as tea.

In a nation that boasts 2,500 years of history, Iran’s tea industry is still in its salad days. It all started just over a century ago with a cloak-and-dagger story of subterfuge, espionage, and smuggling.

In the late 1800s, an Iranian prince named Mohammed Mirza (also known as Kashef ol Saltaneh) traveled to India as consul with the goal of learning the tea trade run by the British. But India’s Colonial rulers kept tight control over their precious tea plantations, so the prince went undercover as a French laborer. He learned how to grow, harvest, and process tea and later smuggled 2,000 plants out of the country under the shield of his diplomatic immunity. Mohammed Mirza planted his illicit crop in Lahijan, a city nestled in the green hills of Gilan. Lahijan remains a center of tea production today, as attested by the enormous statue of a teapot on the road leading into town.

Photo by Vivid Colors of Fouman

Several years ago, my husband and I visited a family-run tea farm in Lahijan and received a tour of the fields and processing shed. We drove up a dusty track through tidy rows of evergreen plants that reminded me of the low-bush blueberries I’d seen in the Vermont hills of my youth. A few of the Lahijan tea plants were in bloom, displaying a seven-petalled white flower with an orange center. (Blooming is usually prevented by the harvest, but we arrived in the off-season.)

Some plantations in Gilan use mechanical harvesters, but this one, our guide explained, preferred local laborers who plucked the leaves by hand and gathered the harvest in big woven baskets.

Only the tips of the plant are harvested (the top two leaves and a bud). Over the growing season, the tea is picked three times, and each harvest is called a “flush.” The first flush, in early spring when the new leaves and buds appear after their winter’s dormancy, produces the best quality tea.

The harvested tea is spread out in troughs through which air is blown to wilt the leaves, a process known as “withering.” After that, the leaves are rolled to release enzymes that promote the next step of fermentation. This is a form of oxidation that creates the black tea consumed in every Iranian home.

Lahijan plantations produce the best quality tea grown in Iran, a rich, amber-colored brew. But today, many Iranians prefer imports from India and Sri Lanka, which is putting a tremendous strain on the local tea industry. With a population of 70 million, Iran is the world’s fifth largest importer of tea according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Ironically, the most popular brand of imported tea is Ahmad, a London-based company whose blends come from tea varieties grown in India, Sri Lanka, and Africa. So perhaps, in the end, the British got their revenge on the wily Prince Mohammed Mirza of Lahijan.

Like A Candle In The Wind

Growing up in a country that is part of the Commonwealth, it was normal for me to see photos and hear stories about English monarchs. But when I walked through the doors of a tea house in Gaiman, Argentina, I hadn’t expected the Princess of Wales would be staring straight back at me.

Set in Argentina’s Patagonia region, Gaiman is home to the descendents of Welsh immigrants who arrived on these windswept plains in 1865. Back then, the Welsh were looking for a way to protect their lifestyle that had become endangered by the English. The Argentine government wanted to promote immigration to Argentina and offered the Welsh 100 square miles of land along the Chubut River in southern Patagonia. In exchange, the Welsh made a deal that the Argentines would respect their language, religion, and traditions. Who knew that years later, the Argentines would have their own issues with the English when it came to the Falkland Islands (or las Islas Malvinas, as the Argentines call it)?

The settlers arrived on a converted tea-clipper and found they had been given false promises. The supposed fertile land was arid, and little food was available. Floods washed away their crops and hampered construction of towns. The Argentine government introduced conscription and insisted the Welsh men drill on Sundays, even though it went against the Christian principles of the settlers. A wide rift grew between the Welsh and the Argentine government, but it wasn’t enough to stop more Welshmen from travelling to Argentina over the next 50 years. By the time immigration stopped just before World War I, approximately 2,300 Welsh had arrived.

As I strolled through the streets of Gaiman back in 2000, it was difficult to remember this was an Argentine town. The concrete block buildings found in Argentine suburbia weren’t common in this quaint town. Instead, Gaiman’s streets were lined with weatherboard houses with white shutters, lush gardens were in full bloom, and the air sagged with the scent of roses. Tea houses surrounded the settlement and Welsh tea, accompanied by pastries, cakes, and other delectable delights were on the menu.

In a hallway of the Ty Te Caerdydd tea house, Princess Diana of Wales is honored at a shrine of sorts. A large photo of the former princess in royal regalia is framed by bunches of roses and the original tea set she drank from when she visited the establishment sits under her picture. The day Diana visited, a children’s choir sang in Welsh, and she shook the hands of each child. She drank tea and ate pastries and when she left, despite being forbidden to accept flowers for security reasons (!!), she took a red rose from a bouquet.

On the 31^st of August every year, the anniversary of her death, the Welsh descendants gather to pay their respects to the Princess of the People. The Argentine Welsh have an undying love for an English woman, which is ironic, given they once had such contempt for the English. Maybe their adoration for Diana was a result of her charm, or perhaps it was because she appeared to be a thorn in the side of the “real” royals.

The Eisteddfod, a Welsh tradition, is held every year and plays an important role in Patagonian heritage. Choir singing, poetry, and dancing competitions are held during the Eisteddfod, and keep the Welsh tradition alive. The water channels the Welsh built were Argentina’s first man-made irrigation system and are now used all over the country. It is one of the reasons Argentina has thrived in the farming arena for so many years.

I’ve often wondered why my connection to Argentina has always been strong. When I discovered my own Welsh heritage and its connection to Argentina, everything fell into place. No wonder this invisible umbilical cord that attaches me to Argentina feels like it could never be severed.

How about you? Have you ever travelled somewhere and realized the bond with the place is because of your ancestry?

Chai-ye Arooz

When I married my Tehran-born husband many years ago, it never occurred to me that I wasn’t just marrying the love of my life. I was joining an enormous extended Iranian family (100 people attended our belated wedding reception in Tehran—and that was only the “close” relatives). When my in-laws came to visit several years later, and stayed for six months, I’d learned enough about this family-centered culture to work myself into total panic. What would they think of me, an American woman who’d married their only son? A daughter-in-law who didn’t speak their language or share their religion?

As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry. We got along famously from the start. It helped that I was eager to learn everything they could teach me about their world. I learned how to cook a proper chelo (steamed rice) without burning the crusty layer on the bottom of the pot. To tell the difference between an Isfahani carpet and a Tabrizi. I practiced Farsi until I could converse comfortably with family members so they wouldn’t feel bad about leaving me out. By the time my in-laws went back to Iran, we all cried at the airport.

“You are our arooz,” they told me. Our son’s bride.

It wasn’t until my first trip to Iran five years later that I understood what that word really meant. Determined to figure out what responsibilities were expected of me, I watched my sister-in-law every time we went to visit her husband’s family. From the moment we walked in the door, she was busy organizing everything: heaping rice onto platters and dishing stew into bowls. And late at night when we were ready to leave, tired and bursting with too much good food, she’d stay behind to help with the cleaning up.

Fine, I thought. I can do that. So I set about trying to make myself useful around the house. At least I tried to.

The thing was, no one would let me lift a finger. Sure, I was allowed to clear the table after meals. Everyone pitched in on that task, men and women alike. But after carrying the platters of leftover rice and kebabs from table to kitchen, I’d reach for an apron and join my mother-in-law at the sink for washing up.

“You look tired,” she’d say. “Why don’t you go watch CNN?”

When I tried to help my sister-in-law prepare chicken for the noon meal, she gave me a pitying look. “Have you ever cleaned a chicken with the beak and feet still attached?”

I had to admit that I hadn’t, but how hard could it be? At least the feathers had already been plucked.

“You’re our arooz,” my in-laws would repeat. “There is no difference between you and our natural daughters.” And yet they still treated me more like an honored guest than a member of the family.

“Don’t listen to them,” my husband advised. “Just do what you want.”

So when relatives dropped by one evening for a visit, I left my in-laws to their elaborate Persian greeting ritual, slipped into the kitchen, and set about making the tea. There is an art to this, but I’d been watching carefully for days. First you pour just the right amount of strong brew into sparkling glasses then dilute it with hot water from the samovar to achieve the proper color. For good Iranian tea should not be either too por rang (dark) or too kam rang (light).

The reaction when I appeared with the tray was explosive. One uncle leaped to his feet and tried to take the tray from me, a look of consternation on his face. The foreign guest serving the tea? What was my mother-in-law thinking? The lady herself simply sat in her chair and nodded her approval. The ice was broken.

Now, whenever I’m in Tehran, everyone accepts that making and serving tea is my special job. After all, as Iranians like to say: chai-ye arooz—tea served by the arooz—always tastes best.