Tastes of paradise
Ode to forgotten flavors
By Laleh Kahlili
August 21, 2000
The Iranian
And there it is: on
the table, at the summer's
equator,
a tomato -
an earthen sphere,
a fertile and repeated
star - reveals its folds
and channels,
its renowned fullness,
its abundance
free of pits and peels,
thorns and scales. It's the tomato's
gift to us,
this fiery color
and undiminished freshness.
"Ode to the Tomato"
Pablo Neruda
There are at moments of respite in Iran,when the three jobs most ordinary
Iranians have to take to put bread on the table are momentarily forgotten
at the end of the work-day (or night), and pleasures of the sense take
over. And there are so many simple things upon which the senses can feast.
Our voluptuous music seduces and our language dances on the tongue. The
cool oceanic tiled surfaces of our public buildings invite the eyes to
linger. We love to touch: from the tactile feast that is the bas-relief
of Persepolis on silky black stone to the indulgence of vintage "termeh"
fabrics handed down from family to family.
But the senses we most celebrate are our sense of smell and our sense
of taste. Musk and ambergris (moshk va anbar), sandalwood and myrrh
(sandal va morr) are the more exotic fragrances so frequently mentioned
in our poetry and our folktales. But there are simpler joys too; there
are orange and almond blossoms, the essence of sweetbrier (nastaran)
and Egyptian willow (beedmeshk), tea-rose and aghaghia, the generous
scent of fresh mint and basil and fenugreek and dill. Even the native names
tickle the senses, or perhaps it is memory that lends such splendor to
these simple everyday perfumes.
We also love to eat, and the greatest pleasures of gluttony are so abundant
in Iran that not even Rosa Montazami's venerable cookbook could scratch
the surface -notwithstanding all the Western recipes in her cookbooks,
and the post-revolutionary disappearance of sherry, wine, and ham from
her recipes. In fact, no cookbook can capture the pleasures of taste we
so easily take for granted in Iran. Grilled corn (balal) at dusk,
with burnt surfaces and kernels bursting with their creamy gifts, and heaven
is when the young boy (the corn-sellers are usually young boys) dips the
sizzling corn-on-the cob in the dirty saltwater with bits of burnt husk
and kernel floating on the surface. And when you bite into the hot corn,
it burns the roof of your mouth.
And in the winter, we celebrate the boiled sugar beets sold out of carts
on the corner of the street, and you peel back the darkened harsh skin
with your thumb, and underneath, the luscious scarlet flesh of the beet
invites you to bite, steam in the frozen air, and there is rarely a taste
as sweet. I think even Samad Behrangi has written -in one of his short
stories- a quiet ode to sugar beets in the winter.
What cookbook would -or could- write of the crunchy bitter kiss of unripe
almonds (isn't that what choghaleh badam is?), or the sour embrace
of greengage (gojeh-sabz) with salt? My favorite are fresh walnuts
in salt water, the brown skin peeling back, and naked, the walnut flirts
with you, offering the fragrant white flesh, the sinuous folds like the
pleats of a virginal gown. Most of these fruits don't really have names
in English, only approximation, which makes them the mysterious markers
of our memories.
Does anyone know what a zalzalak is called in English? My dictionary
said plums, but the sweet velvety flesh of those tiny little gifts of mysterious
trees does not taste like any plum I have ever had. And -so far away from
home- albaloo becomes sour cherries and naranj, sour orange;
though I have to confess that the California imitation of these two native
fruits has been surprisingly and nostalgically authentic.
I miss desperately the cucumbers with their hard flesh and intense flavor.
The watery giant cucumbers here just have no taste (like almost all other
engineered and denatured and castrated fruits in this country), and the
small, pencil-thin Lebanese version is hard to come by, even here in New
York. When last year, I returned to Iran for the first time in 12 years,
my relatives were astonished by the greed with which I devoured kilo after
kilo of albaloo and cucumber with mounds of salt. I got so many stomach-aches
due to "sardi kardan" (the amazing logic of sardi and garmi -
or cold-natured and warm-natured foods- shall one day be elucidated by
science, I am sure), that my concerned aunts always had some warm-natured
food around as cure. Nabat-dagh (hot water with dissolved crystals
of candied sugar) is just so superior to sugar-water, even if it is only
memory that lends it that unique taste. With this rambling love song to
street foods as a preamble, here I shall serenade my four most favorite
Iranian edibles.
Breads
The taste of bread throughout Iran varies just so slightly that I wish
I could live long enough to travel from city to city and village to village
tasting the native breads. And it saddens me to reduce them all to "flat
bread" when I try to describe them outside the borders of Iran. Watching
the baking of bread in those old shops where the baker extends his unprotected
hand into the hot oven and sticks the dough to the wall of the oven amazed
me as a child. And during the years of shortages and food- coupons, standing
in line for bread -at sunrise or sunset- always seemed the most enjoyable
of chores, as we got to watch the deft movements of these silent men and
their magical hands.
Of all the varieties of breads, the divine sangak is the best
early in the morning -specially in the winter-, when the air is not yet
polluted and in the bitter cold, you can grip tight the small pebbles picked
from the back of the bread, hot from the oven, to lessen the blaze of the
frost on your fingertips. I remember with envious longing devouring those
rich breakfasts of fresh cream (sarsheer) and halva perfumed with
pistachios and sesame in small bites of hot sangak so frequently
in a week. Womanly age and womanly hips now prevent me from such excesses
of decadence simply to allay my hunger at breakfast and where can one find
sarsheer here anyway?
Then there are other feasts. The fleshy sour-dough barbari bread
-whether crisp or chewy- is amazing with butter and honey, its thickness
lending itself to loving squeezes and to being torn apart between happy
fingers; whereas the paper-thin lavash is handled gently, lest it
tear, and it is heaven with the very Shirazi cumin spiced cheese crumbs.
We Iranians so respect the sanctity of bread that I don't ever recall having
thrown any bread away while living in Iran. Dried bread is broken into
pieces into abgusht (a traditional soup) in the winter, or the poor
man's feast, ab-doogh-khiar (cucumber and mint in buttermilk), in
the summer. And the very driest stale bread is given to those old men on
their clunky bicycles who still ride in the streets of the smaller towns
and South Tehran and call out -in sad sing-song voices- for old bread.
Haleh-hooleh (junk food)
When on sunny Fridays we drove to our pear and cherry orchard in Shandeez,
a small village outside Mashhad, I would cling expectantly and longingly
to the window and star at all the small shops and stalls displaying those
appetizing sheets of plum and albaloo roll-ups all Iranian children
covet, lavashak. My parents seldom stopped to buy us any, and the
clamor of flies around those exposed sweet sheets should have been warning
to us; but they weren't. By some strange logic, the best lavashak,
the sourest, the most face-scrunch- inducing, was always the most polluted
and dirty. In fact, even last year, in a guilty and secret fulfillment
of a long-denied pleasure, at a small stall outside the Tehran bazaar,
I bought the least hygienic bundle of sour- plum lavashak and devoured
it with such relish that I noticed a few passerbys snickering at me.
Iranian junk food ranges from the respectable -watermelon and pumpkin
seeds, tamarind, dried albaloo and dried mulberry- to the downright
frightening. The unique qare-qoroot, which can look like a pale
piece of halva or a chunk of tar, is a dairy product, though its parentage
is somewhat dubious. But it tastes so delicious, so sour, that when you
take a bite, you can feel the pangs of sourness right behind your ears
and at the joint of your jaws.
Ice-cream and faloodeh
As a Shirazi, I think I have inherited a genetic penchant for sour and
tart and salty food, but I will bow with humility to the blissful Iranian
ice-cream and even more so to faloodeh. No Iranian who has spent
a hot summer day wandering in the bookshops near the University of Tehran
will deny him or herself the pleasure of the faloodeh or ice-cream
at a small shop right off Enqelab Square where the ice-cream is rich and
sweet and the faloodeh has the perfect consistency. My favorite
ice-cream and faloodeh shop, though, is in Shiraz, as it rightfully should
be. It is at the junction of Bazaar-e-Vakil and Sara-ye- Moshir, and it
also sells the spring-water of paradise, the various araqs, or essences
of spearmint, and orange-blossom and Egyptian willow, in tall clear bottles,
and it also severs the crunchiest, sweetest, least starchy faloodeh
on earth with fresh lime juice which smells of Jahrom nights and star-drenched
skies.
Fruits of paradise
But my most favorite of Iranian edibles are the three fruits of paradise;
quince, persimmon, and pomegranate. When my mother would make quince marmalade
at home, I would sneak chunks of raw quince when she wasn't paying attention.
The texture of quince on the tongue is something like a hearty exotic apple
and it reminds you of autumn and of childhood. I fondly recall the sure-fire
cure for sore-throats when I was a kid: hot water softening the gelatinous
seeds of quince that soothes and coats the throat in a way that would make
Robitussin green with envy.
Persimmon can always be a surprise. It glazes the tongue and paralyzes
the taste-buds when not mature; but ripe persimmon is luscious, gliding
in a velvety dance along the tongue and down the throat, leaving its distinct
fragrance behind long after it is swallowed. Pomegranate is something else
altogether. Some say that this fruit, the symbol of fertility and love,
originated in Iran and was taken to the West during the wars between the
Persians and the Greeks. The Greeks coveted the fruit to such extent that
it came to be Aphrodite's fruit, thrown recklessly to the recipients of
her love and grace.
I believe -deep in my heart- that Eve could not have seduced Adam with
the plain and boring apple. She probably handed him the pomegranate, and
once the blushing armor of the fruit was peeled back, Adam found himself
powerless facing the treasure of those numerous oval rubies tumbling and
cascading in scarlet glory. Avicenna's Canon lists all the ailments for
which the pomegranate is the cure, and among them are scorpion-bites, anxiety
and fever. In our national dish, fesenjan, pomegranate juice adds magic
and refinement to walnut and chicken. And I have to yet acquire the secret
recipe for pomegranate soup that makes an unfertile womb fruitful and an
impotent man lustful.
Raw untreated pomegranate is the best, and until recently, I used to
devour it with copious quantities of salt. Seeding pomegranates is something
of an endeavor, and I always end up getting pomegranate juice splashed
all over my tiny kitchen, but the ecstatic bursting of the seeds between
the tongue and the roof of the mouth is so well worth the effort. Recently,
I discovered yet another variation on the symphony of taste that is pomegranate:
a friend suggested pomegranates with golpar -and although I had
been used to golpar in torshi and on top of hot fava beans, I had to try
this one. The taste was a lovely gift... Try it. It tastes of cold winters
under the korsi, of longing, of vastness of forgotten memories, of flavors
of nostalgia.
