Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 8 - Iran/Persia
Intro
These posts now move on from the Eastern Mediterranean to another part of the world with a long past, Iran/Persia. Persians, as a nation, are very old - younger than Greeks but comparably old to Arabs - and doubtless they were interacting with their neighbours with all the implications that has for food culture for all of this long history.
However although a surprising amount of food history exists, if you want to go right to the start and make Sumerian food there are recipes surviving, I expect a proper food historian would be consider joining the fragmentary knowledge we have as a bit baseless. We know Elamite food was stereotyped as being dill-heavy, doesn’t mean any dill-based Persian dish can be attributed to Cyrus conquering that now-forgotten state. We know a fair amount about classical Greek food and how substantially different it is to modern Greek food (such as very different herbs and spices), doesn’t mean anything looking vaguely similar to that is because of Alexander. And so on.
What we can be more confident on are more recent and long-lasting links in Persia’s history. Persia was a superpower in its own right until the Arab Conquests and was part of the first three Caliphates, with Persian culture and bureaucracy being heavily influential in the last of these - so it’s pretty easy to say that Arabic and Persian food, and likely food from elsewhere in said Caliphates, all influenced each other during this time, and likely for a long time after.
Before, during and after this time, like many states from Central Europe all the way to China, Persia has been influenced (read: invaded) by various Central Asian tribes for long periods of its history, even being ruled by various tribes for several centuries. Doubtless this affected their food but it also heavily influenced the culture of these tribes as they settled. Persian kingdoms ruled by various tribes influenced (read: invaded) India, introducing Islam and other aspects of Persian culture and generally having a huge impact on Indian history. One man, Babur, from modern Uzbekistan, which was then heavily Persianised, invaded Afghanistan and then India, taking Persian culture and ideas with him. These were the famous Mughals who, as any good restaurant menu can tell you, were very influential on Indian food culture and, as the preceding power in India before the British Raj, pretty recent.
Overall this means Persian food is heavily influential, and influenced by, its neighbours in all directions. It also helps bridge the gap between Western Asian and Indian foods, continuing this smooth continuum of cuisines bleeding into each other all the way from Greece to East Asia, and this history can explain the presence of some meals originating from very far away in this post!
Admin notes
I’m using Iranian and Persian as if they are interchangeable unless context demands otherwise, defaulting to Persian most of the time as we’re talking primarily about food. To be clear these terms aren’t interchangeable at all but how they interact is complicated and contextual, so I’ve employed a little constructive ambiguity to cover my own ignorance. Hopefully this is less bad than actually getting it wrong..
Also I’ve decided to shift the order of proceedings around a bit and the transcontinental cuisine that was meant to come after this post is going to be delayed and done out of sequence. Essentially I actually started planning out recipes and it became very apparent that the best way to do the food justice would be to cook for a large group. That’s just not a responsible thing to do yet so I’ve tentatively rescheduled the cooking for a few weeks after my second COVID-19 jab is scheduled. The next post (9) is what was scheduled to be post 10.
The book
This is my first new purchase for the blog as, it turns out that the Persian cookbook I thought I had was nothing of the sort and, also, looked lower quality than most of the cookbooks appearing on this blog. As there wasn’t really an obvious substitution I bit the bullet and ordered a few cookbooks, also collecting a couple of extra Indian cookbooks for later this year.
So my new Persian cookbook is Persiana by Sabrina Ghayour, who is Iranian-born and has since gone on to write three more cookbooks, including the well-regarded Sirocco. Persiana was her first book but she made her name doing supper clubs in London.
Technically this is actually a broadly Middle Eastern cookbook, however, as the name would imply, it is very much centred on Persian food, there are blurbs for each recipe that often talk about the origin of each dish so it’s easy to tell when the content strays outside the focus for this post.
What I cooked (and adjustments)
For the main meal I chose a lamb tagine with prune and squash. I must say that I never particularly considered tagine to be a Persian dish, with its strong associations with North Africa and all, but apparently it’s an older recipe than I had realised - first attested to in the reign of the famous caliph Harun-el-Rashid in the 8th century, while Persia was in the Caliphate. So this is likely not a recent import. The presence of tamarind in the recipe also suggests influences that are decidedly not African!
A tagine is all very well and good but it needs some carb with it and I opted for a rice recipe, as eating Persian rice is usually a nice experience. Initially I was intending to cook some morassa polow - an elaborate dish parboiled and steamed basmati rice with butter, sugar, nuts and berries; alongside another, simpler, rice recipe which is similar but omits most ingredients save the butter and the rice itself. Ultimately while the morassa polow was cooking it was clear that I was making more than enough rice so I decided to not attempt the other variety.
As a tangent on the topic of rice - last year a BBC video for egg-fried rice went viral after criticism of its method of cooking rice. This was boiling unwashed basmati then draining it and rinsing in a colander, the very method used for all rice dishes in this book (albeit followed by steaming). From what I gather this is the standard method in Persian food in general and the volumetric method is actually a regional variant there, and in India either method is acceptable.
Now, obviously egg-fried rice is not Indian and certainly not Persian, the volumetric method is most appropriate there, but a surprising number of commentators seemed to think draining rice is completely unacceptable at all. This always bugged me when draining rice is used in very highly regarded cuisines (like this one!) - so I guess I have to thank Uncle Roger for making internet commentators once again talk annoying shite.
Tangent over, I also made some flatbread, naan barbari, which despite the name is not much like naan bread beyond kahlonji/nigella/black onion seed being a common flavouring. An underrated spice outside of Iran and India.
Two more side-dishes were chosen - kotlet, spiced patties of mashed potato and beef (which apparently can be eaten like a burger if desired), and Shirazi salad, a common accompaniment to most meals in Iran - a simple tomato and cucumber salad with pomegranate seeds added.
My partner had also picked out the recipe za’atar roasted squash with spiced yoghurt and pickled chillies - perhaps over-ambitiously I also decided to make this. But fortunately it was quite simple, fit into my workflow quite seamlessly in the end and allowed probably the most elaborate spicing of any dish cooked in this post.
Finally I planned dessert, remembered how difficult the timing got for the last post, and nipped that idea in the bud!
With these recipes I used all my standard adjustments - asfoetida instead of garlic and doubling the amounts of spices. The one exception was with the yoghurt sauce for the squash where I followed the recipe more faithfully, in case too much spice would affect the texture negatively.
Beyond this I made plenty of other adjustments which I classify into mistakes (using unpitted prunes in the tagine), necessities (making my flatbreads shorter than the 40cm recommended, so they fit on my trays) and choices (using unsalted butter rather than salted in the rice, halving the red onion used in the Shirazi salad and using clingfilm to seal the saucepan when steaming the rice). Of these choices the first one was fine, the second was good and the third was a daft mistake.
Cooking
The cooking was done over two days, with day 1 dedicated to cooking the lamb and prune tagine and preparing a mix for the kotlet. At the time I was considering cooking the squash on the same day so a few extra ingredients are in shot, but these were tidied away later in the evening.
The spices used in the tagine were cumin, cinnamon and turmeric and a honey and tamarind mixture also went in, despite my forgetting to put the honey in this shot. And, this goes for all these photos, apologies for the mess in the kitchen in this post.
The first step was to get chopping the onions out of the way.
The spice mix was made and the honey and tamarind paste combined.
I also chopped up the squash and drained the prunes. The picture below I think is quite pretty but was actually largely pointless as I’d misread the recipe and they needed to be separated again!
As with many other recipes the onions were cooked until they started to brown and then the lamb was added so it could brown, with regular stirring to prevent burning.
Then the spices were added, followed by the tamarind mix and then some boiling water. The dish was simmered for a couple of hours, then the chopped squash was added, followed after another half an hour of simmering by the prunes.
A final half an hour’s simmering and the tagine was finished, though the dark colour of the tamarind makes it hard to pick out the individual ingredients. I must say that the picture of this in the book was a lot prettier than what I produced, which is a shame, but as my tamarind paste was a deep black that seemed to stain everything.
At this point I refrigerated the tagine and didn’t eat it until the next day, I wasn’t even attempting rice that evening. The end result from the tagine was decidedly okay. It had a nice flavour but it really didn’t pop as much as I expected, the taramind in particular didn’t really cut through in a way I found quite surprising.
It was also very oily, even after removing some cooled fat off the top, which wasn’t ideal and may account for some of the muted flavours.
After cooking the tagine I moved onto the kotlet. Though strictly speaking I’d been making the mashed potato for this as the tagine was cooking.
The cooled mash was combined with egg, beef mince, chopped onion, garlic (read: asfoetida), cumin, turmeric, cinnamon, pepper and salt to make a very ugly mixture that was kept refrigerated overnight. Tasty things are not always beautiful.
Tasty when cooked. Not beautiful.
On day 2 it was time to make bread. I’ll spare you the images of dissolved yeast but the ingredients used are shown below, save for olive oil. The spice jar contains kahlonji, the other jar contains yeast. The frying pan contains butter for brushing the bread, I got this out far too early and it appears in the background of numerous photos after this.
The dough looked unremarkable but the process of making it was quite involved and included multiple rounds of kneading and short proofs, as well as incorporating olive oil in the final short proof. It was then left to have a long proof for three hours.
Sadly my photo of the dough before rising came out too blurry to use (phone cameras let me down again!) but I’m sure this picture of the dough after its final proof will demonstrate it was very happy to rise indeed! It was a particularly light and airy dough.
This dough was then stretched, cut in half and laid out on a baking sheet. A pizza cutter was used to make slits in the dough and a final thirty minutes was given for the dough to rise. Despite it being a flatbread.
This is what the breads looked like after quarter of an hour’s baking - not bad in my view, though I should have made the gaps bigger. The one on the right looked a bit pale and got a few minutes more, then both were left to stand before serving.
Given this bread was meant to be a flatbread I think I perhaps stretched it out less than the recipe wanted. Nevertheless this was amazing and I was very happy indeed with how it panned out. The kahlonji works extremely well in combination with the bread, which isn’t surprising given it works great with naan, but was still pleasing.
Onto the polow, clearly cognate with pilaf. This is apparently the variant cooked at weddings and involves basmati rice, butter, pistachio, almond, barberries, sugar and sour orange peel. The last of these ingredients was a pain to find but was ultimately just placed oddly in the usual independent grocer I go to for unusual ingredients. I also found shatta in the same aisle, a few weeks too late to use it for my Palestinian food last time!
As stated before the rice is parboiled (unwashed), drained, then rinsed with cold water in a colander. Not how it’s done in China, but this post isn’t on Chinese food.
The parboiled rice is then piled up in a pan with oil and butter and steamed for an hour - I used clingfilm to keep the steam in, which initially worked well but which tore about 80% through the cooking time. Not ideal and I think it did negatively impact on the rice!
After steaming the rice the butter and sugar were melted and the peel, barberries, pistachio and almond fried in this mixture. The recipe said to do this in two steps but I’d combined them as I was running out of bowls to mix things in at the time. This was, again, a mistake.
Finally, when everything is cooked, all the ingredients were combined. I think the end result is quite pretty.
On tasting I enjoyed the rice but I do think I mucked it up somewhat - the toppings, particularly the sour orange tasted as though I had cooked them for a little too long and I occasionally found a small lump of caramel in the mix, suggesting the sugar had clumped and not mixed in with the rice properly. This was likely due to me keeping the sugar and butter mixed in with the other ingredients. Had I melted the butter and sugar together first I could have better distributed the sugar and given the nuts, berries and peel a shorter cooking time.
Furthermore, as said before, the clingfilm used to keep the rice steaming broke a bit early and I think this meant the rice at the top was less fluffy than would have been ideal. Finally, the tahdig (crispy bottom-rice) was a little overdone, still edible but not delicious - I’m not too concerned with this last error as the book implies even people regularly cooking Persian rice have trouble consistently getting this right. However the book also states that a good tahdig is a highlight of cooking rice, so it’s still a shame.
Nevertheless I could tell that the flavour combination would have been fantastic had everything worked out alright and as it was was still good, even if it was not as good as it could have been.
During gaps in the cooking of other dishes I worked on the Shirazi salad - the ingredients of which are shown below, with some ingredients for other ingredients skulking in the background. Also the pre-packaged pomegranate seeds were thrown out, as they were bought with a short date and were on the turn. The lemon was used for juice but not for zest.
Step one - chop veg.
Step two - chop poms. I actually only needed one pomegranate worth of seeds but hadn’t a clear idea on how many seeds you get per fruit when I bought them.
Step three - chop red onion.
Final steps - add pomegranate seeds, salt, pepper, sumac, olive oil and lemon juice. Combine, serve, done.
This salad was good, quite simple and basic but healthy-tasting and a step above a conventional Western salad. I must admit that pomegranate seeds usually seem more effort than they’re worth but they do work well here.
Onto the squash - the full title of the recipe is za’atar roasted squash with spiced yogurt and pickled chillies. I’ll describe the yoghurt sauce and the topping with pickled chillies later but for those who are unaware za’atar or zatar is a thyme-based herb and spice mix popular across the Middle East. The mix comes from the Arabic word for thyme and my mix also included toasted sesame seeds and sumac.
Next up - the yoghurt sauce. This contained fresh mint, lemon juice and zest, olive oil, ground coriander seed, black pepper and sumac.
The pickled chillies were simply bought from an independent grocer in Brighton and were served in a mix with kahlonji seeds and parsley.
The squash was coated with olive oil, salt and zatar and baked for three quarters of an hour.
With the sauce and topping applied it’s now done!
Overall I liked this, I wasn’t much in the mood for squash by the time it came to actually eat it but I was still impressed so it must have been good. The meal really showcased the flavour of the ingredients with every component acting well together and demonstrated some elaborate spicework. This is very much a side dish rather than a main meal but comes highly recommended!
Finally we return to the kotlet - the ugly mix made yesterday is shaped into patties and coated in breadcrumbs. The result is … still ugly.
Into the pan it goes - the tagine is also reheating in this shot, and some tahdig is visible in the background.
Multiple batches were cooked and one finished batch is shown below. Truth be told it’s still not an amazing looker but it’s a lot prettier than the raw mix!
Overall I found these patties tasty, they reminded me of a Burmese dish I make semi-regularly, except that these are milder in their flavouring and are much easier to make. This said, it was still quite hard to prevent these from falling apart during cooking, which was mildly annoying. Nevertheless I thought them were pretty good and my partner loved them.
What I’d do differently
For three of the recipes - the kotlet, squash and flatbread - I have no real regrets on how I approached them. Certainly I’d have preferred the kotlet to hold together a bit better, and I’d try and work on my shaping if I repeat the recipe, but I don’t think any particularly large changes are necessary. I have more concerns with the tagine and the rice.
With the tagine I needed to use far less oil, on the first day of eating it it was far too oily and that was after removing some cooled fat before heating. Naturally that improved it but I’m sure some flavour was lost by doing this. I’d also pit the prunes and consider using a different vessel to cook in, as there was a little burning on the bottom with the casserole dish I used.
And although I enjoyed the rice more than the tagine I do think it was further away from what was intended and needs the most refinement:
Firstly the cooking of the nuts and orange needed improved - as said before in mixing up these ingredients with the butter and sugar ahead of time I committed myself to cooking the mixture for longer than was optimal and also I think this lead the sugar to not be evenly mixed across the rice.
Secondly the bottom-rice, tahdig, was a little overdone - ideally the rice should be on the heat for less time next time.
Finally, and possibly most importantly, it was a mistake for me to steam the rice using clingfilm instead of putting a lid on and sealing it with a tea towel as the recipe suggested. Eventually the heat lead to the film tearing, had there been a bit more time with the rice steaming I think I would have been able to get nicer, fluffier rice.
My view on the book
As usual I’m concerned with the balance of introductory content versus actual recipes - so on the topic of the introduction, here it is:
Aside from some content on the hard cover and blurbs above the recipes this is it.
I’m sure anyone who’s read my earlier posts could tell that I generally prefer a brief introduction but, even for my tastes, this is a little too concise! However this is the lesser of two evils versus a book where the introduction rambles on and we have to hear about the author’s great-uncle Ronald who met an Iranian man once. Nevertheless I would still have liked a little more information on the country, its history or its food, which may account for my rather self-indulgent introduction in this post.
Presentation-wise I find Persiana a very nice balance between being practical and being aesthetically pleasing - every recipe has a full-page photograph opposite the recipe and the recipe comes with a section talking about it, which is consistently long enough to be informative or interesting without overstaying its welcome. It doesn’t go over the top with its presentation but does what it does well, and for that I’m glad.
However, I do take issue with the cover. Not with the design itself, which I think is very tasteful and which even has some texturing on the front, a touch I love and didn’t even know I wanted. No - my issue is with the choice of quote.
“Loving Persiana.”
The sheer brevity of that quote makes it seem like a selective quote, as if Nigella went onto slate the book in the remainder of her sentence. I doubt it is but it’s such a lazy quote that I found it gave a bad impression.
On the back cover there are plenty of better quotes from a mix of famous chefs and reviews in newspapers or magazines. Although I realise Nigella Lawson is more well-known perhaps this would have been better?
“A fantastic treasure trove of good food.”
Of course, this is a very minor point that just bugs me more than it should.
On a matter of more substance I do find it hard to fault the recipes, they all work as described with only minor adjustments and that’s nothing to be sniffed at. From my own cookery from this book, tagine aside, my disappointments were borne purely from my own mistakes and I can’t really judge the cookbook negatively under those circumstances.
I would, however, criticise some of the stranger choices of presentation, such as insisting on sea salt flakes at every instance where salt is required - I’m very clearly middle class but I’m not sure I’m that middle class! That’s one step away from insisting on pink Himalayan salt. Though at least it didn’t commit Falastin’s sin of assuming a stand-mixer!
Another criticism I would levy is that it refers to spice mixtures such as zatar without actually providing recipes. Although zatar isn’t a hyper-variable spice mix like ras-el-hanout, or even garam masala (variants with or without cumin/coriander vary a lot), different mixes do exist and it’s useful to have a recipe so it’s clear what kind of mix is intended. The omission wasn’t the end of the world, not least because I simply used a recipe from a Başan cookbook to make up a batch, but it seems an obvious omission.
As I’m sure is clear the broad thrust of this section this time is that I’m positive about this book but do have some frustrations with it. Another mild frustration I have is its uncertainty about whether it’s a Persian cookbook or a broader Middle Eastern one, a strange ambiguity that extends into the marketing material and even the text of the book itself, Persian one minute, just Middle Eastern the next. Certainly I like Adana kebabs and I like lahmacun but I didn’t buy what appears to be a Persian cookbook so I could cook Turkish food!
On the other hand there’s always a tension in cookbooks between three depictions of a country’s cuisine: what food comes from the country, what food is eaten in the country, how the author would like to depict or progress the country’s cuisine (for instance by making new recipes in the appropriate style). Perhaps (inconsistently) framing the book as a Middle Eastern cookbook, even while it’s centred on Persia, is just a way of being explicit about this tension?
Similar issues of focus are certainly implicit in other books, lahmacun has appeared in cookbooks not only for the Turkey post and this one but also for the Levant post, and while it’s certainly part of Syrian and Lebanese cuisine few would argue it actually originated from either country. The books for last week’s posts just didn’t draw attention to this implicit tension between these three things a cookbook can be.
Ultimately the boundary of what is within a country’s cuisine is always fuzzy. Coming out of the context of the Middle East is a burger with beetroot and egg New Zealand food or is it just a variant on an American dish? And, for that matter, is a burger an American food or just a variant on Hamburg steak and therefore essentially a German dish? Although it niggles I can understand Persiana casting the net wide on what to include and not getting too focused on what’s explicitly Persian, and in turn, the writing reflecting how wide the net was cast.
Indeed, food history can be murky enough that I think too tight a focus on food coming from a country is a mistake - Persiana contains a biryani recipe for instance. Biryani is closely associated with the Mughals and with Hyderabad in particular but it’s not an established fact whether it evolved in India or was exported wholesale from Persia. An ultra-purist approach would be to not include it in a Persian cookbook but I think that would be a shame. And while this is particularly relevant in this part of the world the exact origins of foods can be tricky even in the West - most would say crème brûlée is French but reasonable cases can be made for an English or a Spanish/Catalan origin for the dessert and it would be odd to produce a lengthy French cookbook while excluding it.
Long tangent about what a cookbook should do aside, I enjoyed this book. It has its frustrations and I’ve apparently discovered there is such a thing as a cookbook that skimps on the introduction and becomes too much “all business” - but overall I do have to recommend it. I was, granted, middling on the tagine, so I won’t sing from the rooftops but I have fewer reservations recommending it than for the last post’s books and don’t regret by purchase for one second.