By Laleh Khalili
Professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London

MERIP - Middle East Research and Information Project

When I left Iran for good in 1985, I carried two books in my massive suitcase. The first was a boxy little hardcover bound in black cloth: the collected ghazals of Hafez (which apparently every Iranian must own). The version was edited by the great modernist poet Ahmad Shamlu, and it was notorious for his controversial editorial choices, unadorned presentation on the page and blasphemous punctuation. The second book was also bound in black cloth.

Roza Montazemi’s venerable cookbook, Honar-e-Ashpazi (The Art of Cooking) was bigger in size but lighter, because its paper was what we called kahi, or lower-quality straw paper, lightweight and liable to yellowing. I am not certain whether my parents had to use their ration books to buy it, but due to shortages of paper during the Iran-Iraq war, the sale of this immensely popular book had to be rationed.

My edition of Honar-e-Ashpazi has some 800 recipes (the 2009 edition of the book has 1700). In my version, approximately 500 of these recipes are farangi recipes: potages, consommés, soufflés, Chateaubriands, schnitzels and a variety of sauces, including béchamel. But all references to forbidden fare are eliminated: no ham, mortadella, sherry, wine or cognac appears in the ingredients’ list.

As food historian and cook Anny Gaul has written about Egypt, the emergence of a middle class and its access to a print culture led to cookbooks which Egyptianized modern cuisines, including French recipes. Gaul notes that béchamel sauce entered Egyptian cooking through cookbooks and the restaurant culture.

In Iran’s case, French cookery was absorbed not only through the travels of Iranian aristocrats and merchants to Western Europe and the adoption of French institutions in Iran, but also through the influx of Russian and Polish émigrés after the Revolution of 1917 and two World Wars who brought with them both French court cuisine and their own dishes.

It is no surprise that meat pirashkis (pirogis) or Olivier salad—a version of which is called Ensaladilla Rusa in the Hispanophone world or Rus Salatası in Turkey—have been part of the weekly cooking rota of many an Iranian middle-class family. These French and Russian influences were especially prevalent in the kitchens of northern and central Iran, but less so in the south, where the cuisine looks across the water to Arabia and the Indian Ocean.

Montazemi’s Iranian recipes have to a large extent become standard recipes by which most middle-class Iranians—and certainly those who learned to cook from cookbooks—construct a meal. Montazemi (born Fatemeh Bahraini), who was from Shahsavar on the Caspian coast and moved to Tehran at an early age, highlighted and universalized northern Iranian recipes.

As my extended family is originally from southern Iran, the flavor profiles of our family recipes differ slightly from Montazemi’s recipes for such everyday dishes as eggplant, celery or rhubarb stews, or Islambouli or kalam (cabbage/kohlrabi) pilaus.

What I remember as childhood favorites, and what I subjectively consider the standard flavors of these dishes, were prepared by my father. He became our household’s primary cook after he was purged from his University of Mashhad job during the years of the so-called cultural revolution (instigated in Mashhad by Abdulkarim Sorush who went on to become a famous reformist).

The two Persian and nine English-language Iranian cookbooks under review provoke reflections and questions about authenticity and adaptation, the social profiles and memories of cookbook writers and what differences in regional cooking portends politically.

Cooking in the Diaspora

Diasporic Iranian cookery writing has broadly come in two waves: from the 1980s to early 1990s and again in the latter years of the 2010s. The first wave appears in the United States and Britain with the arrival of Iranians after the revolution.

The second wave occurs when the children of those original exiles come of age and begin to search for community, belonging and an unreachable Iranian past—unreachable because of the obstacles placed on travel to Iran by both the Islamic Republic and European and American governments.

The first wave includes the two volumes of Mohammad Reza Ghanoonparvar’s Persian Cuisine—based on a cooking show he hosted on local television in Texas and southern California and published in 1982 and 1984 (later combined in the 2015 edition). Ghanoonparvar is familiar to scholars of Iran, and many others, for his decades of teaching Persian at the University of Texas, but perhaps more importantly, for his beautiful translations into English of some of Iran’s most important modern literature (foremost among them Simin Daneshvar’s Savushun).

Margaret Shaida’s The Legendary Cuisine of Persia, first published in Britain in 1992, includes research on the historical roots and travels of Iranian cuisine. Shaida was born in Britain and moved to Iran with her Iranian husband in the 1950s, and the cookbook is based on her experience of cooking Iranian food for more than 30 years. Shaida introduces most recipes with quotes of relevant passages from Iranian poetry, European travelers’ accounts and her own observations and memories.

The second generation of cookbooks resembles a spate of memoirs, novels and travelogues produced by young Iranian-American and Iranian-European women starting in the 1990s. The authors go to Iran—physically or in memory—in search of themselves and the sometimes elusive connections to a place they remember through a mist of sentiment and forgetfulness. In this second wave, food is the conduit for remembering familial and diaspora history, and not only in cookbooks. Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken with Plums and Marsha Mehran’s Pomegranate Soup both use food as a vehicle for storytelling.

In the first generation of diasporic cookbooks, Najmieh Batmanglij’s New Food of Life is the one that made me think about cookbooks as something more than an instruction manual. After I arrived in the United States, I had to learn how to prepare my meals. In Iran, my family had insisted that as a woman I should not learn cooking so I would not “have to wait on some man hand and foot.”  >>> read more