Cook a little Persian feast
With inspiration from Saghar Setareh and other strong Iranian women
“Our common roots go far beyond borders. In food we can see our true connections, and uniqueness, no matter what our passports say. These flavors and encounters are the heart of my stories, recipes and photos. Always searching for the connecting dots that make each of us a little bit less of a stranger.” — Saghar Setareh
Today I want to talk about Iran. I honestly knew very little about Iran until I became friends with , aka Lab Noon, who is one of the most talented food writers and photographers I know — a great friend, a great dining partner and wonderful cook, too. What I know of Iran now is largely influenced by the food of proudly strong women that I have been lucky to meet, their unparalleled hospitality (when I have shown up on Iranian women’s doorsteps, whether in Rome or London, I’ve been welcomed with open arms and a table full of delicious food!) and big hearts that care deeply about justice and humanity.
Born in Tehran, Saghar moved to Rome to study Fine Art in 2007 and stayed, starting her food blog, Lab Noon, in 2014 (this part of her story is very familiar to me). Her debut cookbook Pomegranates & Artichokes came out in 2023 and is the culmination of so many years of hard work — you can see it in every detail from the pages, the words, the recipes, the photographs. It is stunning. She seamlessly takes us on a journey — her journey — from Iran to Italy and in between (in fact, those are the names of the three sections that the book is divided into) and everything is mouthwateringly scrumptious.
When the book came out, I invited Saghar to Tuscany to teach a class at Enoteca Marilu and it was one of the most memorable cooking classes I’ve ever been part of. We prepared an Iranian breakfast to welcome the guests (if you make one thing from this book, the naan-e sheermal milk bread that you can see in the photo below is incredible — the smell of it baking alone is reason enough to try this — served with butter and rose petal jam as part of a breakfast spread along with sweet black tea, feta cheese, slices of tomatoes and cucumbers, walnuts, clotted cream and honey). Saghar proceeded to show us three different “stuffed” foods from her cookbook, as well as her grandmother’s sweet tea and rose petal, pistachio and saffron-laced ice cream (swoon — also, I love that it’s a cheat’s version made with store-bought gelato).
“Bread is such an important part of an Iranian breakfast that the utmost effort and love you can put into the meal is to visit a bakery early in the morning to get some fresh bread still hot from the oven,” she writes. Her depiction of Enghelab Street (‘Revolution road’) in downtown Tehran, near her Art and Architecture university, at the beginning of the milky bread recipe is one to read to hear about the vibrant street food scene as well as the “battered asphalt and blackened building walls” that could “speak of many turmoils and unrests, with students at the heart of them, of tear gas and gunshots and bloodshed.”
She manages to paint a picture of what Iran is for her, between the nostalgia for her family in a place that she has “unfalteringly wanted to leave” but where “it’s only here where people how to properly pronounce my name, making it sound as poetic and astounding as it is — cup of wine, star.” A place where “music is in our bones, and poetry is in our blood, and the aftertaste of saffron and rose lingers after every bite.”
“It’s difficult to talk about Iran from any angle. I don’t think at the moment any two Iranians in the world could agree on anything other than, perhaps, that chelo kabah represents the national dish of Iran,” writes Saghar in her introduction.
“Trying to preserve our identity as a country with a very rich culture and a turbulent history, while grappling with modernity on one hand and a religious regime and decades of semi-isolation on the other, has left us ‘on a pendulum between self-veneration and self-deploration’, to quote the multi-award-winning Iranian film director Asghar Farhadi. What we really want, though, apart from everything else, is an ounce of normality.
‘Normality’, this extraordinary privilege, has been taken away from us twice: once by the totalitarian regime that tries to police our lives (and that we’ve been incessantly fighting back), and once by Western media, with their perverted image of us, against which we have little means of fighting.”
Continue to the end to see two quick, wonderful recipes from Saghar’s cookbook. I urge you to check it out to be completely transported and very well fed; to be nourished by the food, as well as the stories, it’s the legendary Iranian hospitality of too much food, made with love and time, in book form.
More strong Iranian women that you should know
Another person to follow for more on Iran is Kamin Mohammadi, writer, editor, journalist, broadcaster, all-around powerhouse of a woman. Author of The Cypress Tree: A love letter to Iran (her memoir) and also Bella Figura: How to Live, Love and Eat the Italian Way, her family fled to London in 1979 during the Iranian revolution when she was a child. She has lived in Tuscany for the past 16 years, where she writes, makes olive oil and shares experiences from yoga to writing retreats. Do follow Kamin on her Substack and also on Instagram, especially for these informative posts on the history of Iran, read some her prolific journalism work about Iran — or take her Brief History of Iran online course for the Idler Academy.
Another writer and activist is
, who writes the substack Rising Up. Her beautiful cookbooks tell the stories of her mother’s native Iran (The Saffron Tales) and Palestine (Zaitoun), for example, and she has just released a new book of vegetarian recipes, Sabzi.
Below, Yasmin shared these wise, strong and beautiful words by Iranian novelist Marjan Kamali, best selling author of The Lion Women of Tehran:
“War is not a form of liberation of something to cheer. It is an inhumane and cruel way for men to profit and destroy. We’ve normalised the forever wars. We’ve made it part of foreign policy, part of routine. It is not routine. War is horror and a moral failure. Don’t let it become an expectation or presumption. When I voiced my sorrow, a friend said ‘that’s what happens over there.’ No. That’s not what happens over there. What happens ‘over there’ is life. Birthday parties. Weddings. School exams. A trip to the corner store to buy groceries. Please. Let’s not lose our humanity fully.”
The current and sudden attack that Iran is under is an absolutely heartbreaking and terrifying situation for its ordinary civilians, whose misery is “sure to deepen” as things escalate (such as the US entering the war!). Although hundreds of thousands of people are trying to evacuate Tehran, a city of 10 million people, not all people can flee. To paraphrase this Guardian article, not everyone has another place they can go or the means to get there (the country is experiencing its worst economic crisis in decades). Essentially, innocent civilians are left abandoned in the city, as the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Narges Mohammadi, describes here:
More alarmingly, the notorious Evin prison has not been evacuated — this is where hundreds of political prisoners and female protesters of the Women, Life, Freedom protests from 2022 are currently detained. Iranian human rights activist, Reza Khandan, whose wife, Nasrin Satoudeh, is a human rights attorney and Iran’s most prominent women’s rights defender, is one of them, imprisoned for standing up for women’s rights (read this interview with Reza for Time magazine and see the trailer for the documentary on Nasrin below for more about her and what she — and many others — are fighting for).
What does this all have to do with food?
Food is unifying, and during these horrific times of war, food can bring people together, it can show our humanity. Food is a wonderful way to show support for one another.
As my friend, Ukrainian cookbook author, Olia Hercules (who has a new book out right now, a memoir called Strong Roots), has shown through her important Cook for Ukraine movement and fundraiser, food can bridge and bring cultures together. As Olia wrote on social media when the war in Ukraine broke out, “I don’t want people to get stuck in the headlines and to disassociate themselves from the humanity.”
Let’s do the same for Iran.
Let’s cook some beautiful food and share it with others.
Let’s offer tea.
Let’s bring a plate of sweets.
Saghar has generously given me permission to share any recipe from her beautiful book, and I have been pouring over it but in the end I want to share these two delicious, very, very simple dishes that you can easily whip up right now and are just perfect for any occasion. You can also visit Saghar’s blog to download her free e-book, “A Little Persian Feast” of the Iranian recipes that she teaches in cooking classes — things like Iranian jewelled rice, saffron chicken and rose and cardamom cake: irresistible food to share with people you love.
A Simple Iranian Salad (Salad Shirazi)
This was part of a perfect, quick lunch for the summer heat that has just hit us full force. A humble salad, as Saghar says, that is an essential part of an Iranian table. Use the best ingredients, as it is so simple, and don’t make it more than 15 minutes in advance, she advises. If you’re in the southern hemisphere, you can make her “unorthodox winter version” instead, with a diced fennel bulb and pomegranate seeds to replace the cucumber and tomato.
2 cucumbers (or 4 Persian/Lebanese cucumbers), peeled and diced
2 small tomatoes, diced
1/2 large red onion
1 heaped tablespoon dried mint, or handful fresh mint leaves
2 tablespoon lime /lemon juice or verjuice (“which we love in Iran”)
1/2 teaspoon salt
sprinkling of freshly ground black pepper
Simply mix all the ingredients in a bowl and serve.
Beetroot and yoghurt dip (Borani-e laboo)
Saghar has a number of borani (“vegetables — even raw but often cooked — when drowned in yoghurt are called borani in Iran”) and I couldn’t resist “the one with beetroot” as it’s called in her book, with its bright pink colour. Saghar likes to add a hint of sugar to this, but you can leave it out if you prefer. I especially loved this advice (even if I didn’t have the fresh one, I used pre-boiled beetroot as it’s not always easy to find fresh where I live): “If your beetroot has the stems and leaves intact, you can cook these, chope them up and mix them through the dip as well. I like to keep in some chunky bits of beetroot, as they feel better in the mouth when you chew on them. Throw in a handful of coarsely chopped walnuts as well if you feel fancy.”
300 grams beetroot, cooked and peeled
400 grams plain Greek style yogurt, strained
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar, or to taste
Dice the beetroot, some finely, some coarsely, and combine in a bowl with the rest of the ingredients. Rest at least 10 minutes in the fridge before serving.
Thank you to my dear friend Saghar for this beautiful collection of recipes and photographs, for letting me share some of them, along with her stories, today. These recipes come from Saghar Setareh’s Pomegranates & Artichokes: Recipes and memories of a journey from Iran to Italy, published by Murdoch Books (2023).
Persian food is bloody amazing: my father (a lawyer) had a number of Persian clients and became friends with several. The hospitality is unparalleled and the food is exceptional, hard to find in NYC.
Thank you, Emiko. A wonderful idea and a beautifully written piece.