Home At Last

When I recently went home to the US for a week, I had the immense pleasure of eating 3 different Persian dishes, all of which, in the hopes of an eventual return, my father had saved for me. Two were made by an aunt and one by my grandmother. The dishes -- ghormeh sabzi, khoresh-e-garcht, and fessenjon -- were doled out into plastic freezer bags and tightly sealed. As we cooked rice in my mother's kitchen, the perfumed smell of basmati filled the apartment mingling with simmering pomegranate, mushroom, onion, saffron, and parsley to name just a few. They were smells I missed. Until last night, I had avoided making Persian food for nearly a year and a half when I used to make it quite regularly. I grew up on this food. Apparently, when my grandmother babysat me for a year (just after she immigrated to the US during the Iranian Revolution of 79'), she would make these amazing dishes and blend a portion so that her toothless granddaughter could savor the flavors of her country without choking on a cube of beef. Years later, when we moved to the east coast to be closer to the rest of the Iranian family, there were big, family get-togethers nearly every weekend, smaller ones during the week, so that Persian food was a part of my regular diet; I ate rice the way most other Americans ate Kraft singles; I celebrated Nowruz, the Persian New Year, that stems from a pagan, Zoroastrian tradition; I said "merci" instead of "thank you." After the meals, we'd crank up the stereo and dance to the sitar or to Iranian pop music, my 5 aunts teaching me how to move like an Iranian woman, our soiled dinner napkins now moving sensually above our heads. It's all in the wrists, they'd say. Move your hips more, my grandmother would shout, snapping her fingers to the beat. And then we'd collapse, the food heavy in our bellies, to talk over tea and sweets. I have fond memories of those days. By the time I married, my husband had already acquired a taste for Persian food and I decided, somewhat nervously for Persian food isn't an easy cuisine, to learn how to cook it. Fast forward about 3 years and many dishes later. I'm in France. My kitchen is small and my stove top even smaller. I can't find good basmati rice (on one occasion, I pick up a burlap bag and several roaches scurry out from underneath!). The smallest range on the stove gives off too much heat so I worry the rice will burn. There are no Persian food stores...and so on and so forth. They're not so much excuses as evidence that my world has changed and I, for a while, am choosing not to face the changes that I can get away with not facing. In other words, what I realized was that I hadn't made Persian food in France because France was not yet home. But perhaps, in that inadvertent delay, I had caused that feeling to stick around longer. I had to make France my home. My sudden desire to cook Persian food could also be due to having returned from home and feeling homesick, the need to recreate what I no longer have, but whatever the reason, I think it's a good sign I'm beginning to cook Persian food again...