On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  Later when we met up with Mr. Sanjar, he asked us what we’d had for lunch. Craig mentioned that he’d wanted to go to the fancy hotel. “Oh, you mean the Abbasi?” our guide asked. “They have the best hamburger in Iran!”

  Hamburgers and pizza aside, shops sold illegally imported Western goods like Nutella, Coco Pops, and Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup, which sometimes sat in revolving storefront-window display cases. The all-powerful beverage companies Coca-Cola and Pepsi had managed to skirt the embargo and had turned Iranian youth into soda drinkers. On the streets, I’d even found a pirated copy of a Jamie Oliver DVD selling for just over a dollar. At the cooking school, too, I’d seen the enthrallment with the West. Mrs. Soltani’s saffron-imbued fried chicken aside, her curriculum included roast beef sandwiches and European-style loaves of bread.

  Iran’s love of Western food was not a recent phenomenon. Under the shah, Western goods had flowed freely from Europe and America. In fact, to celebrate the twenty-five-hundredth anniversary of the Persian monarchy in 1971, the shah flew in chefs from Paris to prepare a banquet. Craig and I learned of the lavish event while touring Persepolis, the ancient city of the Achaemenid Empire. Pointing to a set of abandoned tents in the distance, Mr. Sanjar told us that that was where the feast had been held.

  The menu included quails’ eggs stuffed with caviar, crayfish mousse, roast lamb with truffles, and roasted peacocks. Not a single Persian dish was served, unless you counted the caviar from the Caspian Sea and the peacocks, Iran’s national symbol. Wines, including a 1945 Château Lafite Rothschild, flowed throughout. The dinner made the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest and most lavish banquet in history. Dozens of world leaders and dignitaries, including U.S. vice president Spiro Agnew, dined for almost six hours at a cost of more than one hundred million dollars. Eight years later, fierce and bloody demonstrations over the shah’s incompetence and corruption finally loosened his grip over the country and he fled, fearing for his life.

  Iran seemed to have a love-hate relationship with the West, an unsurprising result of constant meddling by British, Russians, and Americans, who scuffled over geopolitical dominance and oil. It was easy to get the impression from spending time with Shaheen that Iran was in trouble, yet the current anti-Western regime had managed to stay in power for almost forty years. And not everyone I met dissented, not even the more Westernized and affluent. At a party in a private home in Tehran, as Craig and I snacked on salami and sipped whiskey, both smuggled from Europe, an Iranian woman told me, “We were so European growing up, we didn’t know who we were as a people. We didn’t know our culture, our history. Things are now moving in a good direction. I feel positive about the future.”

  • • •

  The day after Shaheen took us out, I returned to the cooking school for another lesson. In the back kitchen, Yasmin taught me how to bake Iranian cookies called berenji, while a group out front learned how to make European bread. The cookies had begun as a snack for the students, but became so popular that the school had opened a side business selling them to a distributor. Like Central Asians and Europeans, Iranians had a long history of baking and sweet-making. Confectionery shops were as plentiful as pizza and hamburger places, many of them family businesses passed down for generations. They sold many types of baked goods, from a dense version of baklava, heavy with pistachios, walnuts, and syrup, to cookies made with not just wheat flour but also ground chickpeas and rice.

  So important was rice that Iranians even added it to their cookies. Yasmin pulled open a large Tupperware container of rice flour. I was familiar with the ingredient from China, but this flour had a distinctly earthy, sweet fragrance. We measured out the flour on a digital scale and mixed it with vegetable shortening, sunflower oil, and eggs. Yasmin poured in rosewater and a teaspoon of crushed cardamom. We shaped the biscuits with tiny, thumb-sized cookie cutters, decorated them with poppy seeds and pistachio slivers, and glazed them with saffron water and egg yolk.

  As the cookies went into the oven, Yasmin asked how the evening had gone with her brother. I told her we’d felt bad about drinking in front of her parents and concerned about getting into the car with him after the drinks. Mrs. Soltani, who’d just given the class a short break, wandered in and overheard us.

  “Shaheen bad!” she said, shaking her head and wrinkling her nose.

  “We’re all worried about him,” Yasmin said. As a child, he’d been the smartest student in his classes, but as he grew older, his intelligence often got him into trouble, she explained. He questioned authority, challenged everyone around him, and was unwilling to compromise. His temperament made him particularly frustrated with Iran’s current state of affairs.

  “My parents warned him not to drink and drive several times last night but he did it anyway,” Yasmin said. Shaheen was headstrong, and once he had an idea in his head, he didn’t let go. Her parents acquiesced the night before only because they didn’t want to fight in front of us, honored guests from afar.

  I asked her how she felt about his desire to leave Iran. She wanted to leave, too, she replied. She hoped to immigrate to Canada, which was why she’d gone to French class the evening before. Every year, Quebec admitted a certain number of skilled immigrants who met certain requirements, including French proficiency. She’d already submitted paperwork for the two-year process. If she studied diligently and passed the language test, she had a good chance of making the cut. Canada had already granted one relative and the relative’s husband visas, and several college friends lived there. America was her first choice, but it was nearly impossible to immigrate there without family already in the country.

  I asked Yasmin why she wanted to leave. Like her brother, she, too, launched into a tirade, albeit a saner one. Her complaints went beyond the hejab and not being able to drink. The morality police had unbridled power to arrest whomever they wanted, she said. Unmarried couples weren’t allowed to walk in public together. Police broke up parties in private homes, hauling young people to jail for fraternizing and dancing. I discovered that we could have even gotten arrested for turning up the music in Shaheen’s car and singing along to Gloria Gaynor. Granted, his singing was horrendous, but making it a crime seemed a little extreme.

  “Women aren’t even supposed to ride bicycles,” Yasmin said.

  “Bicycles? What’s wrong with bicycles?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Yasmin said wearily. But the police had recently stopped the daughter of one of the school’s assistants for doing just that and warned her not to do it again.

  Shaheen had been arrested a handful of times, Yasmin added. She’d gotten in trouble as well. Just before graduating from college, she’d been camping with her boyfriend and several friends in the desert. The authorities tracked them down and sent them to a detention center. When the police called her parents, they said that she and her boyfriend were engaged, hoping to buy amnesty. After a court appearance and strikes on their dossiers, they’d been freed. But if she had gotten in trouble again, she would have been expelled from college.

  The authorities who monitored social norms were called the morality police. But they weren’t the police we’d come in contact with over our visas; they were part of the basij, or revolutionary guards who worked under the religious order. So far, they’d been invisible to Craig and me. I asked Yasmin what the morality police looked like. They essentially could be anyone on the streets, she said. That was part of what made them so effective. Some wore black chadors pulled tightly around their faces—that described about half the women on the streets; the men often were plainclothed. Others worked directly for the military. They lurked in certain public areas, keeping watch on young people. It was a game of cat and mouse, as much defined by luck as it was by skill or how careful people were. I shivered. We’d taken a big risk the night before.

  Things had relaxed under the previous president, Yasmin said, and the morality police had been mostly concern
ed that women were properly covered up. But the social restrictions had tightened since Ahmadinejad had taken office, and now the government had made life so untenable that she, like many other young, well-educated Iranians, felt she had to leave. She added that she planned to take her parents with her.

  “But what about the cooking school?” I asked.

  “My mother’s been cooking for a long time. She’s tired. And soon, my father will want to retire, too,” she said.

  It was a shame to think that the vibrant women’s-only private space might vanish. But it was worse to think of the family languishing under the tight rule of a government that micromanaged every aspect of their lives. The government even restricted how the Soltanis ran the school—classes had to conform to a set curriculum and the family couldn’t change menus without permission.

  Mrs. Soltani came back into the kitchen, complaining about her arm, which had been bothering her so much she’d recently signed up for physical therapy. She poked her head into the fridge and, with slumped shoulders, picked at some leftover roast beef with her fingers. She dunked the beef into some cold soup: Not bad, her expression seemed to say. At the end of a hard day in Iran, the food was always there to comfort you.

  • • •

  Craig had liked Iran more than he’d expected, and I’d enjoyed having him with me to experience the delicious Persian dishes and the Soltanis’ hospitality. While he never got used to the tea (my husband was addicted to coffee), he could always find packets of Nescafé, and while I was at my cooking classes, he could go off and find an occasional hamburger in peace. He especially admired the country’s long history of poetry and hearing locals recite verses spontaneously. Had Craig not come with me, I doubted that my experience would have been as rich. I would not, for example, have heard Shaheen rant about politics, an evening that, odd as it was, would go down as one of the trip’s most memorable.

  Also, had I been without Craig, the travels with Mr. Sanjar would have been awkward, given the social norms. Thankfully, the tension with our guide had ebbed again, and one morning, I made a truce with him over kalleh pacheh, a stew of lamb’s head and feet. I’d heard of the dish in Turkmenistan, when we’d visited Michael’s village for the sheep slaughter. Throughout Iran, our guide had spoken about the dish, calling it his favorite. Toward the end of our trip, he asked us if we were up to the challenge of trying it. One eatery in Tehran was known for the best kalleh pacheh.

  “What’s in it?” Craig asked.

  “Well, you get the feet, of course. And then parts of the head, like the brain, the tongue, and the eyes. I don’t like the eyes,” Mr. Sanjar said, making a face. “But everything else is delicious!” Our guide added that we’d have to leave early in the morning. It was breakfast, and we’d have to beat the rush.

  “I’ve had enough interesting food experiences,” Craig said, declining the invitation.

  So Mr. Sanjar and I set off the next morning at six-thirty. On our way to the eatery, the sun began to rise across the city, which was just coming alive with a few bicyclists and vehicles.

  “When I was in high school, I used to get up this early and go jogging with my friends,” Mr. Sanjar said, as we rounded a corner. “And then we would go eat kalleh pacheh.”

  As soon as Mr. Sanjar parked the car, my nose detected the smell of lamb’s innards wafting down the street. It wasn’t the most pleasant fragrance, but the store was already packed. A dozen diners crowded the eatery, standing around a large mustachioed man with a protruding belly who presided over two vats that sat on a stove low to the ground and rose to his waist. One contained a soup made of lamb’s stomach, an innard that resembled a squishy sheet of honeycomb, while the other contained the main attraction: sheep’s heads and feet. He ladled out the soup, tinged yellow with turmeric. He fished out a sheep’s head and shook out the brain, which landed on a plate with a small thud. It resembled dirty cottage cheese. He carved some tongue and cheek onto the same plate and placed it all in front of us.

  The shopkeeper had worked in the store for twenty-five years, taking it over a few years before the death of his father, whose framed photo hung on the wall. Each afternoon around five o’clock, he prepared a fresh batch of the soup. First he cleaned dozens of sheep’s heads by burning off the remaining hair and removing the noses, then split them in half. A hairy gland was taken off each of the hoofs. He boiled the sheep parts slowly over a low fire, adding salt, pepper, turmeric, and cinnamon, periodically adjusting the seasonings. He left the vats simmering overnight and returned to the store at five in the morning to taste the soup and adjust the seasonings once more. His regulars began to arrive after dawn prayers.

  “The eyes are good for your eyes, the brain is good for your brain, and the feet are good if you’ve broken a bone,” he said. It reminded me of what Central Asians and Chinese said about eating various animal parts. “We have a story about kalleh pacheh. Two men have been given life sentences”—highly plausible, given we were in Iran—“and they’re told they can eat only one thing at mealtimes, over and over again. One prisoner dies shortly thereafter, because he’s chosen kebabs. The other prisoner ends up living for years and years and even gets stronger. His secret? Kalleh pacheh.”

  Did he eat the soup every day? I asked.

  He patted his round stomach. “Not anymore.”

  I ate the tongue and cheek without a problem—the tongue was a bit more fibrous and slippery than beef tongue, but the cheek was succulent and tender. I hesitated when I got to the brain. Mr. Sanjar had already sprinkled some into his soup, along with torn-up pieces of lavash. In between slurps, he assumed his most soothing, parental voice: “Don’t worry, I’m here. It’s Iranian traditional food. Just close your eyes and enjoy it!” I mustered the courage and inserted the spoon into my mouth. The brain had the same taste as liver, but with a gelatinous, gummy texture. One bite was plenty. In this instance, my husband was right: I’d had enough interesting food experiences.

  As we ate, I noticed I was the only woman in the shop. “Women don’t like the soup because it’s heavy and fatty,” Mr. Sanjar said. But strangely, the guide didn’t seem to have a problem bringing me here, unlike the teahouses. The diners didn’t seem to mind my presence either—they smiled and greeted me as I sipped the soup. As in other parts of the Silk Road, hospitality toward foreigners seemed to override prejudice. And they were busy in the social space, swapping news about their lives and talking about the day’s headlines.

  After we finished eating, a middle-aged mechanic wearing a jumpsuit invited me to his table. He poured me a cup of tea and offered me sugary saffron wafers to help me digest the soup. Every day, the dish gave him the energy he needed for his job, he said.

  As we got back into the car and drove off, Mr. Sanjar looked content. He wasn’t so bad after all, I supposed. Evidently he hadn’t planned to detain or torture us, and in a sense he’d kept us safe. A few days later, we would pass through immigration and board our flight back to Beijing without a hitch.

  “If only young people ate more of this and less pizza, they’d be much better off,” our guide said, adjusting his seat belt. “My brain feels light. Oh, we should walk a lot today.”

  • • •

  On one of our last evenings in Iran, we went to the Soltanis’ for a final meal. I’d offered to make Chinese pan-fried dumplings with lamb-and-carrot filling. It wasn’t going as well as I’d hoped. I had the ingredients I needed, which had come from the Soltanis’ well-stocked fridges and pantry, but the dumpling skins were drier than usual and kept tearing. And I was nervous, because when I’d stir-fried kungpao chicken another day, the smoke from the chilies had made everyone cough. Everyone dug in with makeshift chopsticks fashioned out of wooden kebab sticks. “Good!” Mrs. Soltani proclaimed while everyone else choked on the spice. Afterward, they lit incense and opened the windows to disperse the scent of chili-infused oil. Iranians, like Central Asians, were not fan
s of spicy.

  In the cooking school kitchen, I struggled with the dumpling skins in the face of all kinds of distractions. Mrs. Soltani, in a motherly sort of way, kept shoving sections of an orange directly in my mouth. Another relative was trying to show me a cooking magazine she edited. Craig was trying to make the dumplings as big as he could to get the process over quickly. “Personally, the kind of cooking I like to do is fast,” he told Yasmin, who took down the recipe for her mother.

  Yasmin had spent the week cooking with me, and for that I was very grateful, especially since she didn’t like to cook. As the last pan-fried dumplings came off the stove, we dashed downstairs to the Soltanis’ home. I asked if the week had changed her opinion on cooking. “No, not really.” She shrugged. She still thought of cooking as a chore. To be honest, she said, she’d rather be cleaning her room.

  It was around ten in the evening when we started eating. Instead of sitting at the formal European dining table, as I’d expected, everyone sprawled out across the room, eating on sofas, sitting at bar stools, or standing in the kitchen. I finally got to taste the Soltanis’ kebabs, the dish I’d learned my first day with the family but hadn’t sampled. Mr. Soltani grilled up dozens of skewers and wrapped them in a blanket of lavash to keep them warm. He served them with a simple salad of lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumber with a homemade yogurt dressing. Even though I thought I’d hit my limit with kebabs in Iran, the Soltanis’ version, toothsome hunks of tender lamb sprinkled, of course, with saffron, was more delicious than most.

  Passing over the chili oil I’d made and the soy sauce, everyone was dunking my dumplings into ketchup. I was horrified, but with Mr. Soltani’s encouragement, I tried it: Iranian ketchup, imbued with spices, was actually quite tasty, a cross between Heinz and tangy barbecue sauce. (And ketchup, as it turned out, had Chinese roots—it had begun as a condiment called kecap before going to Britain, where tomatoes were incorporated.) I had to admit that the condiment enlivened my dry dumplings.