by Donia Bijan
Maman’s Homesick Pie
Maman’s Homesick Pie
A PERSIAN HEART IN AN AMERICAN KITCHEN
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Donia Bijan
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2011 by Donia Bijan. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.
Design by Anne Winslow.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bijan, Donia.
Maman’s homesick pie : a Persian heart in an American kitchen /
by Donia Bijan.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-56512-957-3 (hardback)
1. Cooking, Iranian. 2. Cooking — California — San Francisco.
I. Bijan, Donia. II. Title.
TX725.I7B55 2011
641.5955—dc23
2011023858
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
In memory of Atefeh and Bijan
For Luca
Contents
Author’s Note
Introduction
Persian Cardamom Tea
Orange Cardamom Cookies
Chapter 1
Pomegranate Granita
Sour Cherry Upside-Down Cake
Chapter 2
Saffron Yogurt Rice with Chicken and Eggplant
My Mother’s Quince Marmalade
Chapter 3
My Mother’s Bread Stuffing
Persimmon Parfait
Chapter 4
Braised Chicken with Persian Plums
Cinnamon Date Bars
Chapter 5
Sweet and Sour Grape Leaf Dolmas with Jeweled Rice
Madame’s Cocoa Pound Cake
Chapter 6
My Mother’s Pot Roast
Fava Bean Omelet
Chapter 7
Straw Potato and Muenster Galette
Roast Rabbit with Whole Grain Mustard and Rosemary
Chapter 8
Ratatouille with Black Olives and Fried Bread
Duck à l’Orange
Chapter 9
Potato Waffles with Crème Fraîche
Salmon Gravlax with Meyer Lemon and Tarragon
Chapter 10
Purple Plum Skillet Tart
Tomato Confit
Chapter 11
Roast Duck Legs with Dates and Warm Lentil Salad
Rose Petal Ice Cream
Chapter 12
Roasted Stuffed Quince with Fennel Sausage and Currants
Cardamom Honey Madeleines
Chapter 13
Rice Pudding
Pistachio Brittle
Chapter 14
My Mother’s Apple Pie
Cherry Slushy
Special Thanks
Author’s Note
I WROTE THIS BOOK in an attempt to find answers to the questions I never asked my parents, such as How did it feel to start your life from nothing? as well as to give their grandchildren a context so that when we speak of Iran, they will see their connection to the elusive home of their parents and grandparents. And because I am a cook, not a reporter, I have told the story as I remember it, through the prism of food, changing the names of the characters to preserve their privacy, but holding their place at my table.
Maman’s Homesick Pie
Introduction
MY MOTHER HAD been dead eight days when I showed up in her kitchen. There I was, on a gray January afternoon, with empty boxes and grocery bags, determined to cope with my colossal loss by salvaging a head of lettuce, a quart of milk, a pint of plain yogurt, and jar after jar of homemade pickled vegetables.
Walking down the hallway to her front door, I was no longer greeted by the familiar aroma of sweet Persian spices, nor could I hear the faint notes of the classical music station my mother tuned in to from morning until the evening news. I half expected her to open the door and pull me to her chest—Here you are, darling, here you are—and tell me it had been a huge mistake, that she had not been crushed under the wheels of the old lady’s Mercedes coupe, that she had not been in that zippered orange body bag on the side of the road, that the mangled body we buried just a few days ago was not her. Not her.
But on that day and thereafter, no tender heart awaited me, no one strung endearments like garlands around me, and no one cared if I was tired or chilly or asked me if I needed a sweater. My mother’s home smelled of tea and roses, but no kettle whistled, promising a steaming cup, served on a tray with a pitcher of milk and butter cookies on a linen doily.
For days it was quiet, methodical work—sorting and packing the boxes I had lined up by her cabinets like little coffins, filling them with cups and saucers wrapped in newspaper, and spoons, spatulas, and whisks. I labeled them in angry print with a thick black felt-tip marker, bound for a basement until the day a grandchild might hoist it up to her first home and delight in things her grandparents once used.
My mother’s best china and silver were not in these boxes—they’d been looted from her home in Iran thirty years earlier. In the aftermath of a revolution that had targeted my parents as infidels and royalists, they had escaped a regime that would have paraded their slain bodies through the streets of Tehran. These boxes held the everyday household things that my parents had slowly accumulated since their exile. Which was more valuable—the heirloom silver or these mismatched cups from Goodwill? My mother had worked harder to buy this single Wedgwood cup.
I was not prepared for this sort of packing. My mother always helped me pack, for trips, slumber parties, and camp. Packing for good like this, packing after someone dies, holds no promise. I had to wonder: Who would want this cardigan with her elbow impressions, or the scarf that had cradled her head, or her cream and white sling-back shoes? Who would sit in her knitting chair and finish that unfinished sweater from a pattern she had cut out of Vogue, rolled up neatly around her knitting needles? And so, my task soon became a battle between us. I chided her for having too many things—Why must you have so many juice glasses?—then scolded myself for being too keen on giving everything away to spare myself having to scrutinize it. At times I was downright careless, tossing into the giveaway box a rotating caddy of poker chips that my son, then two, loved to dump on the floor and stack back in place with chubby fingers, spending as long as it took. When my mother looked after him, I would come to fetch him and find the two of them on the floor, spinning the caddy and shrieking out the colors of the chips: Red! Blue! Green! If I kept it, he would ask for her. No. Let somebody else stumble upon this treasure on the dusty back shelves of a secondhand store. In rare moments of clarity, I went home with a random tea strainer or a cracked wooden spoon tucked into my coat pocket. I suppose I thought she had held these things long enough, and often enough, that they were no longer inanimate.
One afternoon I pulled open a kitchen drawer, expecting to find more spoons that I had missed. Instead I found it filled with papers, which I feared were receipts and warranty cards. I was ready to nag her again, when I realized they were recipes, mostly handwritten, some cut out of newspapers, piled in no particular order.
On the floor, with the drawer on my lap, I tallied recipe after recipe of American dishes that she had made great efforts to master: coleslaw, banana bread, carrot cake, macaroni and cheese. There were recipes for chow mein with the prerequisite can of water chestnuts, microwave sweet-and-sour shrimp, and casseroles involving Campbell’s cream of mushroom
soup, many bearing the name of the friend, neighbor, or colleague who had given her the instructions, like “Peggy’s Lemon Bars.” There were also newspaper clippings dating from the fall of 1980—the year my parents had arrived in America and settled in Fresno—dedicated exclusively to holiday cooking: Christmas goose, chestnut stuffing, eggnog pound cake, and “party favorites” like cheesy stuffed mushrooms. Thumbing through her eclectic compilation, I knew I had stumbled upon something far more revealing than an avid cook’s recipe file or even a box of old letters. In my lap, I held her story.
Why had a woman so well versed in Persian cuisine, who had weathered a revolution, exile, and threats to her life and had built her family a new home through sheer will, felt pushed to the other side of belonging? Not one to be left out, she had seen a vital connection between food and belonging. The Thanksgiving holiday was her initiation, as it had been for so many generations of immigrants, giving thanks for an opportunity to begin again without the threat of persecution. Though confronted with tastes, textures, and ingredients that eluded her, my mother learned to roast a turkey, make giblet gravy, create a signature stuffing, bake yams and sweet potatoes with brown sugar and butter, and line up jars of cranberry sauce with orange peel to give to neighbors.
She liked to tell us the story of her first Thanksgiving, when, alone with my father, she had made cheeseburgers for dinner. She loved a good, juicy burger, shaping and seasoning the patties with salt and pepper, browning them to medium rare in her cast-iron skillet, toasting sesame buns, and tucking pickles and hearts of butter lettuce drizzled with vinaigrette inside. Just as my parents sat down to eat, they got a call from a woman conducting a survey asking whether they were having a turkey. Why, no! We’re having cheeseburgers. The caller had expressed pity and suggested churches where meals were served. Humph! My mother hung up, offended that this stranger had called her house and assumed she couldn’t afford a turkey. From then on, she embraced Thanksgiving with Pilgrim resourcefulness, talking to the butcher early in November to reserve the best-looking bird, storing fresh cranberries and pecans in the shell in case they became scarce in the days before the holiday, reveling in the preparations for a feast. Year after year, she exclaimed, This is my favorite holiday!
My mother had many stories, funny ones that made you laugh out loud no matter how many times you heard them. Most of the stories were told around the kitchen table, over long family meals. My father, shoulders quivering, eyes tearing, always struggled to deliver a punch line, though we knew the endings and had already spiraled into giggles. But the story of exile is rarely funny. Sure, it has its hilarious moments, like the time my father looked out into the yard of his tidy suburban home and saw a mother raccoon staring back at him—What is this beast? Whom do I call to come capture it?—but it’s not a story to tell around the table; it doesn’t have a tidy beginning, middle, and end.
Exile is threaded into your daily life long after you have become a citizen and pledged your allegiance and can make the best brownies in the neighborhood. I was compelled to make sense of my parents’ journey from Iran to America to understand the world they inhabited. Just five years shy of my mother’s age when she immigrated, I have to wonder if I possess a fraction of her will to start over at square one. Now that her tablecloth has been folded for the last time, the recipes are my only key to unlocking my parents’ experience as immigrants, looking back to see into their lives as I move forward into mine. It turns out, I don’t need to forget to move on.
Persian Cardamom Tea
In most Iranian homes, there is no better way to begin a story than with a cup of tea, served hot, in a glass to better see its amber hue, with two lumps of sugar, and a dish of sweets.
To make a pot of Persian cardamom tea, first bring the kettle to a boil. Swirl some boiling water in your teapot to warm it and pour the water back into your kettle. Measure 2 heaping teaspoons of Darjeeling or Earl Grey tea leaves and 1 crushed cardamom pod and place in pot. Fill the teapot ¾ full with boiling water and allow the tea to steep for 10 minutes under a tea cozy. Pour a glass of tea, then empty it back into your teapot, both to make sure the color is even and to warm your glass.
To serve, fill each glass with tea, leaving room to add boiling water from the kettle for guests who prefer their tea weaker. Replace the teapot on the samovar or under the tea cozy to keep it hot. My mother learned to knit tea cozies when she was a student in England—colorful ones with big pom-poms.
The quality of the tea will change if steeped for too long, so offer refills quickly!
Orange Cardamom Cookies
Makes 3 dozen
8 ounces (2 sticks) unsalted butter
½ cup granulated sugar
1 egg yolk
Grated zest of 2 oranges
2 cups flour
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon ground cardamom
1 tablespoon poppy seeds
1. Beat the butter in the bowl of an electric mixer until it whitens, about 2 minutes. Add the sugar and blend well. Add the egg yolk and orange zest. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Combine the flour, salt, cardamom, and poppy seeds and fold in, mixing just enough to combine the dough. Form the dough into 2 logs, wrap in parchment paper, and chill for 30 minutes.
2. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
3. Using a sharp knife, slice the logs into ½-inch-thick rounds and place 1 inch apart on a nonstick or parchment-paper-lined cookie sheet. Bake approximately 12 to 15 minutes, until slightly golden around the edges.
Note: This dough keeps well in the freezer for 2 to 3 weeks.
Chapter 1
THE TEHRAN OF my childhood was cosmopolitan and multicultural, bearing little resemblance to our Western notion of contemporary Iran—that of a fearful nation beneath the glare of clerics and Revolutionary Guards. I was born in a hospital built brick by brick by my father. Fresh out of medical school, he combined a loan with all of his savings to buy land in undeveloped Tehran and open his own hospital. He was a sought-after obstetrician and knew that if he built the hospital, the patients would come. And they did. At all hours of the night, frantic husbands would pound on the iron gate while their pregnant wives howled in the darkness, waiting for Doktor to rush out in his robe and slippers to let them in.
My mother, a registered nurse and midwife schooled in England, had returned home to Tehran in 1952. Some years earlier, in 1945, just as the war ended, my grandparents had sent their eighteen-year-old daughter to England. She flew to London from a one-room airport speaking only two words of English: good and hello. My grandfather had arranged for an escort to meet her upon her arrival. My mother thought the taxi driver who held the car door open and greeted her, Hello, love, need a lift? was her escort. She got the hello part and hopped in the back, expecting him to know where to go. He didn’t, so she directed him: Good hotel! The cabby wasn’t taking any chances, so he dropped her off at the Grosvenor House.
My mother could not tell this story without throwing her head back to laugh out loud. In her first twenty-four hours away from home, Britain welcomed her in pomp and glory. Imagine her awe when the bellboy opened the door to a room with gilded mirrors and dark wood paneling, the downy duvet and tasseled cushions, the bathtub with gold fixtures. After studying a room-service menu on the bedside table, she pointed to the ice cream from the pictured items. And here she would stop to lick her lips before continuing her story:
My dears, I opened the door to find a young man in a tuxedo and white gloves holding a silver tray upon which sat a tall crystal goblet with three perfect balls of vanilla ice cream, and a ladyfinger perched on top. He said, Good evening, ma’am. I said, Hello. He marched inside, snapped open a starched white place mat, set my ice cream down with a small glass of water, a napkin, and a tall spoon. Then he turned and asked me if I cared for breakfast the next morning. I said, Good. He bowed and left. Oh, that was the best ice cream I’ve ever had!
The next morning, there was a knock on the door, and a silver trolley
was wheeled in. Apparently the war had not depleted the Grosvenor House of their supply of eggs, sausages, butter, toast, and marmalade. Bewildered, she lifted up the silver domes one by one and ate her first English breakfast. Good!
After checking with every hotel in London, her escort tracked her down. She got the call from the desk and was soon counting out a stack of pounds from an envelope her father had carefully pinned inside her coat pocket. After that day, there wouldn’t be any more ice cream and marmalade. The boardinghouse where she was to stay at her nursing school rationed their staples; sugar, butter, and eggs were luxuries.
What my mother left out of her stories from this period in her life was the homesickness she must have carried around like a stone in her stomach. After growing up with the affection and endearments that my grandmother wove even into her reproaches, my mother was now met with the stiff upper lip of her British matron overseer. For the first six months, my mother struggled with English, memorizing her nursing textbooks without understanding a word. Matron would rap her knuckles on the door when she saw the band of light in the dim dormitory hallway: Lights out! My mother learned to place a rolled-up towel under the door and read by candlelight. Once a week, she watched her classmates wash their hair in the sink. She had never done this, being used to baths, her mother scrubbing her back and combing out the tangled curls. When Matron gave her a bottle of shampoo, she had no idea what it was—she had always washed her hair with big cakes of soap. So she learned to fill the sink with water that ran cold and shampoo her hair—a task made far more difficult by her thick locks, which never quite dried in the damp air.
Slowly the memorized texts, Matron’s commands, and the chatter by the fire in the common room began to make sense. She started stringing words together to make sentences, and English found a way into her speech. And in the meantime she mastered sink baths, learned to make her sugar and tea ration last through the week, figured out how to start a proper fire, and began to knit hats and tea cozies.