by Donia Bijan
But regardless of the time of year, we always ended a meal with a bowl of seasonal fruits, chosen carefully by my parents on their daily market run. Few Iranians can walk past a fruit stall without lingering a moment to fondle a melon or sample a grape. One of my beloved chores was to wash the fruit they brought home in a shallow tub of cold, soapy water with a soft sponge, then rinse and pat it dry before placing it tenderly in a bowl—a still life I painstakingly arranged. The fruit was served whole, and one had to know how to properly eat a persimmon, peel an orange, section an apple and offer some around the table. Ceremony was a big part of our meals. We may not have prayed every day, but gratitude was an essential component of every gathering at the table.
Pomegranate Granita
My mother never forgot the taste of that pomegranate sorbet that got Ahmed Agha the job at the hospital. As the years went by, she mused about the texture and balance of that sorbet. I was inspired by her longing to experiment with pomegranate desserts, and this “shaved ice” was my answer to her bygone chef’s masterpiece.
Serves 4
2 cups pomegranate juice, fresh squeezed or bottled, unsweetened 1½ cups simple syrup (see following recipe)
1. In a large bowl, whisk together the pomegranate juice and the simple syrup. Pour the pomegranate mixture into a 9-inch shallow pan and put it in the freezer.
2. Every ½ hour or so, stir the mixture up delicately with the tines of a fork to break up the ice crystals that form around the edge of the pan, giving the granita a light texture and preventing it from freezing into a solid block.
3. Freeze the granita 6 to 8 hours. It is best served the day it is made. To serve, shave the frozen mixture with a spoon into chilled parfait glasses. Garnish with mint and pomegranate seeds.
Simple Syrup
Yields 2 cups
2 cups sugar
¾ cup water
Zest of 1 lemon
2 to 3 sprigs fresh mint
In a small pot, mix the sugar and water together with the lemon zest and mint. Bring to a boil. Simmer 2 minutes. Discard the mint sprigs. Remove the pot from heat and cool. Simple syrup will keep for weeks in the refrigerator and is handy for sweetening iced tea or lemonade.
Sour Cherry Upside-Down Cake
Cakes and cookies were a rare treat when I was little. On special occasions, when I was allowed to choose a pastry, I never fancied rich, creamy confections, preferring the simple, unadorned cakes. Even today I’ll take a piece of pound cake over a frosted layer cake. One of my favorites, which my mother would buy for me with great ceremony, was a cardamom cupcake that could be found in any ordinary bakery.
My attempts to re-create this childhood treat resulted in an upside-down cake with caramelized sour cherries. As a child, I spent hours dangling from the branches of the sour cherry trees that lined the hospital grounds, but I ate most of what I picked. These days, I wait for the two weeks in July when a few markets have fresh sour cherries, and I buy as many as I can to make preserves or freeze. However, this cake works beautifully with Bing cherries, red or yellow plums, or apricots when they are plentiful and in season. The tart fruit juices seep into the cardamom cake, and it’s difficult not to steal bites every time you walk by.
Serves 8 to 10
Sour Cherry Compote
5 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
2 cups pitted sour cherries, fresh if available, otherwise substitute
with Bing cherries, ripe plums, or apricots
Cardamom Cake
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 cup brown sugar
1½ cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon ground cardamom
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup half-and-half
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1. Butter and flour a 9-inch round cake pan.
2. To make the sour cherry compote, melt the butter in a small saucepan and stir in the brown sugar. With a rubber spatula, gently fold in the sour cherries and pour into the bottom of your cake pan. Set aside.
3. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
4. To make the cardamom cake, cream together the butter and the sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer until fluffy.
5. Sift together the flour, baking powder, cardamom, and salt. Add to the creamed butter alternately with the half-and-half and mix until smooth.
6. Add the vanilla extract and the eggs one by one. Continue mixing just until the batter is combined.
7. Pour the batter on top of the cherries. Place the cake in the center of the oven and bake for 45 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.
8. Remove the cake from the oven. Allow to cool for 5 minutes. Run a knife along the edge of the cake pan before inverting the cake onto a platter. Don’t worry if the fruit doesn’t fall over the cake; it’s happened to me a million times. Simply scoop the cherries and spread evenly over the cake. Serve warm with pistachio ice cream.
Chapter 2
IN THE SUMMER of 1978, I was fifteen years old and I had left Iran with my parents for a vacation in Spain and a reunion with my two sisters, who were attending college in the United States. We had arrived on the island of Majorca with little more than beachwear, paperback books, and a backgammon set, with the intention of staying for a month in a studio apartment.
My father often woke up early to buy our morning bread. He was friendly with the merchants on the busy street lined with bakeries, cafés, money-exchange booths, and souvenir shops that catered to summer tourists. The buxom lady at the butcher’s beamed whenever he strolled in, anticipating their animated exchange without words, for my father didn’t speak Spanish. Relying on farm-animal pantomime, they managed to fill his shopping bag with the day’s meal:
Buenos días, Doktor!
Buenos días, señora!
Baa-baa bien? (Hand on his shoulder.)
Sí, sí, Doktor, baa-baa muy bien!
Once she had selected and weighed a lamb shoulder roast for him, she would wipe her broad hands excitedly on her apron before handing him his parcel. They would wave good-bye and my father would present the roast with great pride to my mother. Expecting his return, she would be in the kitchen frying up the onions for our lunch, humming along with the radio.
My father took great pleasure in his shopping expeditions, and my mother was happy to indulge him, sending him out even for a single tomato. He would return weighed down with shopping bags. The kitchen in our tiny apartment was already stocked with jars of Hero jam, cans of Spanish olives, braids of pimientos and garlic to last many seasons. Unpacking the bags, she shook her head from side to side and muttered to herself, adding another can of sardines to the row below and rinsing the purple figs he handed to her almost apologetically.
Unlike most families, who look forward to vacations as an opportunity to eat out, our family enjoyed finding good markets and making our meals with the local ingredients while on holiday. My father did not trust restaurants, imagining them as petri dishes where bacteria flourished. When we traveled, he brought along the equivalent of a well-stocked first aid kit—albeit gourmand—with an assortment of knives, corkscrews, can openers, salt and pepper mills, minibottles of mustard, olive oil, scotch, and vodka, and occasionally caviar. Beluga caviar traveled with us packed in oily blue tins (the cans were so chock-full that fish oil inevitably seeped out) wrapped in ice packs, two or three for gifts, and one for us, which we ceremoniously opened upon on our arrival. If we were hungry, my father simply gave us a spoon and we ate it like jam, but he preferred to wait until he was set up, easily transforming the desk in any hotel room into a kitchenette. No sooner had we checked in than he would pop open his suitcase, set up the “bar,” and call room service for ice and lemon. Soon after, he would scour the neighborhood for delis, charcuteries, bakeries, stocking up on local groceries. This foraging was as essential as sightseeing. The cathedrals and museums were impressive, but
he was curious about what the locals ate, their markets, their shopping carts. Eating out was an ice cream cone, or a cold Coke at a sidewalk café, and you could always count on my parents to have mints, chocolates, or lemon drops in their coat pockets when your feet hurt and you couldn’t bear to see another ruin. I remember what a big deal it was when in Rome my mother took us out for a pizza while my father made an excuse to go to a travel agency to check on our tickets. Refusing tourist meals, he would reason with us that having followed the locals, he had found the best mortadella studded with pistachios, crusty bread, mountain cheese, and exquisite plums. Let’s go back to our room, where I will serve you first zakuski. He favored this Russian term for appetizers. I have green olives stuffed with peppers, white asparagus with aioli, and of course caviar on toast with a squeeze of lemon. And is not that far better than a bowl of cold spaghetti the man boiled in his shoe? My father referred to all restaurateurs, as the man. Back in our hotel room, perched on the edge of our beds, he sliced ripe tomatoes, sprinkled them with salt, and fed us like baby birds.
Our apartment in Majorca had a balcony wide enough for three narrow cots, where my sisters and I slept. In the next room, my parents made their bed on a pullout couch. My father’s thunderous snoring kept us up late into the night, but it was my opportunity to plead with my sisters for stories about college life and boyfriends. I imagined them living inside an Archie comic book, where girls plotted, boys were clueless, and they gathered at the soda fountain to eat cheeseburgers and work it out. When my sisters tired of my queries—Yes, you can order a hamburger and eat it in your car. No, I don’t have a date every Saturday night. Now, GO TO SLEEP!— I pulled the sheet over my head and read Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon mysteries that my mother had finished and passed along, still uncertain what exactly went on in college.
In the morning I heard my father latch the door on his way out to the bakery. My mother stirred, then woke up swiftly. I rolled over and watched her plump their pillows and fold the light summer blankets, storing them neatly in the drawer under the couch. I’d tap on the sliding glass door that separated us and she would push her morning hair away from her face and look up with a smile, then gesture to me that she was going to the kitchen to put the kettle on. We rose one by one, put away our bedding, set the breakfast table, then took turns brushing our teeth and slipping on bathing suits, moving to the quiet rhythm of another lazy day, unaware that these few weeks would be the last time the five of us would be together in this unfettered way.
My father returned with a large ensaimada, still warm and dusted with powdered sugar. It’s a Majorcan specialty, and I had seen travelers at the airport carrying stacks of them tied with string to folks back home. For some, Majorca may evoke a longing for pearls, but for me, it was that light, braided loaf that left a trace of sugar on my lips, and the slow sweeping of the sweet flakes with my fingertips from the greasy box it came in.
My mother carried the breakfast tray with jars of jam and slices of melon. I followed her with the percolator and a pitcher of steamed milk. Perched around a table on the balcony, with glasses of café con leche, we ate our breakfast in our bathing suits and planned another slow day on the rocky beach. In the evenings you would find us there again, the Mediterranean a thin blue band in the far distance, and a row of bright swim-suits drying on the railing. Music from nearby discotheques would fill the air, and my sisters would sway or sing along with the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” and ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me.” They were so cool that I felt my own status elevated just being in their shadow, watching them to learn their moves, mouthing the lyrics or at least the words I could grasp. Showered and darker than yesterday, we played backgammon and nibbled on olives and pistachios while my father nursed a whiskey soda and my mother fiddled with the radio.
Surrounded by tourists, mostly Brits with sunburns, we kept to ourselves, preferring the slow pace of our meals, our strolls into town, window shopping for shoes, and the occasional ice cream at a sidewalk café. I was never a zealous shopper—unless it was for food. I preferred to linger over a dish of coffee ice cream rather than slip on an endless array of leather jackets and bikinis, but my adolescent awe for my sisters was a powerful draw. If they asked for my opinion on a color or style, my chest would swell like a pigeon’s, urging them to hold it up one more time while my mind hastened to call a verdict: Go with the blue. It matches your eyes. But what did I know? I felt compelled to accompany them on their excursions, admiring their poise and mimicking their taste for clothes and makeup—seduced, really, by the scent of the lotions and lip gloss they carried from America. My teenage angst made me awkward and self-aware, so I looked to them for reassurance:
This suit makes me look fat.
No, it’s pretty.
I think I should get one with vertical lines.
No, I like the polka dots.
Polka dots are for babies! I’m almost sixteen, you know!
Despite the assurances from my mother and sisters that my hair was curly, not frizzy, that my nose had character and was not like a coat hook, that my glasses made me look smart, not nerdy, I wasn’t convinced. I rounded my shoulders and observed boys from inside my shell. We were hardly mischievous. A threatening frown from my mother was usually enough warning. I once joined some kids who were going to a club. I drank vodka and orange juice, then slow-danced to Julio Iglesias with a Spanish boy who smelled of Chaps and cigarettes and came up to my shoulders. When a taxi dropped me off that evening, my father was waiting for me in the hallway with clenched fists. My sisters found it unfair that I was given liberties denied to them at fifteen. I wanted to shout and tell them where I had been, that vodka made my skin tingle, that a Spanish boy had held me, that he had chosen me—me, with the frizzy hair and the square windowpane glasses on a hooked nose. But instead I shrugged it off and took my place around the table to pick up the hand that was dealt for me, joining the late-night gin rummy game.
Day after day seemed the same, yet things were shifting. Through the whistle and static on BBC Radio, we heard news of scattered protests on the streets of Tehran against the monarchy. Although we were aware of these skirmishes, the newscasts were increasingly alarming as riots gained momentum and spread to major cities. Demonstrators were on a rampage, bombing establishments that symbolized Western decadence: liquor stores, nightclubs, cinemas, even schools attended by foreign students. It seemed our country was unraveling at terrific speed as we listened to reports of widespread bloodshed and violence. There, perched on a Spanish island, in relative calm, I couldn’t grasp the chaos that spilled from the radio. It seemed far away, and I think even my parents, despite mounting evidence, thought, Surely, this can’t last.
The tone of our evenings became somber, a dark mood overtaking our carefree days like an uninvited guest, without apology or departure date, hovering over our backgammon games, more tedious now than playful. The grooves on my father’s forehead ran deep, and an unlit cigarette often twitched at the corner of his mouth. He didn’t even smoke. If my mother wasn’t adjusting the antenna on the radio, my father held it on his lap, coaxing better reception. They’d continue to follow the news long after we had gone to bed. Their vigilance cast a shadow on our bright mornings, they only half listened to my teenage gripes and didn’t bother correcting my posture or rubbing suntan lotion on my back.
The urgent call we received from my uncle was unexpected. His news was of an upheaval on a much larger scale, with the imminent fall of the Shah. Across the rattle of telephone lines, he warned us not to return to Iran. We listened to his news with numb disbelief as riots exploded in our country, and every day brought reports of another friend captured as crowds marched with a boldness never before seen under the rule of the Shah.
Having held public office and championed women’s rights, my mother was an obvious target of the Islamic revolutionaries sweeping the country. If she were to return, her fate in the hands of Khomeini’s followers would be to stand before his Revolution
ary Guards and be showered with bullets—the picture of her slain body posted next to all the other “enemies of the revolution” on the pages of their newspapers.
Subsequent phone calls revealed that our home had been seized, our assets frozen, and our relatives interrogated. With this news came the recognition that we might be exiled indefinitely. Having already harbored some resentment toward his wife for her political aspirations, my father, seeking someone to blame for our loss, turned his anger toward my mother. He mocked her efforts on behalf of the Iranian women now marching shoulder to shoulder with their Muslim brothers. The injustices she had fought, and a lifetime of hard-won legislation, were erased with the swift swipe of a cleric’s cape.
With the school year about to begin, my sisters returned to America to resume their studies. My mother took a tour of the local high school in Palma and made arrangements with the principal for my registration. I resisted her plans and persuaded her to let me join my best friend, Neda, who was already attending a boarding school in Michigan. Amid the turmoil in my family, I heard America’s call clearly. Within weeks, we took the ferry to Barcelona to apply for my student visa at the U.S. Consulate, and I made the decision to leave my parents behind. At the time it seemed obvious to me that sooner or later I would be sent to college abroad, so going a few years earlier than planned wouldn’t make a difference. I was restless with anticipation of a life in the United States, regarding it like spending the summer with a glamorous cousin. Ironic, really, a teenager assuming control over her future when all other assumptions are dispelled. In hindsight, I am astonished at my shallow take on the massive upheaval that overturned my country and the lives of its people—as if I weren’t a part of it—and incredulous that my parents felt utterly powerless, even to curb their daughter’s foolhardy yearning for America.