by Donia Bijan
We celebrated my sixteenth birthday on the balcony, now our place of refuge. My father let me win several rounds of backgammon. The butcher had selected a nice, plump chicken for my mother to make one of my favorite dishes with saffron yogurt rice. During my last week she had made all my preferred meals, in a prescient and feverish preparation for a premature good-bye to her youngest daughter. The mood had shifted from somber to resigned. I know my mother’s heart was breaking, but she wouldn’t let me see her cry. Maybe my parents had convinced themselves that allowing me to leave was proof of their confidence in me, the only sure thing in the face of uncertainty, but most likely they were simply stunned. I don’t know because I never asked, ashamed to this day of my selfish pursuit. The morning of my departure, we shared our last ensaimada with dollops of my mother’s homemade quince and carrot marmalade. My parents would spend the next year as refugees, biding their time, waiting for the dust of the revolution to settle. But the dust became a storm that left their lives in ruins.
Saffron Yogurt Rice with Chicken and Eggplant
Equally delicious with braised lamb shanks, the saffron and yogurt marinade is essential to the subtle tartness of this dish, with egg yolks used as a binding for the rice. For serving, the ta-chin is turned out onto a serving dish and cut into square pieces, as one would cut a cake. As a child, I found this resemblance to yellow cake very appealing.
Serves 6
4 free-range chicken breasts and 4 thighs, boneless, skin on
3 cups Greek yogurt
Zest and juice of 2 lemons and 1 orange
1 teaspoon ground saffron dissolved in ⅓ cup hot water
3 cups basmati rice
2 globe eggplants or 5 Japanese eggplants
5 tablespoons olive oil
4 egg yolks
6 ounces (1½ sticks) butter, melted
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Kosher salt and fresh-ground pepper
1. Marinate the chicken overnight in a mixture of the yogurt, lemon and orange juice and peel, dissolved saffron, kosher salt, and fresh-ground pepper.
2. Soak the rice in water (enough to cover by 1 inch) and 1 tablespoon of salt for 2 to 3 hours.
3. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
4. Wash and peel the eggplants and slice them lengthwise ¼ inch thick. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper brushed with olive oil and overlap the slices of eggplant in a single layer. Brush the eggplant with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until tender. Remove from the oven and cool.
5. Remove the chicken from the marinade and save the yogurt mixture in the refrigerator. Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil and brown the chicken pieces on both sides in an oven-proof skillet over medium-high heat. Place the skillet in the oven and bake the chicken for 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and set aside, reserving any juices from the pan.
6. Boil 2 quarts of water with 1 tablespoon of salt in a large nonstick pot. Wash and drain the rice, then pour into the boiling water. Boil for 8 minutes, stirring once or twice, then strain.
7. Whisk together the yogurt marinade with the egg yolks. In a large bowl, gently combine the rice with the yogurt mixture to coat the rice but not break the grains.
8. Pour half the melted butter into a 14-inch ovenproof dish. Place a layer of yogurt rice on the bottom, then a layer of eggplant, cover the eggplant with another layer of rice, and place the chicken pieces on top. Continue with a layer each of rice, eggplant, and chicken, finishing with a layer of rice. Sprinkle with the remaining butter, cinnamon, and chicken juices. Pat gently with a spatula and cover with foil.
9. Place on the middle rack of the preheated oven and bake 2 hours. If using a glass dish, you will be able to see when the bottom turns golden.
10. Remove from the oven and keep covered until ready to serve. Using the edge of a metal spatula, loosen the baked edges. Hold a serving dish over the baking dish and turn over to unmold the rice.
My Mother’s Quince Marmalade
It is inevitable that when I’m selecting quinces at the market, people will ask me, What are these, apples? or What do you mean you have to cook them to eat them? Their lumpy, pale yellow skin will often prompt, Are you sure they’re not pears? I’ll hold one up to their nose and watch their eyes open wide with wonder. So fragrant are these ancient fruit of the Middle East that at room temperature, they perfume your entire house. Far too sour to be eaten raw, when they are cooked slowly with sugar, their natural pectin transforms them into beautiful preserves with a rosy hue. In Iran they are combined with fatty meat dishes like lamb stew to counteract the richness, adding a sweet-tart complexity. In Moroccan cuisine they are incorporated into tagines laced with clove and cinnamon. Quince paste is made widely in Europe and has become a frequent accompaniment to cheese in America. I’m on the lookout for quinces in our local markets from October to January.
This marmalade is delightful spread on scones or whole wheat toast, tucked into a crepe, or served as an accompaniment to goat cheese or Spanish Manchego.
2 pounds quinces
1 pound carrots
4 crushed cardamom pods
5 cups sugar
1 cup water
2 lemons, zest and juice
1 orange, zest and juice
1. Peel and shred the quince and carrots using a grater or a food processor. Combine well. Save ½ tablespoon of quince seeds and wrap them in a piece of cheesecloth with the crushed cardamom pods.
2. Place the carrots and quince in a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan, then add the sugar, water, lemon and orange juice and zest, and the quince seed and cardamom pouch. Stir to coat the shredded carrots and quince.
3. Bring to a boil, skimming any foam off the surface. Reduce the heat to low and simmer, stirring gently every once in a while for 2 hours, or until the marmalade is glossy and syrupy thick. Remove the seed pouch.
4. Fill jelly jars with the hot marmalade and seal them. Keep in the refrigerator or in a cool, dark pantry.
Chapter 3
I COULD ARGUE that I had been preparing to leave long before the cries of revolution. When I was seven, my father had given me a white vinyl Pan Am bag, a souvenir from a trip abroad. I packed this bag with essentials that I thought I would need in case I was ever kidnapped. Odd as this may seem, it was my “disaster kit,” complete with a pair of clean white socks, underwear, a stuffed rabbit, a tin of cookies, color pencils, and a notebook. From time to time and over the years, I refreshed the contents, exchanging the rabbit for a Barbie, or underwear for the next size. I believed that if I ever needed to leave in a hurry, I would politely ask my captors permission to grab my bag. My parents never knew I had it, but I always thought they would have been proud of me for being prepared.
Thinking back to my departure from Spain, I have often tried to put myself in my mother’s shoes the day she put me on that plane to New York. How did she go back to that apartment where my bathing suit still hung to dry on the balcony railing? With so little regard for the gravity of their situation, how could I have left her alone with that emptiness and uncertainty, and with an angry, bitter husband to contend with? My country was exploding and I was preoccupied with blue jean styles.
As I began my junior year at an American high school, it was fortunate that I spoke English and was easily able to follow the curriculum. Neda’s family invited me to stay with them, an extraordinarily generous offer, thus saving my parents an outstanding expense and rescuing me from becoming a boarder. Neda’s mother brought me under her wing and looked after me like her own child for two years. I was introduced to Christmas, Halloween, and Easter, marveling at the elaborate products that accompanied each holiday. Intimidated by the scale of preparations, I worried whether I would ever observe them without being so obviously clueless, but my friend and her family taught me the rituals and included me in all their festivities. I learned to paint my face and walk around the neighborhood in the dark with a pillowcase in hand and ask for candy. I learned to wrap gifts and
make bows, to stay in my pajamas on Christmas morning, to eat my turkey with cranberry jelly, and to look for painted eggs in bushes. On Thanksgiving, I discovered pie. Until then, I had only known apple pie, but Neda’s grandmother baked rhubarb, sour cherry, pumpkin, and peach, taking each out of the oven just when the fruit was bubbling around the edges. Not surprisingly, it became my favorite holiday and the beginning of a lifelong passion for pie.
The social arena was a different matter. Having carefully studied old issues of Seventeen magazine, courtesy of my sisters studying abroad, I thought I had a fairly good handle on the American high school culture. But nowhere in any of those advice columns were the issues of a foreign student from a hostile country addressed. The tips regarding how to be popular, or how to make the boys notice you, were useless when all I wanted was to be unnoticed and to blend in. I didn’t understand yet the correlation between belonging and blending in. My true sense of belonging was lost forever, along with my dog, my stamp collection, my charm bracelet, my house, my street, my school, my country.
In Iran, I had attended an international school with a bilingual curriculum and a student body resembling the UN. Our science, math, and social studies were taught in English, and humanities, poetry, and literature, in Farsi. On the playground we came together from every corner of the globe, and we thought it was so everywhere. It was a remarkable introduction to history and geography. Friendships were based on curiosity—we were all foreigners to one another, our cultural diversities a kind of splendor. But if you were a foreign student in a relatively homogeneous private school in the Midwest, especially one from a country that was covered in the nightly news as a former ally of the United States, where its citizens were shown marching to the tune of America, the Great Satan, blindfolding and taking hostage U.S. Embassy employees, well, then, you weren’t going to blend into a coterie of jocks, punks, or preps. You didn’t even understand exactly what separated them, except for their clothes, because after all, they all came from the same place.
Nevertheless, just a few miles away from the multinational amity of my school, in the south of Tehran, a neighborhood I had only glimpsed through a car window on our way to weekly lunches at my grandfather’s house, children who did not benefit from these opportunities stewed in a pressure cooker stirred by clerics shunned by the Shah. These children accompanied their parents to Friday prayers while I took ski lessons in the Alborz Mountains. I sung the words to “This Land Is Your Land” and “La Marseillaise”; they memorized verses from the Koran. While we begged our parents for miniskirts, they tightened the knots on their headscarves. And while these families observed the Islamic holidays, I wanted to know all about Santa Claus. We were just a few miles away, yet we might as well have been on the moon.
What I knew of America, I had learned from the American students and teachers at my old school. I had observed their confidence—their slouch as they sat at their desks with their long legs stretched out defiantly. An Iranian student would simply not sit this way unless he was mimicking a gesture he wished to own. I envied their athleticism, in awe of the graceful ease with which they pitched a ball, dove into a pool, or tossed a basketball. I admired how naturally they stored and cataloged sports trivia without engaging in the rote memorization we were accustomed to. They could not recite Hafez by heart, but they knew multiple baseball scores from games lost or won years ago. Most of all, from their bold and candid inquiries, I learned how to construct and voice a question, and how to distinguish a real answer from oratory, which my Iranian teachers had mastered. And I marveled at the frank and open-ended discussions in the classroom with my American teachers, who challenged knowledge I had thought absolute.
In Tehran, when I was invited to play in the homes of my American classmates, I took inventory of their cereals, maple syrup, and cake mixes, their glossy hair products and magnificent lip gloss collections, their denim, and the smell of their laundry soap, all stocked from the commissary—an elusive store we had no access to. What struck me was how long you could be in someone’s home before anyone offered you a glass of water (we were taught never to ask for anything). In an Iranian home, you are fed fifteen times before the mud on your shoes dries. My friend Sally would burst through the front door of her house yelling, Mom! What’s there to eat? No tray with the afternoon snack was set on the table. I stared bewildered as she grazed standing up, the milk bottle to her mouth. She tried to teach me a lesson in survival: If you want something, you go into the kitchen, open the refrigerator door, and get it yourself. This idea was so preposterous, I thought she was trying to get me in trouble with her mother. If someone had walked into our house and helped himself, my mother would have been outraged that we had not prepared the tea tray. Food and drink were to be offered preemptively to any man, woman, or child who rang the doorbell, and accepted graciously after a long, convoluted exchange:
Really, I’ve just had lunch.
Just a taste. It’s my special rhubarb compote.
No, thank you. I’m running late.
Late for what? Come in, come in. I’ve just made some tea.
And so on, until the guest relented and they might, at last, have a real conversation.
Playing Barbie with my cousins who had moved to Iran from California with a trunkful of flashy accessories, plus a Ken, I had learned about the rituals of courting American-style: dating, movies, popcorn, soda fountains, jukeboxes, convertibles, and the necessary wardrobe for a girl on the go. When they had had enough and begged me to play a different game, I staged a vote and enforced my will upon my younger cousins—writing “Barbie” on all the ballots before folding them and asking them to pick from a hat. I thought I was so clever. Of course they knew I was strong-arming them, but they sweetly consented and we staged another rendezvous with Ken. I never tired of Barbie’s freedom to turn down invitations, to help herself to popcorn and soda, and to accept gifts and compliments without indebtedness.
I was in love with an America that I believed was not weighed down with the anchors of custom. I envied the absence of formality and rigid cultural codes of behavior. Their nihilism was a vast, open plain to the complexities of my Persian landscape.
Yet here I was, and after all that longing for America, I was surprised by how much I missed home. I had dreamt of America for so long, but when I finally arrived, I found it was just a place where people lived, worked, took their children to school. Initially, what seemed exotic were the sloping, manicured green lawns, the quaint mailboxes with their red flags, and the chipmunks—in Tehran you never saw wild animals scurrying about your yard. And it wasn’t long before I was seduced by the dizzying array of food: Thirty-six flavors of ice cream, thirty-six! Sundaes and milk shakes: small, medium, large? Large, of course! With or without whipped cream? With, with! Cereals, candy bars, treats made out of cereal and marshmallows, McDonald’s hot apple pies! I was ravenous for the food that came out of drive-through windows, the stacks of pancakes and the caddy of syrups, the tubs of popcorn, cheese that squirted out of tubes and melted on salty chips. I could never get enough. Even the mashed potatoes that the homely school cafeteria ladies dished out using ice cream scoops and plopped next to the meat and gravy they called stroganoff intrigued me. I had to taste it all, and eventually I couldn’t button my prize jeans. Food offered enormous consolation for homesickness, as well as a chance to make friends, joining amiable classmates at the diner for coffee and cigarettes with buttered raisin toast and jam in foil packages.
I kept my homesickness coiled inside me and concentrated on behaving like my peers, smoking cigarettes to show I wasn’t such a dork, listening to learn what they found funny or gross. I wrote long, brave letters to my parents filled with false anecdotes about my triumphs at school and ease with my new classmates, sometimes elaborating on the snacks or a movie Neda’s mom had taken us to see. Grease had left such an impression on me that for weeks I couldn’t get the songs and mannerisms out of my head. At the time, I knew nothing about the relevance of the
era when the story took place. I thought this glimpse into high school culture taught me everything I needed to know about jocks, preps, class rings, and cheerleaders, and I expressed as much in my letters.
My parents wrote back equally long and encouraging letters, never once revealing their despair. What good was it to write of my yearning or my awkward status as the foreign student from the dark country of flag-burning hostage takers? Our infrequent telephone conversations were brief, and we stifled our grief even when my mother called with news of my grandfather’s death. I pressed the phone to my ear: Your grandpa died, honey. Baba bozorg is gone. It seemed impossible that a man who had been surrounded by family and friends all his life had died alone in Iran. Heartsick following my grandmother’s death when I was just six, he had learned to live alone, but not a day had gone by without a call or a visit from his daughter, until her exile. And now she could not go back to bury him. His housekeeper of forty years had embraced the revolution that had given her family free ash, a hearty noodle soup, to yell Death to America! in the streets (rumor was that the regime offered soup to busloads of people if they would join the demonstrations in support of Khomeini). In a zealous reversal of roles, she moved her family into my grandfather’s house.
My grandfather had written me a letter that had taken weeks to arrive. It had been opened and read, then carelessly taped and sent once the “sons of the revolution” had established that he was not conspiring to overthrow the republic. I kept it in a shoe box with my parents’ letters. I read it again because it was the only tangible object that remained of him, tracing his elegant handwriting. What was missing was his humor, for the content was stoic, encouraging me to focus on my studies and get good marks, to practice my French verbs, and to write letters in Farsi. I imagine he’d written similarly restrained letters to my mother when she was a student far from home, navigating her life in a new country: Listen to Matron. Save your money. Don’t ride your bicycle at night.