Maman's Homesick Pie

by Donia Bijan

  4. To make the filling, combine the dates, brown sugar, and water in a saucepan and cook over low heat about 8 to 10 minutes, until the mixture boils and thickens. Stir in the cinnamon.

  5. Remove from heat and set aside to cool completely.

  6. Preheat the oven to 350°F.

  7. To assemble the bars, prepare a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Remove the dough from the refrigerator and cut in half. Keep one half cool.

  8. On a well-floured surface, roll half the dough into a rectangle about 14 inches long and 10 inches wide, and about ¼ inch thick. This dough is crumbly, so use your fingers to patch it if you need to. Roll the dough up onto the rolling pin and then unroll it on your baking sheet. Brush the surface with the beaten egg. Spread the date filling evenly down the center and out, allowing ¼ inch on the edges for sealing.

  9. Roll the remaining dough into the same-size rectangle. Roll it up onto the rolling pin and unroll it directly over the dates. Press gently to seal. Trim the edges and brush the top with the beaten egg. Using a fork, lightly poke the top layer of the dough to make vents. Refrigerate 20 minutes.

  10. Sift together the powdered sugar and cinnamon over the date bar before placing in the oven.

  11. Bake 15 to 20 minutes, until golden brown. Remove from the oven and cool on the baking sheet. Slice into 2-inch bars.

  Chapter 5

  SUNDAY AFTERNOONS FOUND me waving good-bye to my parents from the smeared window of a Greyhound bus headed back to Santa Cruz. My mother would tuck dried fruit and nuts, chocolate bars, oranges, and a jar of jam into my backpack, so each time I reached for a book or my pencil case, I came up with a snack.

  In the early evening lull of the dorm, I stepped softly into my room, where my roommate and I often left the door open, encouraging friends to drop by. Hey, I’m back! My roommate would greet me affectionately, bubbling over with stories of weekend hoopla that varied little from week to week: Guess what? Michelle dumped Gary. She thinks she might be gay. She munched gratefully on the snacks from home that I lined up before her. Frank would stroll in with a happy-to-see-you grin, sometimes bearing a gift: Hey, I found this at Logos. You should really have it. I would open the slim paper bag to find the Beatles’ White Album, The Doors, The Best of Van Morrison, or Billie Holiday’s Lady in Autumn.

  You should really have it. He was diligent in his efforts to expand my repertoire, traveling the enormous distance between us with music, trying to translate himself while I held on to my otherness as a defense against losing something recognizable to me, to my family, to friends from home. What I learned from his music was essential. Billie Holiday’s “Trav’lin’ Light” broke through to me, her voice and the lyrics convincing me that this song was written for us, that we were not so different, that we were moved by the same words. And slowly I learned to trust these friendships that strengthened my still-fragile connection to this new country.

  I was happy to creep back into my orderly college life. Beyond campus lay chaos—hostages at the embassy, Carter, Khomeini, Reagan, and the budding stereotype of the Iranian terrorist. On campus these elements were put in perspective, organized and explained within the parameters of history. The anti-Shah rallies, the Reagan protests, all were a reminder of the freedom that was now mine, too. But the upheaval I witnessed from afar happened before my political consciousness had taken shape. I was just barely beginning to discern the powers that trigger events and affect our lives.

  When I was a child, my awareness of current events was initiated at my grandfather’s house, where he welcomed us for lunch on Thursday afternoons. Inside, his house was dark, but the atmosphere was warm and smelled of sweet tobacco. He liked to sit at his desk with his pipe and read the paper cover to cover, then solve the crossword puzzle with one hand around the slim waist of a glass of tea. Once the puzzle was complete, he folded the paper neatly along its creases, then handed it to me and sent me downstairs to a windowless room stacked from floor to ceiling with newspapers going as far back as my mother’s birth. I glanced at this history of Iran on brittle, yellowed paper tied neatly in bundles, peeking at the headlines but never pulling on the strings that held them. Kayhan was the largest daily newspaper in the country, but even if I had read a story, it would have been a censored version of the truth. The paper was not allowed to print any criticism of the Shah, or any opposing political views within the country or abroad. Despite its liberal editorial staff, it was still heavily monitored and censored by the Information Ministry. I would not have learned anything about the dissident clerics or the disenfranchised left-wing “radicals” to give me a context for the revolution that would one day overturn our lives. I did not understand that we paid for political stability through repression. My grandfather knew this; he was better at reading between the lines, and he kept those newspapers as evidence of everything that was left unsaid. Leaving the day’s paper behind, I wondered, Why does he keep all those newspapers? What does all this have to do with now? It smells funny down here. And, What’s for lunch? I raced back upstairs to recite the multiplication table, or a poem he had taught me the week before, as a prerequisite to lunch.

  Though I didn’t participate in campus politics, this was a time when Iranian students had to take sides. We were obliged to explain the news and sift through the rhetoric and propaganda of the revolution for our professors and fellow students. Fearing the other Iranian students, not knowing whose side they were on, I became adept at telling my story in a matter-of-fact way, as if recounting the plight of another family. On campus I could engage in a dialogue that was increasingly difficult elsewhere, worried what my identity might provoke in a casual conversation at the post office. Persian quickly replaced Iranian. Where Iran was dark and threatening, Persia recalled glory, carpets, and cats.

  Where are you from?

  Persia.

  This food is delicious. What is it?

  Persian.

  What is the origin of your name?

  Persian.

  Few people questioned where Persia was, not wishing to divulge their sketchy knowledge of history and geography. Where are you from? was a dreaded question. I felt that where I was from, where I’d grown up, where I called home, didn’t matter. The point was that we had to leave.

  The advantage of being from an ambiguous place is that one can spin tales worthy of Scheherazade. My college friends would sit cross-legged on the floor of my room, like preschoolers begging for a story from the exotic land of Persia. I amazed my audience (and myself) with tales of riding camels to school and never having seen a television set, a washing machine, or a hamburger. A favorite ongoing fib was about my camel Delilah, whom I rode to school every day:

  Where did you keep her?

  Why, in the stables, where else?

  I had to avert my eyes when I explained that when the Revolutionary Guards came for my family and we were gone, they lined up our camels Czar Nicholas–style and shot them instead. I was astonished that they believed me.

  Although I still often felt like an observer, sent to collect data on the natives’ behavior, I was nevertheless beginning to feel I was a part of something. Walking through the redwood groves to my classes, I thought, Yes, I, too, can stroll through campus holding hands with my boyfriend. I was hoping my alienness would eventually become less interesting. Shuttling back and forth to the UC Berkeley campus to use the library or just wander down Telegraph Avenue, I became enamored of the diversity I found there, feeling a kinship with the parade of characters. It seemed that even if I were to sprout horns and a tail, no one would look twice. Browsing Moe’s and Shakespeare and Company, I pulled books with penciled notes in the margins from the labyrinth of shelves, charmed to know that something I might have missed had happened in a passage. I loved finding handwritten inscriptions and the close, musty smell inside the pages. I lingered in coffee shops, with their makeshift sofas and chairs, the scent of roasted beans and incense clinging to my sweater like souvenirs on the slow bus home. I loved Sproul
Plaza and the students of all political, religious, and social orientations who sat at their tables, earnest behind their movements, handing me free brochures. I didn’t even know what activism meant. I only knew that I could partake in something that did not exist in my country: free speech. Reluctant to leave the one place that was beginning to assert itself, I also sought the anonymity Berkeley offered, so it wasn’t long before I transferred. To please my father, I declared a premed major, with no intention of registering for any relevant courses, unless you make a connection between medicine and The History of French Cinema, or The Enlightenment and Eighteenth-Century French Literature. I continued to correspond with Frank. He, too, had left to continue his studies in England. Subsequent boyfriends did not measure up to his generous nature or his curiosity for the unfamiliar. Shallow in their worldview, they would not take someone like me home to meet Mom and Dad. Besides, who was I kidding? My father would have strangled them all, shallow or otherwise.

  A part-time job in a coffee shop got me back in the kitchen, putting in as many hours as I could and carrying a full course load. I took so much pleasure in serving the stream of students who waited patiently for me to toast their bagels and gazed longingly at the strawberries I spooned onto their waffles. Our connection was uncomplicated—I could rely on their hunger and my ability to fulfill their need. It brought me back to the early cooking lessons my mother had given me in Iran, and to the school where I was first introduced to American food. The idea of making things, the alchemy of putting things together, had really taken root in me as a child. In my mother’s kitchen, where pots of fluffy saffron rice, their lids wrapped in towels to capture the steam, sat on the stove, I watched her peel and salt eggplants, dice tomatoes, and brown a lamb shank with onions to make an aromatic stew scented with allspice and preserved lemons. I witnessed not only the transformation of these simple ingredients but its effect on people. My mother cooked because it made her happy, and when you sat at her table, you shared her happiness.

  Back in Iran, my mother enrolled us in an English-speaking international school from elementary through high school. She had experimented with French schools and despised their medieval approach to education. At Jeanne d’Arc, run by Catholic nuns who punished my sister with a stick for giggling in the hallway, she had had a standoff with the mother superior: Do French children not laugh, Sister? she had hissed. Determined that her children be bilingual, she bought us English books, read Peter Rabbit, The Wind in the Willows, and The Secret Garden at bedtime, and sang “I’m a Little Teapot.” The principal at our new school was a kindhearted American man. His wife was our music teacher, who taught us how to read notes and play the recorder. Neither of them had any intention of hitting us, no matter how much mischief we stirred. Instead, they let the vice principal, a short lady built like a tank, bawl us out. It was best to be invisible when she walked the hallways, her small head swiveling on her boxy frame, looking for the ringleaders. But she wasn’t cruel, punishing children didn’t give her pleasure, and if our parents heard we had been reprimanded, they knew we probably deserved it.

  It was at school that I first became aware of the different smells at lunchtime. Whereas in my home, steaming rice signaled a midday meal, at school I smelled hot dogs for the first time, their delicious porky aroma luring me to the line outside the kiosk. I brought a lunch box, but oh, how I envied the children with lunch money who bought lunch from Madame’s kiosk. The kiosk was a makeshift cabana where Madame, a grandmotherly Armenian lady with silver hair tucked under a net, and bright blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, served hot dishes from a two-burner stove. I could smell her sloppy joes at eleven o’clock, during math, and my mind would wander for the next hour, my stomach counting the minutes with bold rumbling.

  At noon I followed the kids over to the kiosk, their hands playing with the change in their pockets. I found a bench nearby so I could watch them while I ate my lunch. Madame ladled her homemade meat sauce onto soft buns and handed them through a tiny window. She kept soda bottles on ice and would open them with a bottle opener she kept tied to her apron. Madame made a simple cocoa pound cake and a spice cake, both lightly dusted with powdered sugar. How I longed for that pound cake. I would think about it all day, and when I couldn’t stand it any longer, my best friend, Neda, would help me scrounge together some coins so we could buy a slice to share crumb by crumb. Later, much later, I would teach myself to make that cake, but it never tasted as good as it did in the school yard with my best friend.

  Bake sales were equally enchanting. American moms brought brownies and chocolate chip cookies and carrot cake. I circled their tables, clutching a coin purse, reading the labels and pronouncing their delicious syllables quietly to myself, unable to decide. When I first bit into a brownie, I wanted desperately to decipher it. I wondered in what divine kitchen these recipes were invented. By what intuition had a pair of hands melted chocolate and butter and folded them into eggs with sifted flour? Did all these blessed fair children eat these squares of chewy cake with shiny, crackling surfaces after school every day while I ate bread and jam?

  Recently, while gnawing on the end of a Twizzler, a friend asked me, What kind of candies did you grow up with? I paused before I said, Roasted beets, sour green plums, furry green almonds, and salt-roasted corn on the cob. Our snacks often came from street vendors we passed on our way home from school. In winter you could get a wedge of red beet that had been slowly roasting under coals and had caramelized. The vendor handed it to you warm, wrapped in newspaper, and you peeled away the charred skin, which left hennalike stains on your fingertips. In spring we looked for green almonds, which cost us a nickel for a dozen or so. They, too, came in newspaper cones with coarse salt, and a dozen was never enough. We ate the gojeh, sour green plums, by the pound and suffered the consequences. In the summer you found vendors with little charcoal grills on the side of the road, where they fanned their coals and yelled, Balali, while yellow ears of corn blackened on their grills. It may have been the only time I saw my father eat from the outside, fearful as he was of any food prepared outside the jurisdiction of a trustworthy home kitchen. Nevertheless, street food was our treat. My only candy was the lollipop I learned to make at home by caramelizing sugar in a pot and letting it harden on a spoon.

  My mother never seemed concerned that I preferred stringing beans with her at the kitchen table to playing outside. I attempted to decode the flavors and textures that bewitched me, conducting experiments that often failed. But my mother indulged me, never minding the waste or the mess in the aftermath of disaster, but firm about my responsibility to clean it up. I relished these opportunities the way a child who practices magic tricks becomes convinced of his ability to transform a skeptical audience. I began every project with the bold premise that it was going to be delicious. In the space between the stove, the sink, and the refrigerator, I felt uninhibited and able to summon combinations with ease. I overmixed flour, eggs, and milk for pancake batter, I scalded milk for custard and ran to the pot when the foam had already pooled on the range, I rolled dough and it stuck to the counter. Enjoying my infrequent successes, my mother never complained about the lack of freezer space when I squeezed limes and dissolved sugar cubes, then froze the juice in glasses with a spoon to make Popsicles, or froze sweet, milky Nescafé to make what she called coffee ice cream.

  AFTER GRADUATING FROM college, my sisters, in their desire to help my parents, quickly began working and married their college sweethearts—stalwart, brilliant American boys who brought the best of America to our family. My mother loved to cook Persian food for them, dazzling them with steaming platters of braised beef stew and jeweled saffron rice. Later she would delight in sewing her granddaughters’ Gypsy skirts and tiaras for Halloween and hiding Easter eggs—a fresh embrace of new culture through them. My father, a tough nut to crack when it came to suitable men for his daughters, didn’t hesitate to remark, They could have done better … After all, we invested in their education, and so on.
Nevertheless, he was glad he was no longer outnumbered by women in the family. Finally there were men he could sit with, who called him Dr. Bijan and enjoyed a glass of scotch, and sweet granddaughters to peel pistachios for and bounce on his knee.

  Although I grew up in a culture where food was cherished, this same culture did not esteem the culinary arts as a viable career choice for a university graduate. One weekend at home, I dropped the bombshell: I was changing my course of study from premed to French, with the intention of attending cooking school after graduation. My father’s reaction was explosive; he refused to speak to me for months. The idea of his daughter becoming a cook was preposterous . Cooks are domestics, he would spit out. Cooking was something women learned to do from their mothers and grandmothers, a chore they repeated day after day for their husbands and their children. Restaurant cookery was for the uneducated. He hollered accusations that flourished alongside favorite banishments: You are someone else’s child! My mother’s response was dry, with a here-we-go weariness that pinched her pretty mouth. Something passed over her face like a cloud over the sun. I later understood this brief absence of light in her expression to imply her aversion to judgment. She believed a parent’s job was to provide love and security without staking any claims on a child’s future, that children owned their dreams, their mishaps, their triumphs, and their failures.

  After the big announcement, my trips home became less frequent, leaving my mother to bear the brunt of my father’s wrath. When she spoke plainly—Her life is her business—he accused her of complicity, implying that the hours I spent in her kitchen were part of a deliberate scheme to disappoint him. Now unreachable to me, he could not see that I was just following my calling as he once had, that I, too, could not fathom doing anything else with my hands. My mother prepared his favorite dishes as peace offerings—duck and pomegranate stew, grape leaf dolmas, smoked whitefish with dill and saffron rice, veal osso buco with extra marrow bones—all to no avail. She stood by me, never once questioning my decision, urging me to apply to cooking schools in France, offering to pay my tuition by taking on the higher-salaried graveyard shift at the hospital where she worked as a registered nurse. By graduation day I held a one-way ticket to Paris and a room to rent in the fifteenth arrondissement.