by Donia Bijan
Sweet and Sour Grape Leaf Dolmas with Jeweled Rice
Going for a walk with my mother was part exercise, part foraging, like an outing with a child. She rarely came back from her morning march through the neighborhood empty handed, unclenching her fists to reveal a bouquet of sage, tiny red plums, or a stack of nasturtium leaves. The plums would make two tablespoons of jam, the sage was tied with twine and hung to dry, and she saved the leaves for making her dolmas. Tender and peppery like watercress, nasturtium leaves were a fine alternative to the more tangy grape leaves. She served the dolmas garnished with nasturtium flower petals, like small presents.
Makes 35 to 40 dolmas
1 1-pound jar preserved, drained grape leaves
1½ cups lentils, preferably tiny French or flat green
1 whole clove
1 bay leaf
2 medium yellow onions
2 carrots
2 stalks celery
6 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups basmati rice
2 teaspoons cinnamon
½ teaspoon turmeric
½ teaspoon saffron (optional)
1 cup dried currants
4 cups chicken stock
1 tablespoon orange or tangerine rind
1 cup pine nuts, toasted lightly
Kosher salt and fresh-ground pepper
1 lemon
1. To remove the excess salt from the grape leaves, soak them in warm water for 30 minutes. Drain and rinse with cold water, then strain and pat dry with paper towels. If fresh leaves, such as nasturtium or butter lettuce, are available, select the largest ones and plunge a few at a time into boiling water for 1 minute to soften them, then lay flat on paper towels to remove excess water.
2. Rinse the lentils, then drain well. In a large saucepan, cook the lentils in 3 cups of water with the clove, the bay leaf, 1 peeled onion, 1 stalk of celery, and 1 carrot. Bring to a boil, skimming any scum that may rise to the surface, then simmer gently for 30 to 40 minutes, uncovered, adding more water as the last of each batch is absorbed, until the lentils are tender, with just enough cooking liquid to keep them moist. Season to taste with salt. Drizzle with 2 tablespoons of olive oil and set aside to cool to room temperature.
3. Dice the remaining onion, celery, and carrot and sauté over medium heat in 2 tablespoons of olive oil until soft and translucent. Add the rice, cinnamon, turmeric, saffron (reserving a pinch for later), and currants and toss well with the vegetables. Add 3 teaspoons of salt and 4 cups of chicken stock or water. Bring to a soft boil, cover, and cook the rice over low heat for 20 minutes. Allow to cool and transfer to a large bowl.
4. Blanch the orange or tangerine rind in boiling water for 30 seconds, strain, and dry on a paper towel.
5. In the large bowl, with a wooden spoon or spatula, gently toss the rice, lentils, citrus rind, and pine nuts. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
6. Preheat the oven to 325°F.
7. On a cutting board, lay 4 or 5 leaves side by side, vein side up (if the leaves are small, you can overlap 2 leaves). Place 1 heaping tablespoon of filling in the center of each leaf. Fold the stem over the filling, then fold the side flaps toward the center and roll up like a fat cigar. Continue until you have used up your filling.
8. Place the dolmas tightly next to one another in a buttered ovenproof dish. Dissolve a pinch of saffron in ½ cup warm water with 2 tablespoons olive oil and the juice of 1 lemon. Brush the top of the dolmas with this mixture. Sprinkle with salt and fresh-ground pepper. Press a piece of wax paper gently over the dolmas to keep them moist and prevent them from unraveling. Cover with foil and place in the oven for 2 hours, until tender.
9. Remove from the oven and arrange on a platter with fresh herbs, such as tarragon, mint, and basil, or edible flowers. These are delicious served warm or at room temperature.
Madame’s Cocoa Pound Cake
Madame, the lady who ran the lunch kiosk at my school in Iran, made two simple cakes every day, spice and cocoa. She displayed them under a cake dome, lightly dusted with powdered sugar, and sold them for the equivalent of thirty cents a slice—a fortune to me, and a rare treat.
I made a lot of pound cake before I came up with one that resembled Madame’s, but in my fond childhood memories, hers still tastes better.
At Christmastime I make dozens of these cocoa pound cakes to give to family and friends. This year, my son walked into the kitchen as I was lining them up to wrap in cellophane and raffia. Will any of those ever be for us? he asked, sighing. I set one on a plate with a knife and made us two mugs of hot chocolate, and we sat down to eat cake together. Maman, you don’t always have to give them away, he reminded me.
Yields 1 9-inch Bundt cake
1 cup all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
¾ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
6 ounces (1½ sticks) softened unsalted butter
1½ cups sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 large eggs, at room temperature
¾ cup buttermilk, at room temperature
1. Butter a 9-inch Bundt pan.
2. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
3. Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cocoa powder.
4. In the bowl of an electric mixer with the paddle attachment, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, approximately 2 minutes. Add the vanilla extract. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition and scraping down the sides of the bowl.
5. Fold in the dry ingredients alternately with the buttermilk, mixing well after each addition.
6. Spread the batter evenly into the Bundt pan. Bake on the center rack for approximately 35 to 40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
7. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for 10 minutes before unmolding onto a wire rack to cool.
8. To serve, place on a cake plate and drizzle with chocolate glaze (see following recipe) or simply sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar.
Chocolate Glaze
¾ cup heavy whipping cream
6 ounces dark chocolate, chopped
In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, scald the cream. Remove from heat and whisk in the chocolate until the glaze is smooth and glossy. Drizzle over cake.
Chapter 6
ALTHOUGH A TRUCE was called, the relationship with my father remained strained after my abandonment of medicine. He became more distant as rage, anxiety, and depression ate through his body. Hearing the news that a brain drain had left hospitals and clinics in Iran in dire shape, he saw an opportunity to go back. Much as America held promise for his family, for him, it was the end of the road. He did not want to reinvent himself, negotiating daily between East and West. The lush lawns bordered with perennials, the outdoor grills and backyard swimming pools, the reliable postmen and friendly bank tellers, the easy attire of belted khaki shorts and bright polo shirts, going sockless in any weather, were another man’s comfort and would never be his. He loved nothing more than medicine. Faced with the prospect of a safe and tidy life in a California suburb, or the gritty, uncertain one in Tehran, he chose the latter. Back in Iran, he was known. He had healed mothers and babies, schoolteachers and shopkeepers, and they all noticed him when he walked down the street, bought melons from one of their stands, or stopped to muss the hair of their children. No one knew him in California. Here he was Mister; there he would always be Doktor.
In the seven years that had gone by, the hospital was occupied by various squatters, or as they preferred to be called, “revolutionary committees,” but my father still carried the key to his clinic on his key chain. The authorities, having lost interest in his wife’s whereabouts, renewed my father’s Iranian passport, and at the first opportunity he flew home, took a taxi to his old office, turned a key, and walked in as if he had never left. Tehran’s streets had been renamed to celebrate the revolution and
its martyrs, so his clinic was now on Palestine Avenue, instead of avenue Kakh or Palace Avenue. What did he care what they called it, as long as he could get back to work? Word of his return spread quickly. Before long, patients knocked on his door, at first just to confirm that it was really Doktor Bijan, then returning with genuine ailments and gifts, bearing baskets of fruit, candy, and preserves. And when they found out he was alone, staying in the clinic, and sleeping on a cot, they brought him their homemade stews. I imagine my father slept well on that cot, content to have his work, speed-writing prescriptions only a pharmacist could decipher. His letters to my mother were mostly illegible, but exuberant. Unlike the community of specialists in America, my father knew his patients; he had been to their houses, met their spouses and kids, done everything for them from delivering their babies to removing gallstones. He began making frequent trips back, staying three to six months at a time, resurrecting what was left of his practice and his identity.
In reconnecting with friends, he pieced together a mosaic of his former life, discovering that the patterns we followed had altered little, that desire to come together in familiar places remained intact. Families we used to picnic with, or spend summers with on the Caspian shore, were now swept apart by the forces of revolution, but the remaining members continued to gather for weekend lunches, often inviting my father to come along.
Those patterns, synchronized to the seasons, had defined our lives. Fridays were our Sundays, and during the school year, my parents, who worked a rigorous six-day week, were ready for a day off. I could hear Friday mornings before shuffling to the kitchen. My father would be standing in his pajama bottoms with his back to me, squeezing fresh orange juice and listening to a Friday morning variety show on a Zenith radio he’d bought from an American family moving home. His voice joined the announcer’s in a private tête-à-tête; he would sing and laugh at his jokes as they kept each other company before we wandered in for breakfast. He filled five little juice glasses one by one and held a glass under each of our noses, demanding, Bottoms up! In her mauve satin robe, my mother fried eggs and tomatoes in a black skillet, which she brought to the table with a dish towel wrapped around the handle. Fridays smelled different and sounded different, and the kitchen was filled with light and music until it was time to go on our regular outing. By late morning, we packed the car and drove to Niavaran, just north of Tehran, to the weekend house of my parents’ friends. It was a simple villa with a sprawling tiered garden, where every weekend, the same group of doctors and their families would gather for an elaborate potluck lunch, a volleyball game, and garden siestas under the willow trees. They called themselves the Hal Club, which meant that they got together to hal—to seek rapturous delight and inspiration from nature. Often after their siestas, the grown-ups would be sprawled around on blankets in a circle on the lawn and someone would read Hafez or play a recent recording of the Persian blues or, best of all, sing. All the while, clear little glasses of tea were served from the samovar with sugar cubes, dates, and white mulberries. A friendly game of volleyball would follow on the sandpit at the far end of the garden, and on fall afternoons, there would be a long hike, with the women linking arms and the men clasping their hands behind their backs, engaged in discussions about real estate or politics. This was the only day of the week when I saw my parents relaxed, laughing out loud and playful, yet all the same I dreaded these long get-togethers, where I felt severed from my parents, who socialized and played volleyball with the grown-ups, forcing me into a circle of kids I didn’t want to play with. Before leaving our house in the morning, I’d nag my mother about how long we’d have to stay at the party as she stacked Pyrex dishes of homemade stews, pot roast, and salads in the trunk of our car.
I sulked all day while the other children played tag and hide-and-seek. I was shy and preferred to be unnoticed, hiding behind my book, held two inches from my face. The grown-ups didn’t interfere with the children’s games or attempt to resolve disputes. A skinned knee, crusty with grit and blood, would be tended to later at home. A timid child would not be fussed over and coaxed into play. My parents were not yet aware that I needed glasses; my reticence to mention my blurred vision sentenced me to inhabit an interior world. I made it to fourth grade through guesswork and memorization—walking up to the chalkboard during recess to trace words with my fingertips and commit them to memory. If I had joined the other children’s games, I could have run into a wall or failed to catch the ball and would have had to face their mockery. When I finally did get glasses, thick as saucers, it was a private epiphany, the crispness of it all—the chalkboard, the blades of grass, individual leaves. But it was too late to break out of the self-imposed exile I had already established with this group of children. In fourth grade, I would “blossom” only to the extent that an awkward child with square, gold-rimmed wire glasses could, and school was no longer a hazy mass of bodies with expressions I couldn’t read—Ah, so that girl is smiling at me after all! I could never tell if she liked me or not.
In hindsight I think the Hal Club was a brilliant idea, these bohemian physicians, sitting in a lazy circle on the grass, smoking their pipes, playing backgammon, reading poetry, and refueling before starting another week. Naturally all this bonhomie would come to a screeching halt if there happened to be a soccer match broadcast on television. This same group of renaissance men and women would huddle in a small sitting room in front of a black-and-white RCA, one doctor permanently assigned to adjust the rabbit ears while the others screamed and threw punches into the air. Finally, at dusk, they would reluctantly gather their dishes, my mother wrapping the remains of her pot roast for sandwiches. The buffet was never cleared until the very end, since everyone frequently had seconds and thirds as the day wore on. I skipped happily to the car ahead of everyone. We always arrived home in time to watch The Fugitive, dubbed in Farsi. Now here was a character I felt a kinship with. I was cautioned not to sit too close to the screen—You’ll ruin your eyes—but my eyes were already ruined, and I liked the gray, grainy outlines of Barry Morse’s face. My mother sat behind me, peeling oranges and arranging them on a plate we passed around with a saltshaker, as another Friday came to a close.
In the summer, we drove north to the Caspian Sea with a caravan of families. The long road to Ramsar was treacherous. I sat between my sisters in the backseat of my father’s butter yellow Mercedes-Benz and watched the road curve, zigzag, and narrow, praying that I wouldn’t throw up. I was always relieved when we pulled over to a grassy patch to eat lunch.
My father would cool bottles of 7-Up and Canada Dry in a shallow stream, and my mother would fold back the wax paper from chicken sandwiches and hand them to us. The day before, as she prepared for our trip, I had watched her poach the chicken with carrots, cloves, and leeks. She would let me gnaw on a few bones as she pulled warm, tender meat off the bird. I stood by and watched her fold chopped pickles, homemade mayonnaise, and fresh-ground pepper with the chicken pieces before spreading it on loaves of bread and cutting them into triangles. Sitting on our picnic blanket with her knees tucked under her cotton skirt, she would say, I can smell the sea. Can you smell the sea, children? But the shore was still many kilometers away. Back in the car she would distract us, pointing out the mountains that hugged the road. They were a soft yellow with specks of brown, like the inside of the currant cardamom cupcakes that I loved.
When the mountains gave way to the dark green rice fields, dotted red with women in traditional bright floral skirts, my father would roll down his window and take a long, deep breath. The sea was so close now you could feel the salt on your skin. In the afternoon light, the women sparkled like red bells, their backs curved, their arms extended over the crops, and my father would hum, softly at first, then joyfully, a native song his mother sung for him when he was a boy growing up here by the Caspian. It was a springtime song, beckoning a flower to bloom. A sing-along would follow, my father always amazed by my oldest sister’s voice, as if he were hearing it for the f
irst time. She sings like a nightingale! Inevitably there would be some discussion about voice lessons, which would be forgotten the instant we got our first glimpse of the water.
Our seaside vacations varied little from year to year. The children grew taller, marking the passage of time with new interests; one summer the girls still joined their younger siblings in a water fight, the next they asked you to rub olive oil on their backs as they lay flat on their bellies in moody silence, aloof to the boys who continued to wrestle with their fathers, hurling one another down on the hot sand. Fathers continued to wade in, holding the hand of a toddler who just last August had napped in a bassinet in the shade of a striped umbrella, and mothers offered great wedges of watermelon and handfuls of pistachios roasted with sea salt while remarking on new age-defying creams.
My father seized these days to eat the dishes of his childhood. He bought fish threaded on string from local fishermen, and fat fava beans, fresh eggs with bright yellow yolks, and roosters from nearby farmers. He waved and gave chewing gum from his dashboard to children who clustered around his car. His accent would slowly revert to that of the region, especially when he talked to the locals, and we giggled like crazy trying to mimic him. He wasn’t forthcoming about his past. His father had passed away, leaving his mother to raise her five children with little means, and he had worked hard to break away and make his life far from his provincial upbringing, settling my grandmother in the hospital with us until she died when I was five. Proud of the man he had become, as if life had only begun when he was a medical student, he allowed me only glimpses of his youth through his obvious delight at being by the Caspian, foraging for the flavors of his childhood, chuckling with the fishermen. I tried to imagine him as a young boy kicking a ball on the sand, and it baffled me that a person could grow up by the sea and not learn to swim, but my mother explained that he had been too busy, taking care of his younger siblings and studying, to go to the beach: Darling, the sea was just there; it wasn’t exotic, as it is to us coming from the city. But I held on to a belief that people who grew up by the water were playful by nature. My father may have had to shoulder responsibilities I couldn’t fathom in my coddled life, but there was no doubt that the salt air drew out his humor, and he grew expansive. Everyone came to anticipate his juvenile pranks, like setting up my uncle to give swimming lessons to a pretty young woman on the far side of the beach, only to run back and get my aunt to come see what her husband was up to, then standing back to watch my aunt berate my poor uncle in front of a growing audience, my father laughing his head off like a schoolboy just warming up for more mischief.