Persian essentials
"a poetic balance of subtle flavours." Yasmin Khan
I have just finished another of my Christmas cook books - Saffron Tales by Yasmin Khan. And as an aside when I got to the end of the book I discovered her father was Pakistani but came to live in Iran where he met her mother. She lives in London now.
Anyway Persian food is the subject of the book - just like Greg and Lucy Malouf's beautiful book Saraban. This one is beautiful too, and so is Persian food. The food photography in this book is glorious - a subject for another blog I feel coming on.
But today I just thought I would summarise the main things that I got from this book - and these were the ingredients that kept coming up over and over again, and how, indeed, as the quote says at the top, and as I mentioned yesterday, these ingredients are combined to balance hot and cold, sweet and sour. soft and crunchy ... The picture above is of a Burnt Aubergine and Walnut dip and I think it epitomises Persian food really. Almost all of the pillars of Persian food are there. All that's missing is the rice, the saffron and the honey.
So what are these Persian essentials?
1. Fresh herbs in profusion.
They don't just add a touch of a particular herb, they throw in whole bunches of a mix of green things. To my mind one of their most wonderful dishes is the one shown on the left - a platter of fresh herbs. It is often the first thing they serve at a meal. I remember a few years ago in Dubai's Regency Hyatt hotel we dined in their Persian restaurant and the first thing they put on the table was a version of the above. I learnt about it many years ago in Tess Mallos' book of Middle-Eastern Food, or was it Claudia Roden's? One of the two anyway. You assemble what herbs and green things you have - I think there are spring onions in this one, rocket would be good, radicchio - I'm sure you get the idea. With or without some feta cheese, some nuts and something crisp like radish or cucumber. Provide bread for wrapping and voilà - an absolutely brilliant first course with no effort at all.
The second picture is a sort of frittata - but can you see the egg? There is so much green stuff in there. There is also a green stew - the main component is spinach but there are also masses of herbs - and a couple of eggs to finish it with. And that dip at the top of page has more than a few herbs sprinkled over it.
"Fresh herbs really belong anywhere you put them." Alex Guarnaschelli
2. Saffron and rice
The saffron rice shown here is the national dish. No meal is complete without it, and they love the crispy bit on the bottom. It's the only recipe in this book that has step by step pictures, which I think demonstrates how important it is. But saffron, of course, pops up in just about everything, from soup to dessert. Iran is one of the world's biggest producers. I can't quite get excited about it myself - like truffles. Looks beautiful but I can never detect the flavour. Rice is essential however, and one of the three main types of main dish in Persia/Iran is a pilaff - layered, meat, fish or vegetables and rice. The book has lots of very tempting looking recipes for this - and almost always with that orange crust. Rice and bread seem to be the main source of carbohydrate - potatoes not so much.
3. Fruit
And of course the pomegranate is the defining fruit, although Iran, being a major producer of fruit, has wonderful dates, apricots, figs, oranges and cherries. The oranges tend to be the bitterer Seville oranges, and the cherries are also often sour. For sweet and sour is a definite thing, Limes, lemons and the aforementioned cherries and oranges and pomegranates, with tamarind too for the sour, and dates, apricots and figs for the sweet. And they are often dried, or pickled just to give an even more unique taste. The second main type of main dish is the khoresh - a stew which will contain a mixture of meat, fish or vegetable with fruit of some kind - and probably a legume as well, not to mention those bunches of herbs.
4. Nuts
Mostly walnuts, almonds and pistachios I think, but no doubt there are others too. They are eaten as they are, ground into pastes or chopped and sprinkled on stews, dips, omelettes - anything really. In that dip they are ground in with the burnt aubergines.
And it seems to me that these are the main components of Persian food. Of course there is honey and yoghurt and feta cheese, but no alcohol in spite of the town of Shiraz being possibly the first place in the world to produce wine.
It's a beautiful cuisine - both in taste and appearance, and we must try the local (well near local) Persian restaurant some day. I believe it is considered the most refined of the Middle-Eastern cuisines (though the Lebanese may have something to say about that.)
And the third kind of main dish is kebabs.
