A Sip, A Bite, A Mouthful: A memoir of food and growing up in Shiraz By Afsaneh Hojabri Copyright 2012 Afsaneh Hojabri Smashwords Edition Smashwords Edition, License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. Credits: Cover page design and production by Hossein Milani (http://themilanigroup.com/) Cover picture by Mehrab Moghadasian (http://www.mehrab-m.com/) In memory of my beloved brother, Mohsen, for whom I terribly miss reading, writing, and cooking Table of Contents Book I: Growing Up in Shiraz Chapter One: Meeting the Cooks: My Mom and My Maama Chapter Two: Life in Transition: From Old House, to New Chapter Three: Finding an Occasion to Eat: In and Out; Peace or War Book II: Three Meals a Day and Much More Chapter One. Kaleh-pacheh for Breakfast (Served with Tea and Bread) Chapter Two. Ghalyeh and Rice for Lunch Chapter Three. Aash and Kotlet for Supper Chapter Four. Araghi-yaat (herb and flower extracts) and Aragh (Iranian Vodka) Epilogue: The Cyber- Kitchen Appendix Acknowledgments About the Author Endnotes BOOK I: Growing Up in Shiraz From where I stand in time and space, I look back through a window called food for several reasons: Because taste and smell are the two senses most loyal to my memories; because numerous times, through food alone, I have come to savor a wealth of people and places. Because the finely elaborate ritual of cooking, as well as its absence continues to reveal the highlights of my life. Because I have seen all of my sisters fall into humming a Persian tune only while they are cooking; and I have watched them cook in silence, which told me that they were not happy. Because only two things in the world can make my head spin with euphoria, and one of them is the scent of Gillan’s dom-siah rice being steamed. Chapter One: Meeting the Cooks: My Mom and My Maama Saleheh squatted under the yard’s wall, right next to the valve on the water pipes that ran the length of our house. She had the round edge of her black, semi-transparent head wrap, a maghna, crossed at her neck and thrown back over her shoulders as she always did when her hands were busy with messy chores. In a big, round, copper tray placed in front of her, six shoorideh fish were gliding and glistening under Saleheh’s skilled hands and the summer sunbeams, ready to be cleaned and stuffed. Mom was in the kitchen, preparing the fish filler: fresh coriander and fenugreek that Saleheh had already cleaned, washed and finely chopped to be fried in a paste-like mixture of turmeric and chili pepper powder. While most of the dazzling scent of the spicy filler wafted out to the street through the kitchen’s window, the trail also reached the other end of the house and into the backyard where I was sitting with Saleheh. It had been almost two years since we had purchased our new house in Shiraz in 1968. At the farthest corner of the yard, the already-chopped-and-simmered tomato flesh had been flattened on other copper trays to be sundried and further thickened without losing its glittering, red hue. For the entire two or three weeks of the paste-making process, Saleheh, Mom and occasionally an older sister carried the trays in and out of the building—into the sun, out of the dust, into the air, out of the rain—like an insecure cat moving her kittens around. Sooner or later, a muddy ball always escaped a pack of my siblings to land in the middle of the trays, doing irrevocable damage. From where I was sitting with Saleheh, we could see our flowerbeds encircling the central pond or the hoze, as well as the fruit trees that surrounded it. We had a black mulberry tree that had been adopted from Bushehr, my parents’ birthplace, as a sapling. It produced gigantic, juicy berries the size of fat fingers and painted half the yard’s tiles as well as the faces, arms and legs of all enthusiastic mulberry pickers a dark purple. Then there was our grapevine, which grew into a tall, wide tent of green grapes over a couple of years, providing Mom the supplies to make stuffed grape leaves (dolmeh) at least twice a year. We also had a wild pomegranate tree that no one would either claim responsibility for planting or vote to cut down. From late summer to mid-fall, the tree gave extremely sour and acrid pomegranates, good only as a chaser with Iranian vodka. Finally, standing in our flowerbeds surrounding the central pond was a single, sour orange tree, a naaranj, which wore a perfumed, white robe of blossoms in the spring and an orange robe of fruit in early summer. Short-lived, homegrown sour oranges gave us all the more reason to eat fish during that period. No amount of money could buy the joy of running off to the other end of the yard in the middle of lunch to pick an armful. We peeled the rinds across the middle so that, when cut in half, the bitterness of the hard skin would not infuse the pulp when we squeezed them over halva sefid fish, that had been rolled in a mix of turmeric and flour before being stir fried, or on the stuffed shoorideh fish served with mixed herb rice that we prepared that day. Saleheh scaled the fish one at a time, working from tail to head all the way to the side fins. She then briskly cut off the fins before giving the body a hasty, first rinse. I crouched down to face her, with chin in palm, as flying fish scales landed in my unkempt hair amidst the soft buzz of hovering flies. I used to sit and watch Saleheh for long hours, registering how she prepared each food and tucking the details away in the hidden recesses of my mind. I studied her hands intensively, but often learned nothing because I was so mesmerized by the sharp contrast between the dark pink skin of her coarse palms and the dark brown that stretched across the backs of her hands. Saleheh’s presence in our home was a vital necessity, but we took it for granted, just like breathing. In my mind, she had been with us since time immemorial, frozen in the same small, strong stature, face smooth and eyes brimming with love and pride. In reality, Saleheh sought refuge in my parents’ house back in the 1940s when she was in her late teens. She had been born a slave to a tiny population in the then Arabic-speaking, feudal island of Ghase (later called Kish) off the South coast of Iran in the Persian Gulf. The Island was ruled by a sheikh (1) and Saleheh and her female relatives were unpaid servants in the houses of the sheikh’s family. They also worked along the shore, where they opened and sorted the oysters that their fellow male pearl diver slaves lifted from the sea, always under the vigilant eyes of the sheikh’s staff. Saleheh’s husband was but one of those breath-holding divers who, one day, did not resurface. “Tell me the story of when we were all in the mineral water springs near the Caspian,” I suddenly begged Saleheh with all the persuasion that my ten-year-old tone could muster, for I knew she had already repeated the tale at least a hundred times. “Sit more far, more far,” she chided, urging me with her bobbing head, as if the motion might physically ward off my request. “You get scales all over you, maama!” Maama was what Saleheh was to me, but it is customary among Iranians to use one’s relation to the other as a term of endearment. “Go on, tell me,” I insisted, scooting back an inch. “Okay, okay,” she gave in. “Your mother and sisters and everybody in the family is in this walled mineral hot water because that year we go to Mashhad and then to Caspian, and then they hear water good for bone pain… ” “I know, I know,” I snapped dismissively, “tell the part when we were inside the hot water pool, it was an all-women section, right?” “You were there also, only too little to remember. Ha?!” She rubbed her forehead with her arm and switched from her serrated knife to a sharp-bladed one for gutting the fish. I sat quietly at full attention as she pressed her hand against the fish’s head and sliced from tail to gills with the other hand in one effortless stroke. She put down her knife and dug her hand into the fish to remove the gills and entrails before throwing the flesh into a nearby colander for a final washing. “And?” I prompted, bringing myself back to the story as she reached for the next fish. “Anyway,” she continued, “ten, twenty, maybe thirty women are in the pool.” “All naked?” I asked anxiously, knowing my favorite part was fast approaching.