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In 1980, Terence O'Donnell published Garden of the Brave
in War, a volume of reminiscences of his time as farmer in the 1960s and
70s in the province of Fars in Iran. The "Garden of the Brave in War"
(the name of his farm) produced pomegranates, apples, sour cherries, quinces,
sheep, chicken and bees. O'Donnell's Pickwickian memoir of outings, scrapes
and parties is full of evocations of great meals, such as the picnic which preceded
and almost superseded a hunting expedition and which consisted of "gazelle,
lamb and chicken, two kinds of pilau, spinach cakes, wild rhubarb, yoghurt and
herbs, whiskey, brandy and the local date spirits". O'Donnell's book is
filled with a nostalgia for a douceur de vivre which the Iranian revolution
of 1978-9 has probably placed beyond recovery.
Najmieh K. Batmanglij is an Iranian who lives in the United States, and her
cookery book, A Taste of Persia, is suffused with a similar food-laden
nostalgia. In a prelude to a recipe for dill rice with fava beans, she recalls
the old family retainer who would appear shortly before the Persian New Year
bearing a wicker basket edged with violets and narcissi and containing Seville
oranges and smoked whitefish. When Batmanglij sets out a recipe for rice with
tart cherries, she notes that such cherries are hard to find these days, and
that "they always bring back memories". She remembers waiting as a
child for the crates of cherries, which "were placed in the garden by the
stone fountain and gently sprinkled with water to wash off the dust". She
and her sisters "soaked all our senses in sour cherries". A discussion
of khoresh, or braise, summons up the memory of her mother chopping herbs: "I
can see and smell and hear it still: the various greens of the herbs, the sharp
steel of the cleaver with droplets of herb juice on it, the lovely aroma, the
faraway trancelike concentration on my mother's angelic face she never wore
rings when she cooked - the even quick blows of the cleaver."
Batmanglij stresses the pre-Islamic continuity of Iranian cuisine, and relays
the Assyrian Ashurnisapal II's boast that he had given a ten-day feast, including
thousands of cattle, calves, sheep, lambs, ducks, geese, doves, stags and gazelles,
as well as fruit, vegetables, cheese and nuts, for 47,074 people. (However,
Batmanglij's own recipes only cater for eight people at most and usually only
for four.) It was under the Sasanian dynasty (third to seventh century AD) that
a culture of the dinner table and the drinking bout developed, which combined
gastronomic and oenological expertise with a broader grounding in etiquette
and the elements of table talk. Much of this culture of the table was passed
on to the Arabs in the form of adab (on which see below). The Persians
cultivated and disseminated to the rest of the world "the walnut, pistachio,
pomegranate, cucumber, broad bean and pea . . . as well as basil, coriander
and sesame". In "A Dictionary of Persian Cooking" at the back
of the book, Batmanglij makes similar claims for almonds, fenugreek, quince
and saffron. Some readers may well be suspicious of such broad claims to Persian
priority, which might be thought to smack of gastronomic imperialism. However,
the Larousse gastronomique and Alan Davidson's recent Oxford Companion to Food
not only support most of these claims, but they even add to the list. It also
seems to me likely that Turkish haute cuisine, as it evolved at the Ottoman
court, was modelled on that of the Timurids in Persia and Transoxiana in the
fifteenth century, when the latter dynasty was at the height of its cultural
prestige and an "International Timurid court style" prevailed in other
Islamic art forms.
. . . Like A Taste of Persia, Casablanca Cuisine summons up child's-eye
visions of mother in the kitchen and of leisurely family feasts.
. . . Claudia Roden's new book, Tamarind and Saffron, takes some of its
recipes t from her first book, but the recipes are often pared down and simplified,
and the ingredients specified seem to cater for a more health-conscious audience.
Tamarind and Saffron is lavishly illustrated, but I preferred Roden's
spare prose to the images of over-lit, strangely glowing foods. (Batmanglij's
photographer has succeeded in producing more naturalistic, mouth-watering pictures.).
. . . Geert Jan Van Gelder is Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford. His Of
Dishes and Discourse traces the numerous and complex interrelations between
food on the one hand and medieval Arabic poetry and belles-lettres on the other.
In A Taste of Persia, Batmanglij refers to the tenth-century Persian
epic poet, Firdawsi, as despising the Arabs who conquered Iran for Islam as
rough men who "fed on camel's milk and ate lizards". Naturally, Van
Gelder offers a discussion of lizard-eating in its literary context. Poets who
were of Persian origin but who wrote in Arabic, such as Bashshar ibn Burd and
Abu Nuwas, were particularly inclined to mock the whole Arab race as the eaters
of lizards, hedgehogs or locusts. This was a stock literary insult. Strictly
speaking, however, it was only the nomadic Arabs who genuinely delighted in
eating lizards and locusts. A swarm of locusts, though it spelled disaster for
farmers, might be welcomed by the nomads as a delicacy on the wing.
Robert Irwin's most recent book is, Night and Houses
and the Desert: An anthology of classical Arabic literature.
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