Feast and Family

‘How come you don’t eat like that at our house?’ I ask my four-year-old son as he eagerly wolfs down his kebab digi (pan-fried kebabs with rice and yoghurt) at my parents’ house. ‘Because I like Iranian food, I don’t like your food,’ he says, meaning sausage and mash.

I suppose, at four, he is a little too young to be subjected to a rant about working single mums not having the time to diligently chop mounds of herbs, shell walnuts, stone dates and stand over their Persian rice until it is cooked to fluffy perfection. Or to pound ground lamb with turmeric, mint and yoghurt, as my dad does.

I would like to say for the record, I give my son perfectly good food. Fish fingers are healthy if served with peas (even if they are eaten with the promise of a muffin afterwards). I feel pangs of guilt, however, when I realise my son is a fussy eater only when presented with my bland platefuls of ‘this’ll do’ which are not a patch on his grandmother’s lovingly made stews with dried lime and herbs.

Growing up, my older brother Peyvand and I had friends, twins called James and Paul, who would come round to our house in Ealing to play. The boys found pita breads so fascinating that they ate them without any topping – this was well before pita became a supermarket staple. ‘Wow, this is bread? Yum.’ They loved my mother’s feasts. There were no fish fingers at our house, only slow-cooked lamb and aubergine, tender chicken with sweetened barberries, and rice so delicious you could eat it by itself with just a dollop of cucumber and mint yoghurt.

Nowadays in London you can get all the ingredients for Persian cooking from the myriad Iranian and Middle Eastern shops, the most famous being Persepolis in Peckham (an odd place for an Iranian restaurant, I’ve always thought – we tend to be everywhere but Peckham); in the old days, though, aunts and uncles would visit from Iran with gigantic suitcases full of everything from flat breads and dried herbs to pomegranate paste and regional ingredients my mum wouldn’t know what to do with (nor, she suspected, would the people in the regions).

Iranian food is quite a well-kept secret, and it does take some prep. There is endless chopping, stirring and chanting to be done. Alright, maybe I made the chanting bit up but when a dish is made properly from scratch – such as fesenjoon, a rich ground walnut and pomegranate sauce with duck that Brits tend to love – it is so heavenly that it’s easy to assume some hocus-pocus must go into its making.

For Iranians the world over, the home is a veritable hub of social life. Ours was, anyway. Back in the Eighties my parents, who came here in 1976 but ended up staying for political reasons (no, really), invited friends for a dinner pretty much every other night. Exiles like to make sense of being in exile and for us this meant copious amounts of food and sub-zero vodka, which Iranian kebabs are designed for. Iranians say ‘come for dinner’ as easily as Brits say ‘fancy a pint’? Even today my father frequently springs surprise dinner guests on my mother; it could literally be someone he met yesterday.

When I was a child, Persian restaurants, such as the one in the Milestone Hotel just off Kensington High Street (something of a ‘Little Iran’ in the 80s), were rather raucous, with tipsy Iranians dancing on the tables at the end of the night. Iranians’ love of dancing – any time, anywhere – delights me. We don’t need music. Someone’s chubby uncle can just tap out a rhythm on the table, others will clack their fingers and ladies will wiggle their hips and dance together.

The curiously named Galleria on New Cavendish Street has been around for about ten years and is the most consistently high-quality Iranian restaurant in London. It does food as good as my mother’s and she is its biggest fan. Brilliant kebabs. There are one or two others but they don’t serve alcohol or allow you to bring your own, and we avoid those for fear of bumping into embassy officials.

I regret not standing by my mother’s side and learning to cook as she did with her own mother. Endlessly cooking for hordes of people was not a skill I wished to acquire. Now, though, for the sake of my aubergine-loving son, I have started. Spatula in hand I am on the phone to my mother discussing quantities of cinnamon and whether turmeric will do instead of saffron (the answer to this is always a horrified ‘No!’). I am getting quite good. I make lamb shank with dill and broad bean rice which my son devours without even enquiring about pudding. I still keep a few packets of fish fingers in the freezer for emergencies – you know, in case I have an unexpected guest. ES