We present an extract from This Is Not a Cookbook, the new book by Roxana Manouchehri.
This Is Not a Cookbook uniquely blends memoir with food writing, alongside evocative lithographic artwork. The vignettes in the book chronicle Roxana Manouchehri's childhood growing up in Tehran in the 80s following the Iranian Revolution, the profound influence of the women who surrounded her, and the legacy of memories handed down during wartime. Weaving moving personal anecdotes with the comfort of traditional recipes, Manouchehri offers us a glimpse of a rich but fraught culture seen through the eyes of a young girl seeking to reconcile her roots through the shared intimacy of food.
Shami
Shami reminds me of my grandmother, my mum's mother, Malak Taj Khanoom. She was a master at mak-ing shami, which is a kind of kotlet or kebab in Iran, usually containing beans and meat. It’s dry, so it needs to be served with a sauce. There are many different kinds of shami in Persian cuisine.
Malak Taj, or Maman Malak as we called her, was a great cook. Her kitchen smelled like butter and sugar – warm, delicious and cosy. It was a tiny room – two people could barely fit in it – but she made the most delicious food there. Her father was from Ghafghaz and her cooking was influenced by Azeri and Russian cuisine. Kotlet, dolmeh, Olivier salad and piroshki were everyday foods in her house. My family used to visit her once a week. We would spend the whole day in that beautiful old house, with lunch tenderly cooked by Grandma. In the evening, my dad would collect us on his way home from work.
Maman Malak lived in a typical, traditional Qajar-style house in Tehran, called panj dari or hasht dari, meaning a garden surrounded by five or eight doors. Her house had a small garden, with rooms ar-ranged in a semi-circular shape around it, each with large wooden windows. In the middle of the gar-den was a hoz حوض which was a little pool with a fountain, often with goldfish, very common in tradi-tional Persian houses. The little ponds are decorative but they also keep the gardens cool during the hot summers. I used to wish the hoz was bigger so we could swim in it. After the Persian New Year ceremony, we would leave our goldfish in Maman Malak’s hoz as a tradition. My grandma would soak watermelons in it to keep them cool for my dad. When he came to collect us, he would sit down and enjoy some cold watermelon.
In wintertime there was a korsi کرسی in one of the rooms. My grandma would make the korsi by put-ting an electric heater under the large, low, heavy wooden coffee table and covering it with a beautiful blanket. The table would be covered in small plates and bowls filled with nuts, sweets and dried fruits. In the corner of the room there was a samovar and tea was always available. As kids, we loved this traditional way of keeping our feet cosy and warm while sitting with family for snacks and chats. I remember tucking my legs under the table, feeling the weight of the heavy blanket and listening to my grandma telling us stories.
Maman Malak loved birds and kept hens and turkeys in her garden. I was scared of the hens, who chased me, but I loved to play with them when they were little chicks. In one corner of the garden there was a narrow staircase that led deep down into the ground. At the bot-tom of those stairs was the hammam حمام, which is the traditional style shower room in Iran, Turkey and some other countries. The hammam was dark and damp, and I was too scared to go there on my own. In another corner of the garden was the toilet. It was very tough to leave the warm house and korsi to go to the toilet in the cold of winter.
The best part about spending time in Maman Malak’s house was when the adults were having a nap after lunch. There were two little rooms to the side of the main entrance where we could go and have a look from the windows. My sisters and I used to sneak into the kitchen and take some cold shami to the garden to eat as snacks while we played with the birds or the goldfish in the hoz and wandered around the different corners of the garden.
I lost Maman Malak nearly 20 years ago, before I moved to Ireland. I think about her often, about how proud she was to be from Tehran and all her beautiful stories from before the Islamic Revolution, stories which sounded like fairytales to me and my sisters. Shami was her special dish, and I loved it. I try to make it as well as my grandmother, but there must have been something about that house and her kitchen that created the magic. I can’t find it here in Dublin.
This Is Not a Cookbook is published by Skein Press
