Chapter one
“It’s like central heating for the insides,” Nigel Slater shared with the BBC camera, a smile forming over his friendly face, creases twirling around his mouth like the folds of a velvety Persian carpet. Nigel beamed heartily, revealing a glimpse of his shiny white teeth. He pushed his signature chunky jet black glasses up his long, straight nose as he spoke gently, his hair long and fringe drooping, like the strands of a rug. Deep brown eyes glimmering, Nigel warmed to kale-pacheh and in turn it warmed me, thrilled that someone so new to such an ancient culture enjoyed such a dish – even if it was boiled sheep parts slow-cooked in turmeric and cinnamon for eight hours. Nigel appreciated the soft, succulent, almost milk-like stew in front of him, mouthful after mouthful being smelt and devoured. He understood travelling for food.
Nigel was in a typical restaurant of this area of the city. Inside were white, hard, plastic seats with huge, towering windows which showed the greetings of salam alaykan, handshakes and gentle bows in the street with fingers stretched out over the heart. Cars zipped around in the background, while horns blasted in the distance, but it was the inside of this eating house that required the most attention. Some restaurants may not look as pretty as can be, no luxurious hand-woven carpets, no sagging chandeliers, but inside bubbles away the most luxurious of stews.
It wasn’t just kale-pacheh that Nigel was indulging in. He had landed himself in the gripping city of Tehran, home to around 8.7 million people –and he was eating everything in sight. From a tearing of sangak, crunchy stone baked bread, and a bowl full of dizi, soft mutton soup with chickpeas, to a serving of sour pomegranates, the sharp tang of the red jewels making Nigel wince with their punchy flavour.
Nigel’s passion for food is visible in his every mouthful he chews and digests. His wonderfully descriptive recipes and heartfelt commentaries are like a hug for the belly and soul. You can taste what he tastes and smell what he smells. One of my favourite pastimes is to delve deep into his Eat cookery book and scribble down a sprawling list of ingredients to make one of his soothing stews, zingy marinades and thoughtful toast concoctions. The only sad part of the process is to enter my local supermarket and see the amount of cluttered plastic everywhere, shielding the fruit and vegetables from humankind’s gentle touch. In Iran, there is a different relationship with fresh produce. You can squeeze that peach ever so carefully to find out if it's ripe, furry skin prickling you as you touch it, you can choose your very own spiralling bunch of red grapes, wavy stalk twisting and turning like a treble clef and you can plunge your hand into a sack of sturdy figs while you watch the rest tumble and turn to find their new resting place.
And now, Nigel was right there in Iran –touching and tasting these ingredients. Holding fiery red threads of saffron between his forefingers, cutting into shrivelled dried limes and pointing at the contrast of colour in black eyed beans, white pupils and black irises glaring out for all to see. Nigel was in my Iran, my beautiful Iran. My Iran where tangy sumac is sprinkled onto juicy, succulent kebabs, my Iran where piles of parsley are towered high to eat with soured sheep’s cheese, my Iran where crescents of raw, crunchy white onion are served alongside slow-cooked split-pea stews, my Iran where my grandmother cooked from the early hours of the morning to lunchtime, the main meal of the day in the country, my Iran where food is served with endless, ringing love.
I had never seen any other chef, particularly from the BBC, head into such 'dangerous territory' as the broadcasting giant can allude Iran to be in their news headlines. ‘US-Iran war of words raises fresh fears…’ and ‘Iran arrest journalists…’ blink through my eyes. The food and the people are two of the most important and prominent parts of Iranian culture. 'It’s the people that leave the most lasting impressions from any journey to Iran' Lonely Planet describes in their guidebook. ‘Meet the People’ is listed as their top experience. And Nigel was here singing these two components into the perfect marriage hand in hand. He was wandering around local's houses and perusing their food cupboards, fascinated by every spice in a glass jar and every herb bunched together in the fridge. He was intrigued into the rituals and practices in the Iranian kitchen, which he so beautifully remarked on.
“Do you know, almost every ingredient you’ve given to me, you’ve explained what it adds in terms of flavour, but you’ve also explained what it does to the body? What it does to me. It’s not just about flavour, it's about health.” This element is certainly embedded into Iranian culinary etiquette. There is always an explanation as to what spice is good for your digestion and what this herb will do for your sinuses. Cumin for the former, fenugreek for the latter. Tuning in every week, Nigel’s 2018 Middle East series was one of the most joyful programs I’d ever witnessed on screen. So much so, I wanted to be him. I wanted to be there, where he was, my Iran. Why wasn’t I there?
Where I actually was at the time was a crummy, pokey flat share in Hackney, East London. After trailing through endless room advertisements online, I picked the best of a bad bunch. My previous let in South London with a friend at the time had come to a swift end. She had decided to leave the rush of the capital in search of a new, less hectic lifestyle, along with cheaper rent.
In a house with strangers, my new, tiny room in Hackney was my escape. A square box filled with tacky furniture, peeling wallpaper and a thin, flimsy curtain to keep the heat in. There were three others I shared the house with. One was an incredibly socially awkward man with wispy blonde hair, a small but feisty teacher who slipped my own kitchen appliances in her belongings and a boisterous woman with badly dyed black hair who stomped up and down the carpeted steps, and played thumping music into the night.
My meals would consist of whatever I could cook the fastest. A bowl of sad tinned tomato soup heated in the filthily microwave, tough tortellini that took four minutes to boil on the crusty hob and cheese on toast which bubbled under the rusty grill. I’d clutch the plate or bowl which held my meal while I scurried hurriedly into my room and ate dinner in the comfort of my own space. When I finished I would shuffle back into the kitchen, hoping nobody would be on the other side of the door, and clean my utensils. The rush of hot water would wash over the collected clutter in the sink from the others. Lumps of fried egg would clog the drain, avocado stones turned black and greasy oil would grip to anything in near sight.
I was also working in a crummy job. I was working long hours for a website which sold package holiday deals, the likes of four-star all-inclusive breaks to Corfu and self-catering holiday deals in Málaga – destinations and breaks I didn’t care about. A friend at the time who I had worked with previously in another company, Emma, was there too. Seeing her friendly face was the only positive aspect about the job. Everyone else was cold and unwelcoming –there was no team dynamic.
“You don’t need to get up every time,” Emma assured me, her thick curly black hair bounced as she typed to me on Skype. “You can just send her a message on here.” I frowned to myself, a deep crease forming between my furrowed eyebrows. I felt puzzled. I’d been going to and from the manager’s table to let her know I had completed a task, but I had just been told I could speak to her through a screen, even though she was right there in reaching distance. It felt bizarre to do such a thing, and to hear such a thing from Emma, one of the bubbliest, most energetic people I knew. That was my first day at work. And all of the proceeding ones were the same. You would talk to whoever you needed to in the office via a screen.
There were a multitude of times I felt like I was drowning in the office. Sinking slowly into a never-ending pool of anxiety, panic and unease. My writing, from people who had never worked in the creative industry before, would come back with scribbles of red, every line had a word that needed to be readded or deleted – but no explanation as to why at all. I was just told to redo my work with no guidance. I knew I could flourish elsewhere.
I had won a writing competition at The Telegraph during my time at the company. I had been writing until the early hours of the morning for the deadline. I submitted a narrative piece about arcades in Akihabara, Tokyo. When I found out I won, I sobbed on my own in my bedroom. With excitement and joy, yes, but the immense feeling of relief swept over me through my body –I could and can write.
My anxiety at work had streamed into my personal life. On Fridays I would be ecstatic for the weekend, so thrilled to not have to go into the office, but I pounded with stress as I desperately tried to look for another job. And Friday would slowly turn to Monday and I would be going back to the same old office.
Amongst all of my time at the company, one person kept coming back to me, again and again and again. I couldn’t get the image of him out of my head, I was becoming slowly transfixed by this one heartwarming man. Watching his face light up when a spoon hit his mouth and his delight of learning about another new ingredient. That man was Nigel Slater.
I’d read about him online repeatedly and always checked to see if his Middle East series was still available to watch. I’d look up his recipes and see which ones had an Iranian influence in them. Was that saffron I saw in that stew? And it all brought me back to that one glorious place –Iran – and one pressing question – why was I not where Nigel was?
Nigel had seen the Caspian Sea – I longed to see the Caspian Sea. I wanted to float by on a rickety wooden boat and breathe in the nourishingly clean air of the water and watch the waves to and fro for miles on end. I wanted to inhale fresh sabzi, herbs, dive into a goblet of ash-e reshteh, herb, pomegranate and noodle soup, and slurp its comforting contents and attempt to divulge a towering ‘Tehran Twister’, a black mulberry and cantaloupe ice cream, sold by the metre –just like Nigel had.
Why was I not where Nigel was? I had an Iranian passport, spoke the language, and my father’s entire family (too many members to count) all lived in Mashhad. Having been mostly brought up in Yorkshire, my parents (my mother, a Hungarian), brother and I would travel to Iran every summer school holiday. The dreary drizzle of the north would soon change as we were plunged into 40-degree dry summers. We’d live with my paternal grandparents and get a deeply intensive Iranian living experience before being thrown back into the Western world – a regular culture shock, particularly as a growing woman.
Enjoyable as it was to be with my family in Mashhad, I more or less had just seen the insides of their houses, bar a random trip to Esfahan and a visit to international schools in Tehran, when my household were considering to move to Iran from England. I relished in seeing the new luxurious Persian carpets my family had bought for their marble floors and feeling the soft thread comfort my soles and I longed to see my grandmother stir a bubbling pot of khoresh-e karafs, celery stew, and to tell me which herb would help my hair grow shiny (aloe for any dry-haired readers), but I wanted to see more of the country – all of its corners, not just Mashhad which I knew so well. My brother and I ended up schooling there for half a year after we decided that there was no point moving to Tehran, where we had no family. Strong ties to family are a huge part of Iranian culture.
I had been writing content about Iran for my own website for the past few years, it had appeared in National Geographic Traveller (and later Wanderlust) and I was hungry for more. And that was simply that. After another dull and destroying day in the office, I rushed to my room when I arrived home (naturally) and I threw my laptop open. I clicked and clacked my keyboard keys and purchased a plane ticket for Iran – departing in four weeks.
The next day I quit my job and practically skipped out the door. And just like that, the minute I knew I was leaving, I could taste what Nigel was tasting and smell what Nigel was smelling more than ever. I could savour the sour, thick pomegranate sauce of the ash-e reshteh, inhale the fresh, grassy, parsley sprigs and feel the thick, sturdy noodles sliding down my throat – the herb, pomegranate and noodle soup was the central heating to my insides.
Chapter two
Just before the Iranian Revolution in 1979, my father moved with a bunch of friends from Iran to England. In Tehran, angry, moustachioed men hailed images of Ayatollah Khomeini in crowds while they burned pictures of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi shouting “Down with the Shah”. A sea of black-clothed marchers could be seen for miles in major cities in the country, along with chador-clad women who covered themselves in black fabric after the country became an Islamic Republic. Chador means tent in Farsi. It’s this time in history that most people associate with Iran. In England, my father would watch the television every night to see what was happening in his homeland.
My father was also glued to the television trying to improve his English. He would listen to other headlines, chuckle to classic comedy shows such as Fawlty Towers, read newspapers until the paper’s ink smudged on his fingers and blast out the radio, waves singing through his dormitory room at college in Leeds. It was in college that my father and mother met, who was born to Hungarian parents and raised in Yorkshire. My maternal grandfather played the piano heartily while my grandmother, mother and aunt would dance and prance around their cosy living room. My father and mother fell madly in love, married and had my brother and me. Growing up, every summer school holiday of ours was spent in Iran while friends would sunbathe in Spain, head to Paris for a quick weekend getaway or zip up and down roller coaster rides in Florida. I was knew I was different, and I certainly felt like it.
My father was ecstatic when I said I wanted to return to Iran to travel in the summer of 2018. Less so, when I said I wanted to travel around on my own –a possibility as a British-Iranian dual national, with no requirement of an official guide to accompany me.
“I will be fine, baba, dad,” I insisted down the phone to him when I was in London. “I’m 27 and I’ve lived in Japan on my own for God’s sake.” I could feel my teenage voice emerging, adolescent anger bubbling in my chest. I was no stranger to Farsi, my father’s family didn’t speak a word of English, or they spoke with incredibly heavy accents. “E-my e-dear,” my Amu (paternal uncle) Mohsen would bellow across the room when he’d see me, arms stretched out wide ready to trap me in a bear hug and give me a thousand squeaky kisses on each cheek.
My father is one of eight children and this brings endless sons and daughters. Some cousins were decades older than me, others decades younger. There was one cousin who I spent most of my time with when I visited Iran growing up. I’d hardly see my own household for I would be gallivanting around the streets of Mashhad in her car, music blasting out of the speakers whilst we’d peruse glossy shopping malls and sit down to drink a bitter coffee in one of the city’s numerous café bars. We would talk about the latest tunes, film and travel together into the early hours of the morning, the call to prayer roaring out into the dusty streets in Mashhad. We would head to luxurious morning hotel buffet breakfasts which we would lull over for hours, samovar steaming in the background, keeping the chai, black tea, stewing. I smiled to myself at the thought of my darling cousin, Hoda, and that I would be seeing her again in Iran. After talking endlessly on the phone about me returning to Iran and potential plans –that was it – she would be my travelling partner for my next trip around the country.
