In the culinary world, there are two categories of person: those who seek to impress, and those who seek to please. This is not, however, a cookbook. Manouchehri is not a chef. Rather, with this book, the Persian-Irish multidisciplinary artist asserts her position as host; compelled by an instinct to comfort.
“Her kitchen smelled like butter and sugar – warm, delicious and cosy,” the first vignette begins. It is a scene that will be familiar to many. From here, watermelons cool alongside goldfish in the hoz, holiday air is “humid”, smelling “of garlic and the sea”. Scenes less common to readers whose childhood was weathered by “the snotgreen, scrotumtightening” Irish seas, but the subtext remains familiar – family, togetherness, belonging.
The book is divided into a tone-setting introduction, followed by a series of vignettes, or short personal essays, depicting scenes from the author’s childhood in Tehran in the 1980s. The theme of displacement features frequently as “families fall apart and times together become faint memories” in the era following the Iranian Revolution. Female voices triumph.
The prose is simple and evocative. Scenes are drawn with the language and insight available to their observer; a young Manouchehri who smells “oil paint and coffee” watching her mother’s weekly art sessions, and then, “pieces of smelly brown garlic mixed with tiny bits of sharp, broken glass” after a missile strikes near her family home. In its innocence, a hum of tenderness and ache.
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Each vignette is accompanied by a recipe – often passed through female lineage - and a wealth of lithographic prints. Recipes include a “sour and spicy” fish kotlet, inspired by a young jang zadeg classmate who, like many, had fled from the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war and, Maman Malak’s Shami, an Iranian kebab dish. Appropriately, the recipes are not cumbersome but do require time. It is the ritual of preparing, cooking and sharing food at the core of this book.
Manouchehri’s writing style is undidactic. Neither plain nor fussy, the author’s airy prose encourages the ingredients to speak for themselves. Thus, it is the richness of Persian culture, the resilience of women and the value of connection in a precarious world that shine. In holding back, Manouchehri has constructed an elegant book in which life abounds.
