“Recreating My Family’s Iranian Recipes Helped Me To Find Home”
If you’re from a diaspora community, the seemingly mundane question, “Where is home?” is a loaded one. It can feel like growing up between several worlds, without one concrete place that feels ‘just right’. For me, finding home led me down an unexpected path that began and ended in my mother’s kitchen.
My curiosity about family recipes was piqued in my teenage years living in the suburbs of Washington, DC – particularly when my grandma would visit from Tehran. She and my mom had lived for years in Abadan, a city in the southwest of Iran on the Persian Gulf, which is home to an incredibly vibrant regional cuisine. I would pepper Mom and Grandma with questions about the special dishes we ate: a herbed kidney bean and beef stew that braises for hours; the bright dried lime in ghormeh sabzi; the tamarind paste that makes our spicy and sour fish stew (ghalieh mahi) sing. No recipe was discussed without mentioning the person behind it – whether the family member who passed it down, the beloved friend who made the best (or worst!) version of it, or the brilliant mind who updated it and made it their own. The people and stories interwoven in our food culture were just as important as the dishes themselves.
Fast forward a few years into university, I struggled to replicate my favourite Iranian comfort foods away from home. Then came the growing realisation that time with family was a finite, precious commodity. My fear of not being able to recreate my mom and grandma’s dishes became linked with my identity: Who am I without the food that kept me alive? Without the people who nourished me?
I started writing recipes like I was running out of time: handwritten notes transitioned into a typed document; photos and videos made their way onto TikTok and Instagram. Sharing recipes was an outlet for my anxiety around losing my food, losing my parents, losing my connection to my culture. Hundreds of comments and DMs started trickling in from people all over the world with similar stories, some expressing remorse over not pursuing this with their loved ones while they could, others feeling inspired to start documenting their family recipes. Feeling less alone, I created a cookbook proposal anchored on this very concept: cooking in the diaspora to keep history, culture and people alive and with us.
The process of writing a cookbook with an immigrant parent is daunting: imagine trying to get your mom who pours spices with her “hands and heart” to use a measuring cup. Or quantifying how to know when rice is perfectly cooked more specifically than “put your ears to the pot and listen for crispiness”.
In spite of the challenges, recipe writing became a way to keep our history alive. Recipes tell us where we came from and what we’ve endured. Some are a perfect encapsulation of what life was like at a certain time, such as the chips and dip snack that became a full meal when money was scarce, or the store-bought wonton wrappers that made the crispiest sambusas when sambusa wrappers weren’t easily available in America. There are so many ways to find our roots, but few as visceral as the first spoonful of a dish that tastes like home.
The process of gathering recipes, and the stories and personalities behind them, was grounding and revelatory. I uncovered a treasure trove of notes in the margins of the one cookbook Mom brought with her from Iran 40 years ago. One, written by hand in Farsi, outlined how to make the cookies that had been passed down through generations of women in our family. She hadn’t made them since leaving Iran – hesitant to recreate a treat that held so much meaning without her family around her.
While testing it for our book, Mom told stories about watching the women in her life grate and sift hard cones of sugar to make the powdered sugar, and how they used old newspaper to line copper baking sheets. Like our ancestors, we used a glass teacup to cut the dough into crescent moons – with every push I felt the love of those women in the kitchen with us.
An hour later, our hands and mouths were covered in powdered sugar and cardamom, our bellies full. I searched the dish – noon masti – online to ensure I had the right name. I found nothing; it turned out that it was a family specialty. That’s how I knew I’d found something truly exceptional, and that I needed to document it. The result was my book, Maman And Me.
If I can impart any advice to those who feel similarly tethered to their native cuisine, or anyone who cures homesickness with a good meal: start asking questions, gathering stories, writing down recipes and attempting to recreate them. You’ll find your way regardless of whose kitchen you’re in, and on the path you’ll find new roots that will guide you home.
Discover Roya’s family recipe for the traditional Iranian dish, noon masti, here:
Roya Shariat is a Brooklyn-based writer and social impact leader, and the author of Maman And Me and creator of the Instagram account @mamanandme
