The Persian Table: History, War, and What We Eat

La granada es muy importante.

The pomegranate is very important.

En persa, la granada se llama 'anar'.

In Persian, the pomegranate is called 'anar'.

Es un símbolo de la vida.

It is a symbol of life.

I spent a week in Tehran back in 2003, doing a piece on reformist newspapers, and I still have a clear memory of walking through the Grand Bazaar and seeing these enormous piles of pomegranates, this deep red, almost jewel-like.

And the juice stalls everywhere.

I didn't understand then what I was looking at, which was essentially one of the birthplaces of world food.

El fesenján es un ejemplo.

Fesenjan is a good example.

Es un plato con granada y nueces.

It is a dish with pomegranate and walnuts.

Es muy antiguo.

It is very ancient.

Fesenjan.

This is one of those dishes where the flavor is so unlike anything in Western cooking that it genuinely stops you.

It's a stew, usually with duck or chicken, and it has this deep, sour, slightly bitter sauce from the pomegranate molasses, and the walnuts give it this almost meaty weight.

Sweet and savory and sour all at once.

En España también mezclamos lo dulce y lo salado.

In Spain we also mix sweet and savory.

El cerdo con higos, por ejemplo.

Pork with figs, for example.

And that's probably not a coincidence, given eight centuries of Moorish influence on the Iberian Peninsula.

The Moors brought a whole culinary vocabulary that had Persian roots, Persian techniques, Persian flavor combinations.

Your paella and fesenjan are more distant cousins than most people realize.

Eso es interesante.

That is interesting.

No pensé en eso antes.

I hadn't thought about that before.

High praise from a man who thinks Spanish food is the only food.

Now, let's go deeper into the war piece, because it's what makes this relevant right now.

Iran is under a blockade.

The US Navy shot up two Iranian tankers this week.

What does that actually do to food inside the country?

Irán necesita importar trigo.

Iran needs to import wheat.

También importa aceite de girasol y maíz.

It also imports sunflower oil and corn.

Which means a naval blockade isn't just a military or economic event.

It's a food event.

When ships can't move through the Strait of Hormuz, the shelves in Tehran don't fill up.

And Iran already had severe food inflation before any of this started, going back years of sanctions.

El pan en Irán es muy importante.

Bread in Iran is very important.

Las personas comen mucho pan cada día.

People eat a lot of bread every day.

Bread is always the last thing to go and the first thing you feel when it starts to disappear.

There's a Persian flatbread called lavash, thin as paper, baked against the walls of these clay ovens, and it's been a staple of that region for at least three thousand years.

When an economy collapses, lavash is one of the first things to become unaffordable.

El lavash es muy antiguo.

Lavash is very old.

La UNESCO dice que es un patrimonio cultural.

UNESCO says it is a cultural heritage.

UNESCO inscribed lavash on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2014, jointly with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, which tells you something remarkable: this one bread crosses borders that have been politically hostile for generations.

The bread doesn't care about the politics.

La comida siempre cruza las fronteras.

Food always crosses borders.

Es más fácil que la política.

It is easier than politics.

That's a line worth sitting with for a second.

I've covered enough wars to know that food diplomacy is underestimated as a tool.

The first time I shared a meal with someone I was supposed to be adversarial with, in an interview context, the whole dynamic shifted.

People drop their guard at a table in a way they don't anywhere else.

Es verdad.

That's true.

En España decimos: 'En la mesa y en el juego, se conoce al caballero.'

In Spain we say: 'At the table and in games, you get to know a person's true character.'

That proverb has a version in nearly every culture I've ever reported from, which probably means it's true.

Now, let's talk about Persian influence on the world in a way that most people have never connected.

When you eat a Moroccan tagine with dried fruit and lamb, you're eating a Persian dish that traveled west with Arab conquests in the seventh century.

Sí.

Yes.

Los árabes aprendieron mucho de los persas.

The Arabs learned a lot from the Persians.

La cocina, la poesía, la arquitectura.

Cooking, poetry, architecture.

There's a remarkable culinary history text called 'A Baghdad Cookery Book' from the thirteenth century, and it's essentially a Persian cookbook translated into Arabic.

The Abbasid caliphate, which ran the Islamic world for centuries from Baghdad, completely absorbed Persian culinary culture and then spread it from Spain to Indonesia.

The reach of that kitchen is almost impossible to overstate.

El arroz con carne y especias, el pilaf, es persa.

Rice with meat and spices, the pilaf, is Persian.

Ahora está en todo el mundo.

Now it is all over the world.

Pilaf, pilau, pilaw, plov.

The word and the dish show up from West Africa to Central Asia to the American South, where rice cookery has its own fascinating history.

Every version traces back to the Persian word 'pilaw', which just meant a way of cooking rice in seasoned broth.

One technique, thousands of interpretations, spread across a thousand years.

Eso me sorprende.

That surprises me.

No sabía que el pilaf es persa.

I didn't know that pilaf is Persian.

Octavio Solana, admitting he didn't know something.

Marking the date.

What about the herb question?

Because one thing that I think sets Persian food apart from every other tradition I've eaten is the way fresh herbs function almost as a vegetable, not a garnish.

Sí, el 'ghormeh sabzi' tiene muchas hierbas.

Yes, 'ghormeh sabzi' has many herbs.

Es un guiso verde.

It is a green stew.

Tiene perejil, cilantro y fenogreco.

It has parsley, cilantro, and fenugreek.

Ghormeh sabzi is widely considered the national dish of Iran.

And it's extraordinary because every single ingredient in it, the herbs, the dried limes, the kidney beans, the lamb, all of them are accessible and cheap, but the result is one of the most complex flavors I've ever encountered.

That's what a three-thousand-year culinary tradition does: it learns to do everything with very little.

La lima seca es muy especial.

The dried lime is very special.

Se llama 'limoo amani'.

It is called 'limoo amani'.

Le da un sabor ácido y oscuro al plato.

It gives a sour and dark flavor to the dish.

Dried limes are one of those ingredients that should not work and absolutely do.

You crack them open and drop them into the stew and they release this concentrated, slightly smoky, fermented sourness that fresh citrus cannot replicate.

And they've been used this way in Persian cooking for over two thousand years.

A technique that old doesn't survive because it's fashionable.

It survives because it's correct.

Ahora, con la guerra, ¿qué pasa con esa comida?

Now, with the war, what happens to that food?

La gente en Irán tiene menos dinero.

People in Iran have less money.

That's the question that keeps circling back for me.

Wars attack food traditions in ways that never make the headline count.

The lamb in ghormeh sabzi becomes too expensive.

The saffron gets exported to earn hard currency instead of going into family kitchens.

The herbs are grown outside the cities but the roads are difficult and fuel is short.

Every link in the chain gets stressed.

La comida es la cultura.

Food is culture.

Cuando la gente no puede comer bien, pierde una parte de su identidad.

When people cannot eat well, they lose a part of their identity.

I want to hold that thought, because it connects directly to the Islamabad talks.

If those negotiations go somewhere, if there's actually a real ceasefire that holds, one of the quietest but most meaningful things that happens is that the Persian table starts to reassemble itself.

Saffron exports resume.

Shipping lanes open.

The ghormeh sabzi gets its lamb back.

Eso es muy poético para un periodista americano, Fletcher.

That is very poetic for an American journalist, Fletcher.

Twenty-five years in the field will do that to you.

Look, before we wrap this up, there's one more thread I want to pull on, which is Persian food's relationship to celebration.

Because even in times of severe hardship, the Iranian New Year, Nowruz, keeps happening.

And the ritual foods of Nowruz are non-negotiable.

El Nowruz es muy importante.

Nowruz is very important.

La mesa tiene siete elementos.

The table has seven elements.

Se llama el 'haft-sin'.

It is called 'haft-sin.'

Seven items all starting with the Persian letter 'sin', the S sound.

Sabzeh, which is sprouted wheat or lentils for renewal.

Sib, which is an apple for health.

Somaq, sumac berries for the color of sunrise.

Serkeh, vinegar for patience.

Samanu, a wheat pudding.

Senjed, dried oleaster fruit.

And sekkeh, which is coins for prosperity.

This ritual table predates Islam in Iran.

It goes back to Zoroastrian tradition, over three thousand years.

Tres mil años.

Three thousand years.

La misma mesa.

The same table.

Es increíble.

It is incredible.

Three thousand years of the same symbolic meal, surviving Alexander the Great, the Arab conquests, the Mongol invasion, the Safavid dynasty, the Qajar dynasty, the revolution of 1979, sanctions, and now a war.

Food memory is longer than political memory.

That's what strikes me most about all of this.

Oye, antes dijiste 'innegociable'.

Hey, you just said 'non-negotiable'.

¿Sabes cómo se dice eso en español?

Do you know how to say that in Spanish?

I'm going to say...

'no negociable'?

Which feels like I'm cheating by just adding a Spanish accent to the English.

Sí, 'no negociable' está bien.

Yes, 'no negociable' is correct.

Pero en español usamos mucho el prefijo 'in'.

But in Spanish we use the prefix 'in' a lot.

Como 'imposible', 'increíble', 'innecesario'.

Like 'imposible', 'increíble', 'innecesario'.

So 'in' as a negative prefix works the same way as English 'un' or 'im'.

Impossible, incredible, innecesario.

And because those roots often come from the same Latin, the Spanish word sometimes looks almost identical to the English one, which is one of those cases where being an English speaker genuinely helps.

Sí.

Yes.

Pero cuidado.

But be careful.

No todas las palabras son iguales.

Not all words are the same.

'Sensible' en español significa 'sensitive', no 'sensible'.

'Sensible' in Spanish means 'sensitive', not 'sensible.'

False friends.

The great trap for English speakers learning Spanish.

You think you understand and then you accidentally tell someone their business plan is very pregnant.

I'll say it before you do.

'Embarazado' significa 'pregnant'.

'Embarazado' means 'pregnant'.

No significa 'embarrassed'.

It does not mean 'embarrassed'.

Fletcher lo sabe muy bien.

Fletcher knows this very well.

I do know it very well, at this point, against my will.

The Persian table, false friends, and the world's most expensive spice, all in one episode.

Not bad for a Thursday.