Food as Shibboleth

In her memoir, The Temporary Bride, Jennifer Klinec finds herself applying for a second visa extension in Esfahan, Iran. The functionaries don’t seem to know what to do with her brazen insistence, so they send her upstairs to their superiors. Not surprisingly, all the Iranian officials are quite suspicious of this Canadian-born woman who wants to stay longer in Iran, and they certainly do not believe her interests lie in the kitchen and learning about Iranian cuisine. The man who seems to be in charge of this particular visa office asks her what she has learned to cook. She quickly searches her mind for something beyond the well-known Persian dishes. She elaborates upon halim e gandom, a purée of boiled wheat with onion and lamb, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. Most importantly, she points out that this should be eaten with a bread called sangak rather than the better-known barbari. And with that she gets her visa extension.

She chose well, a dish that would serve as a shibboleth*, that would prove she really had been spending time in private homes, learning about Iranian cuisine. There are many aspects of cuisine and food culture that can mark someone as an insider or an outsider. Think of the criticism leveled by New Yorkers at people who eat a slice of pizza with a knife and fork! Among the many wonderful parts of Klinec’s memoir, the most meaningful for me was how she brings her reader right into an average Iranian family kitchen.

It’s a difficult balance, though. We gain a view into a culture, a society, that relegates women to a very narrowly defined paradigm, and reading about that bristles, as does the rigidity of the society, and the strictures places on citizens by the government for men and women alike, so antithetical to freedoms we take for granted. And yet even in such an environment, people live and love and eat, and through this, Klinec makes sure we see their humanity.

There are no recipes in this book, although we feel present in the kitchen with her. I feel fortunate that I own Bottom of the Pot by Naz Deravian, who left Iran with her family in 1979 when she was 8 years old. One of the most striking recipes in this book is Tahcheen-e Morgh, Baked Saffron Yogurt Rice with Chicken, a showstopper of a dish that will earn you accolades! I ordered the requisite barberries, and it did take some time and effort, but it was definitely worth it! (And, as luck would have it, this recipe is available online if you want to look at it!)

In The Temporary Bride, as Klinec reflects upon the average home life she has shared in Yazd, Iran, she writes, “I’d come to relish living in a house full of artifacts and possessions, melding into a life that wasn’t just about me.” Although it sounds as if she regrets that when she resumes her life back in London she will not be surrounded with such artifacts, she is wrong about that. She will carry in her heart, in her mind, and in her hands the recipes she learned there. The foods people eat, the recipes people create are artifacts: intangible artifacts, perhaps, consumable artifacts, indeed, but artifacts nonetheless, that change through time and space, and that are worthy to be preserved and remembered.

*A shibboleth is a word or other language feature, such as pronunciation, that serves to distinguish outsiders from insiders. The word comes from an episode in Judges 12:4-6 in which one group tries to identify spies based on the pronunciation of the word for stream.

NB: This post was inspired by the website Cook the Books, which designated The Temporary Bride as the October/November selection.