#abgoosht

A FEAST at my favorite place in College Station:

Baba ghanoush with bread (appetizer)

Falafel over rice with bread

Abgoosht (broth on the side) over rice with bread

If there is one thing that gets me excited about a culture, it’s food. Don’t get me wrong, I other traditions are equally fascinating and complex, but food appeals to me in a much simpler sense. Art, music, film, poetry, and dance all require refined taste and background knowledge to truly appreciate, whereas I know good food when I taste it. That is why for my first culture blog, I endeavored to cook a traditional Persian meal. All this would have required was a simple google search, but I wanted something a little more authentic.

I needed the perfect dish, something traditional and culturally significant, but not so involved that an amateur chef such as myself could not prepare it. Fortunately, I knew just who to ask: Maman Naheed.

Maman Naheed was born and raised in Iran where she currently resides; however, she recently decided to visit her family in the USA. She has been visiting since July, and having raised a family in Iran during the 20th century, knows the ins-and-outs of Persian gastronomy.  If anyone could teach me how to cook traditional Iranian cuisine, it would be her.

I should clarify. Maman Naheed is not some random Persian grandmother that I happen to know. My girlfriend is actually an Iranian citizen studying in the USA and Maman Naheed is her grandmother.

With that clear, it should be less of a surprise that I decided to give Maman Naheed a call. I originally asked Maman Naheed to give me a recipe for a dessert or something simple (I am a very inexperienced cook), but she was quick to tell me “Nah”.

“As a growing boy”—Maman Naheed insisted—I needed to be eating a hardy meal with protein. She informed me that rather than making a simple dessert, I would be making traditional Persian “Âbgušt” (آبگوشت‎, literally “meat water” or “broth”). She opened up her cookbook and sent along the recipe.

The recipe was entirely in Farsi, and, at my reading level, indecipherable. I had my girlfriend’s mom help me decipher the recipe and she happily chimed in with additional recommendations as well as an English recipe to make my Âbgušt even tastier. She also informed me that the dish was traditionally slow-cooked to allow the families preparing the meal to tend to livestock, errands, or any other distractions.

With the recipe in hand, I departed for Makkah market (the only market nearby me where I knew I could buy dried lemons, leg of lamb, and quality bread). Returning home with the ingredients, I was ready to get cooking.

I have included the exact recipe at the end of this blog, however, to give a brief summary of the cooking process: I added the lamb, onion, and cinnamon stick into a pot before bringing it slowly to a boil and then gradually down in temperature; when the lamb was about halfway cooked, I added the potatoes, white beans, chickpeas, tomatoes, tomato paste, turmeric, black pepper ground, and dried lemons(لیمو امانی) ; I let the whole mixture cook before mashing the solids into the “Gusht Kubideh” (گوشت کوبیده‎, “Mashed meat”).

Once the Âbgušt was finished cooking, I plated it with some parsley and served it for some friends with bread to help scoop up the dish. We were all pleasantly surprised by with complex sour and savory flavors of the dish as well as the tenderness of the lamb. After finishing the meal, we shared some soft figs and Sadaf special blend tea for dessert.

The whole experience was quite enjoyable, and I am excited to explore what else Iranian Cuisine has to offer. Maybe I will make Kabob next!

-ZS

Recipe: