Curated playlist
Iranian cuisine
- CardamomOne German coffee planter helped make Guatemala the top cardamom grower. He brought the plant there before World War I.
- SaffronSaffron is the spice made from the crimson threads of a purple autumn crocus, and about 150 flowers are needed to produce a single gram of the dried product. That arithmetic explains why people call it red gold. It also helps explain why…
- TahiniTahini is a paste of ground sesame seeds, and sesame shows up in one of the oldest records of food culture. A cuneiform document written 4,000 years ago describes a custom of serving the gods sesame wine. The paste itself is a later story,…
- Olivier saladA sous-chef slipped into his boss's kitchen to work out Olivier salad's secret dressing.
- KebabKebab is not one dish. In the Syrian city of Aleppo alone, cooks are said to make at least twenty-six versions of it. Some are cooked with cherries, some with aubergine, some with chili, parsley and pine nuts, and one style is made with…
- PirozhkiJapan's curry bread is said to have been inspired by pirozhki. Russian refugees brought the pastry there in 1917.
- DolmaDolma first shows up in writing in a 16th-century Persian book called Mâddet ol-Hayât, and the author treats it as a curiosity from abroad. Cabbage dolmeh, the book says, is commonly prepared in the land of the Rûm, meaning Turkey, but is…
- BaklavaBaklava is a pastry of paper-thin filo dough, chopped nuts and sweet syrup or honey, and almost nobody agrees on who made it first. Today it sits on dessert tables across West Asia, Southeast Europe, Central Asia and North Africa. It has…
- PilafPilaf, also written pilav, pilau or plov, is judged by one old test: does each grain stand apart from the next? Thirteenth-century texts set the bar plainly. The grains should be plump and slightly firm, like peppercorns, with no mush and…
- CaviarCaviar is a delicacy made of salt-cured fish roe, and one rare kind once sold for £20,000 a kilogram, then about US$34,500. It was an Iranian product called Almas, a name drawn from a word meaning diamond. Its eggs came from a rare albino…