The Real New Year

Ladies and gentlemen of much of the world: You are party to a sham. While you have been celebrating the arrival of a new year on some arbitrary, cold winter day (ok, unbearably hot summer day in the southern hemisphere) those crazy mofos in Iran have been doing it right, celebrating the new year when it actually feels like, well, a new year. That would be the first day of spring, or as we like to call it in the Axis of Evil, norooz. (Or nowruz, or nohruz, or whatever... نوروز)


Yes, that's right, the people your media has led you to believe are a bunch of self-flagellating religious zealots in search of nuclear weapons actually celebrate the world's oldest pagan ritual in a very colorful manner, and it's a very big deal. Ok, some of us do wear a lot of black and get into the whips and chains, but not in the way you see it on CNN. But come this time of year, it's all about Norooz. The Vernal Equinox. The Rite of Spring. March 20, 2009 at 17:32 GMT. Whatever you want to call it, there's only one way to properly celebrate it: Copious amounts of food. (It's the Iranian way.)

Haft-sin: The traditional Norooz spread made of seven (haft)
items that begin with the Farsi letter S (sin).
No, you don't eat these.

Luckily, my wife likes being stuffed with a whole lotta Persian. So much so that immediately after we got together, she started learning how to make the stuff. Don't tell my dad, but some of Alannah's dishes are even better than grandma's... But Iranian cookery is complex. So we'll start with the simple stuff, as we did for this Norooz: Maast-mousir. Essentially, it's yogurt with minced elephant garlic and a dash of salt to taste. Maast is yogurt, and mousir is the elephant garlic, often badly mistranslated as shallot.

Elephant garlic is tough to come by, although some Trader Joe's stores carry it in cute little wooden baskets in the US, and in Europe it can be found in Middle Eastern stores under names like "Oriental garlic" or in French "ail de cheval." As is often the case with Iranian food, using anything else simply does not work. This is a very stubborn, persnickety culture.

Maast-mousir

Heart on.

The dish is typically served as an appetizer or snack. It looks absolutely non-descript, but the elephant garlic packs a pretty powerful punch. And, of course, the tang of a real yogurt (not that runny, sweet Dannon crap) carries its own dimension. But you don't simply spoon it up. If you order it at an Iranian restaurant (half of whom use regular garlic, rendering it too hot and utterly inauthentic) it will be served with lavash flatbread. But in just about every real Iranian household – and Iranian-Japanese-American households in France – it's best eaten with that über-Persian form of carbs: Potato chips. That's right. Take an ancient dish made with an elusive wild leek bulb... and scoop it up with plain potato chips. If you want to feel more exotic, call them by their French name: Chips à l'ancienne. Classy, no?

Next stop, salade Shirazi. Which means "salad from Shiraz." We're only moving up slightly in complexity here, finely dicing sweet onion, tomatoes, and Persian cucumbers. Despite the opposite being the case in figurative, innuendo-loaded terms, Persian cucumbers are much smaller than the usual English cucumbers, thicker skinned, and bitter on the ends. So when prepping them, you should chop the ends off and peel the skin in stripes – you want to leave some green for both appearance and taste. The dressing is simple: Lemon juice, olive oil, and salt. I like to add some dill and black pepper.

Salade Shirazi. Do not add Feta cheese. That's Greek, not Persian.
And no, 300 was not an accurate portrayal of either culture.

It's best to only lightly dress the Shirazi. The vegetables' own juices will leech out after a short while, both adding a sauciness to the overall dish, and toning down the acidity of the dressing. This is a huge problem at restaurants, where the salad has been sitting in a mixing bowl all day: By the time it's served, it gets very soggy. So if you plan to serve this, don't add the dressing until maybe 15 minutes before dinner time.

So far, neither of what we've made is mandatory Norooz fare. The main course, on the other hand, is. Sabzi-polo va mahi quite simply means "herbed rice with fish." Typically the fish is a white fish of some sort, but we went with salmon... Mostly because that's how my parents sometimes did it, because growing up it was hard to get any sort of brackish water white fish that was up to their standards. (Again, Iranians are very persnickety about ingredients. And apparently so are Japanese wives of Iranians. And now by osmosis, American wives of Japanese-Iranians.) It actually does not matter. The important part is to get good, fresh fish, dredge it in flour, and fry it in a skillet without drying it out. To give it the proper golden color, drizzle it with a mixture of lemon juice and saffron.

Sabzi polo - mahi

As for the rice, I could write an entire volume on properly preparing Iranian rice – which is pretty much Indian basmati rice about 99% of the time, but basmati taken to an extreme of perfectionism. It is the most persnickety of persnickety food components, and the technique takes half a lifetime to perfect. To be frank, I still suck at it at times, and Alannah is still learning. It's a long, drawn out process that requires parboiling the rice until just a shade crunchier than al dente, rinsing and cooling it, then very slowly steaming it until it's relatively dry and fluffy. The trouble with sabzi polo is that you're introducing a melange of herbs in the steaming process - chopped flat-leaf parsley, coriander (cilantro), chives and fenugreek, as well as thinly sliced garlic. These bear both water and weight, making it more likely that your rice will come out less than fluffy – and possibly soggy! The necessary adjustments come naturally after making the dish many times, knowing your rice (stick with one particular brand for consistency!), knowing your pot, and knowing your stove. Seriously.

Then there's the matter of making part of your sabzi polo yellow with saffron. This is done by stirring the desired amount of rice in a mixture of saffron and hot water (this is after the parboiling and draining) and lining the bottom of your pot with it for the steaming round.

Speaking of the bottom of the pot, one can not forget the tahdig. Which means – wait for it – "bottom of the pot!" This crunchy layer of (saffron-infused) rice is the golden ticket in the crazy Wonka land that is Persian cuisine. You spend years perfecting the perfect white, fluffy rice... only to crave the hard, crackly crust at the bottom of the pot.

A perfectly round bottom.

Tadig is served as a side dish, or sometimes – if the stars align and it comes out perfectly – the entire pot of rice is flipped on to a serving dish with the tadig on top, kind of like some sort of basmati upside down cake. Tadig can also be made with lavash flatbread or sliced potatoes (kind of like chips) lining the bottom of the pot. Either way, successfully making a good one is analogous to an American cook roasting a Thanksgiving turkey without drying it out: It'll be what every dinner guest will talk about. "Did you see that tadig? Perfection!"

Of course, in Iran, one is never done playing with saffron and rice. (Personally, I would play with Saffron every chance I got!) A festive holiday dessert is sholeh-zard, which literally means "runny yellow." It's a pudding consisting of basmati rice, sliced almonds, sugar, rose syrup and about US$500 worth of saffron per serving. Perhaps I'm exaggerating a bit, but as pointed out in our Drunken Paella episode, real saffron is not cheap. It is, by weight, more expensive than gold, cocaine and possibly printer ink. Half a teaspoon usually goes a very long way, but if you have Iranian guests and really want to impress them, your sholeh-zard needs to be more golden than a shower with Kim Kardashian.

Sholeh zard. Not as runny as the name implies.

Sholeh zard is typically served chilled (but not cold, as the saffron scent would be too muted) with a dusting of cinnamon and chopped pistachio on top. Fancy people like to write things in Farsi with their cinnamon, but I find that a bit lame. (Sorry, Mom!)

Of course, an Iranian host(ess) would have no credibility if their hospitality didn't reach a certain level of overkill. So it's always best to have a second dessert ready. For this occasion, we made halva. Like most Persian cooking, it's relatively simple in concept, but maddening in detail.

In a dry skillet, you toast flour... Once browned, you add an almost equal amount (in weight) of butter. We went off-script and used a demi-sel butter as opposed to sweet, which means that if my grandparents were alive today, we'd be disowned and written out of the will. The brown roux you've created needs to slowly cook over very low heat. Once cooked, you add a hot syrup of water, sugar, rose syrup, saffron and green cardamom and whip it until there are no possible lumps. The mixture is then poured into a dish to cool, with chopped pistachio sprinkled on top.

Halvascape.

Of course, the halva is not eaten alongside the sholeh zard. It's the second dessert, meaning it would go best with your tea! Iranian tea is quite parallel to Iranian rice: There's an over-complicated preparation process, people are really persnickety about how it's made, and the principle ingredient comes from India – in this case, Darjeeling and Assam tea leaves. We added some green cardamom to tie it a bit to the halva, and also because my grandma would've approved.

Halva and Chai

Incidentally, the Farsi name for tea is "chai" just like in India. In China and Japan, it's cha. That whole Silk Road connection is pretty amazing, eh?

With few exceptions, Iranian food is very colorful and aromatic, whether you're celebrating the arrival of a new year or not. None of what we made is specifically for Norooz: While the sabzi polo – mahi is mandatory, it's also eaten year-round. So really, every day is a colorful celebration. Each dish has colors that are a tribute to various forms of what the French call terroir. It's a cuisine full of life, vibrance, and color; fiercely proud of where it comes from, resistant to meddling, and more ubiquitous than you'd likely think – just like the people.

Persian culture is not about head-to-toe veils, headscarves, big beards or turbans. More than anything it's about pride. Generosity. And eating really, really well.

Saal-e no mobarak!

The Feast of Saint Patrick

This post was supposed to go up on St. Patrick's Day, but we were too destroyed to finish it. No, not by copious amounts of Guinness, but by food coma.

St. Patrick's Day. The day when everybody is Irish. Dress in green day. Annoyingly pinch those who aren't wearing green day. Drink some green beer day. Or as we professional drinkers like to call it: Amateur night.

While my curmudgeonly side likes to deride the, well, amateurs who come out to drink tonight, I do like St. Paddy's. Alannah (as if you couldn't tell by the name) is partially of Irish stock. And the other side is Scottish, who according to my good Irish friend are merely Irish who couldn't swim. Add to that our ability to out-drink people twice our size, and you can see why despite all the douchebaggery, we'd like this holiday.

So imagine my delight coming home from work this commercialized-by-beer-distributors holiday to find Alannah taking on an entire hurling team's worth of Irish. Foods. She was even kind enough to take pictures of what she was doing, knowing I like to show off her stuff on the web.

I came up to the kitchen and saw her furiously whipping something up on the stove. It smelled cheesy. It smelled boozy. It was... Welsh?

Surprise number one: Welsh rarebit. Following the recipe perfected by Fergus Henderson. You know, that famous chef in London. Ok, so maybe none of this was Irish, but it's the same archipelago, right? Besides, ever since eating at St. John on our latest trip to London, I'd been jonesing for the very version of beer-and-Worcestershire-spiked cheese-on-toast perfected by Henderson. Paired with a glass of port, I was having myself a very happy evening.

She then led me up to the kitchen to help her with the next dish: Colcannon. Alannah first made this for me last St. Patrick's Day, when I learned a) that it's delicious and b) that I'd had it before as part of an airline meal under its English name, "Bubble & Squeak."

"Colcannon" sounds much more manly, like an Irish porn star with a thick mustache. The English name sounds like there's a mouse squished in it. Nomenclature aside, it's a hash of potatoes and cabbage, fried like a patty. Simple, but delicious. Of course, Alannah can't leave well enough alone, so she used red cabbage and savoy cabbage. She had me fry up bits of smoky bacon to add to the melange before it was fried, just to make sure it was customized enough to qualify for an episode of Pimp My Ride.

Speaking of customization, she put me to work on the next treat: Soda bread. Irish soda bread is a quickbread. In lieu of making a yeasty dough and proving it over the course of hours, you use baking soda as the leavening agent and bake it straight away. It's like an English scone or American biscuit, only it's often made in a huge round as opposed to little individual morsels. Again, Alannah couldn't leave it alone. Borrowing from my Iranian side, she asked me to put in a fistful of barberries, aka zereshk. Along with a fistful of caraway seeds and a fat pinch of sugar, this customization makes for the most flavorful soda bread, lovingly bastardized with Persian flair. I fear our kids will look like this soda bread.

While I was on boulanger duty, Alannah was doing a bit of kneading of her own, working on her magical pie crust. For she had spent much of the day preparing the filling for what would become a Guinness-brisket-trotter pie.

For the uninitiated, a trotter is a pig's foot. It's smelly. Kinda hairy. And doesn't particularly have much meat. In fact, in the wrong hands, it's downright disgusting. (Have you seen the film Precious? There's some pig foot up in that joint.) But, again, Alannah was plying me with food perfected by Fergus Henderson. And thus, she'd spent the afternoon on "trotter gear." She scrubbed clean the pig's foot, chopped up the aromatics, then drowned it all in port. Delicious tawny port.

How 'bout a pictorial spread?

Tawny port. As Alannah told me she did it: Some for the pig.
Some for the cook. Repeat.

The trotter and its aromatics. Alannah says,
"Trust me, you need all the aromatics you can get."

Starting the stew side of things.

The trotter concoction had to simmer for hours, letting loose all the collagen from the skin and connective tissue, and infusing it all with a rich, fatty, gelatinous property. In the end, there's not really any meat to use, but liquid richness.

In the meantime, she had also started a cast iron pot of a standard beef stew, using a nice fatty brisket. Brisket isn't easy to come by in France. We learned this when trying to make corned beef last year. Alannah had to overcome her language barrier to explain to the butcher that we wanted cow belly. Not pork belly. Not veal belly. Full grown moooooo. At least, that's how I imagine she explained it. This year, it was much easier, because the butcher had apparently remembered last year's exchange.

Anyway, she went with brisket because she knew I love corned beef brisket, but simply didn't have three days to brine it and somehow manage to surprise me. And because it tastes good. No other meat has the texture of beef brisket. Stringy, striated, chewy, and unique to the cut.

When making a stew, it's good to brown the meat and vegetables before adding any liquid. In northern France, as with in the Isles, it's assumed that you'll do the browning with butter. Lots of it.

To quote Hugh Jackman in that horrible romantic comedy
with Meg Ryan, "Rich. Creamery. BUTTER."

We buy our butter and eggs in bulk from a dairy family at the local marché. First off because we go through a lot of it. When you bake as much as Alannah does, you need to buy in near industrial quantities. When you eat like I do, you want to be as far from industrial as possible, as much to stave off the early death from this sort of consumption, as well as because artisanal ingredients taste better. That and even the fanciest of packaged butters – even the one that every food blogger in France pimps and goes on about like a bleating goat – contains stabilizers and flavor-enhancing compounds you're not supposed to know about. So we buy huge hunks of butter by the kilo.

But I digress. The butter is important because it's also what makes the magical pie crust so damn magical. You know that scene in American Pie? You know which one. Yeah, well, Alannah's pie crust will make you want to recreate it.

So, back to the filling, eventually you do need to add liquid. In this case, the liquid is Guinness. Again, some for the stew, some for the cook. Note that his beer is, obviously, black. (Ok, it's a very deep brown, but even in Ireland, it goes by "the black stuff.") Green beer should never be consumed. Hell, beer in a green bottle is even a no-no by beer snob standards.

Anyway, the stew must also simmer for several hours to break down nicely. The trotter gear must then be drained so that the gelatinous substance that's left can be added to the stew to create the world's richest, booziest pie filling.

To be honest, it doesn't look very good. But it's a pie filling, for fuck's sake. It's going to be hidden by a crust of golden, buttery, flaky, delicious dough.

Guinness-brisket-trotter pie.
The richness will nearly kill you.

Once covered with a crust, a brief 20 minutes in the oven is all you need. It seems short after hours and hours of stewing, and the smell emanating from the kitchen is intoxicating and satisfying in and of itself. If you're feeling impatient, you can wait it out by having a Guinness.

Of course, such a dish must be enjoyed with yet another pint of the black stuff. (Or a Smithwick's if you can find it. No such luck this year in Paris.) The point isn't to get hammered, but to enjoy the richness and depth of meats cooked low-and-slow with the earthy, mild bitterness of a good beer. A good brew adds more dimension to a meal like this, and it's a reason the beer is in the stew to begin with.

But wait! There's more!

A proper holiday meal just isn't complete until dessert is served. Though I couldn't eat another bite, I always have room for Alannah's chocolate-stout cupcakes. Which are made with, you guessed it, Guinness.

Here's the thing: I hate cupcakes. I'm not sure it's because the whole cupcake trend was kicked off by the equally deplorable Sex & the City, or because something about the confection doesn't jibe with me. Maybe because they were (and in 4-years-behind-California-in-most-food-trends Paris, still are) trendy above all else, and utterly destroyed by all the people cashing in on the trend and producing fancified little chocolate or red velvet turds covered in buttercream. Read the only trashing review of the beloved Kara's Cupcakes in San Francisco, by yours truly. Then spread the gospel.

But Alannah's little cuppies are tha bomb. They're the first to sell out at every Paris charity sale she brings them to, and they're the first and only ones I've ever actually begged for. In fact, she refused to ever bake them for me until she knew I was the right guy.

They're that good. And even better with a little tawny port.

Happy amateur night to all.