The Wall Street Journal du 8 décembre 2016
By LOUISA SHAFIA
Persian Recipes That Deliver Classic Christmas Flavors
Sumptuous and full of warming spice, these Persian recipes hit all the right notes for a festive holiday mealIN MY CHILDHOOD home, we did holidays our own way. On the same table you might encounter a pan of potato latkes sizzling in fat, a bowl of fluffy Persian rice and a tin of butter cookies topped with winking crystals of red and green sugar. Between my Ashkenazi Jewish mother, Iranian Muslim father and German Catholic babysitter (who was more like a grandmother), we drew on a lively mix of cooking traditions.
Now, with a family of my own, I’m mixing up a new blend of holiday rituals. On Christmas morning, we’ll toast and butter panettone, the sweet, yeasty bread dotted with candied fruit that is my Italian-American husband’s seasonal favorite. And for dinner I’ll cook a Persian feast. To start, there will be sambuseh, flaky pastry filled with lentils, potatoes and rose petals, and scattered with nigella seeds. For the main course we’ll have khoresh-e kadu, a rich, cinnamon-scented stew of seared lamb and tender chunks of pumpkin in a lemony tomato sauce. Where there is Persian stew there must be Persian rice, and we’ll have shirin polo—“sweet” rice—a celebratory dish resplendent with almonds, pistachios, carrots, orange zest, cardamom and saffron.
While these Middle Eastern dishes might seem like a surprising choice for Christmas, they taste comfortingly familiar at this time of year. After all, many of the spices, fruits and nuts that give warmth and color to festive foods came into Europe from the Middle East.
Think of the quintessential British holiday meal: a roast goose with plum pudding, the dinner eaten by Bob Cratchit and his family in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” The goose, stuffed with apples and prunes and served with currant jelly, owes a clear debt to an age-old hallmark of Persian cuisine: slow-cooking fatty meat with fruit. The plum pudding—filled with raisins, dates, candied orange and nuts; spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves—is a cornucopia of Silk Road ingredients. In medieval Europe, Christmas was an occasion to splurge on such luxuries from faraway lands, and many now-classic holiday dishes came into rotation during that period. Hopping south to Italy, even the panettone, with its constellation of dried fruits, has origins in the east, where Arabs developed the technique of candying citrus.
One could keep digging through layers of history, but what’s clear is that the world is small, and the mingling of culinary traditions certainly did not begin with my family.
Still, I did have the benefit of growing up with a father who coddled and cooed over his buttery, saffron-scented Persian rice in preparation for any celebratory meal, and I took away a few tips. For this shirin polo, the ideal texture is fluffy and light. I soak the rice in cold water and rinse off the extra starch before cooking, and I place a towel under the lid of the rice pot to catch condensation—keys to achieving a delicate, tender texture. When working with saffron, I make the most of the flavor and color by grinding it with a little salt or sugar until it forms a powder; you can use your fingertips or the end of a wooden spoon against the inside of a glass. Then add a tablespoon of warm water, swirl gently and let it steep in a warm place until it’s time to add it to the rice.
The khoresh-e kadu is thick, meant to be eaten with a fork over a dish of the rice. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that a stew made the day of the meal won’t have nearly the same depth as one given more time for its flavors to develop. I’ll make mine the day before and let it rest in the refrigerator overnight, then slowly warm it up over the course of a few hours before serving. The cinnamon and pumpkin will fill up the house with their aromas, and then I’ll know Christmas has really arrived.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/persian-recipes-that-deliver-classic-christmas-flavors-1481214807