Tastes Like Home, Bibi Kasrai's Culinary Journey

In 2009, Bibi Kasrai, the daughter of one of Iran's most beloved poets, gave up her high-flying career as a corporate executive to pursue her real passion: cooking. Not gastronomy or haute cuisine, but real food, as in the tradition of communal cooking and eating through which people tell their best stories and discover their shared humanity. She set up a cooking school in La Jolla, Southern California, whimsically called the Harvard Cookin’ Girl, where classes chart the Silk Road and are set to the backdrop of stories of Marco Polo and caravanserai. This intermingling of story telling and cookery has proved enormously successful, and the same approach informs Kasrai's book, The Spice Whisperer, a worldly memoir of cooking across time and culture. She talks to Iranwire about the connection between food and memory, why Iranian culture doesn't elevate cooking to an art, and what her father, the great poet Siavash Kasrai, might have said sitting at her kitchen table.

 

Do you remember being interested in cooking as a child? 
I saw a friend from 40 years ago last night, and he reminded me that when we were children, during a family trip to Abadan, I had made bowls out of mud and was pretending to cook. I don't remember this, but cooking is something that's always been with me. When you leave Iran, especially the way that we left our homeland, you find yourself searching looking for your roots. Some people read Iranian books or poetry, some find themselves drawn to dance. I think food, or the tradition of Iranian cooking, was what connected me to my family, to my grandmother, my aunts. Maybe that's what I was searching for, because I think through food I was able to return to those memories. 

When did you leave Iran?
Five years after the revolution, when they came to arrest my father, we had to leave Iran. I went to the French school in Tehran and always thought I would go to France or would study at Tehran University, but then after what happened we left Iran. Moscow was not planned. But because we left through Afghanistan and didn't have passports – there was no other way out – they gave us scholarships to Moscow as Afghan students. In the dormitory where I lived, there was a communal kitchen where I encountered cooking from all over the world, Asia, Africa, Latin America, it was amazing to see spices and ingredients I'd never seen before. I was never encouraged to cook as a young person. But when I went to Moscow and was far away from everyone, where there was no one to cook for me, I wanted to connect myself through food.

You have a Harvard MBA and worked at places like the World Bank. How did your family react when you said you were giving that up to cook? 
It was a shock for everyone. Especially because it was 2009, perhaps the worst year for the economy probably all over the world. There were people who lost their house in our own neighborhood, and everyone said, “why did you trade such a good job for this?” I don't know, maybe it was a bit nuts. People at first often said so what if it doesn't take off, what will you do? I said I'll come and clean your house.

There's such pressure in our culture to pursue 'serious' professions, do you see yourself as a role model to other young Iranians who don't want to be doctors or engineers?
I've always had mentors, and as I grew older, I tried to become a mentor myself. But I never thought I could be a role model in this line of work, in cooking. But after I did an interview on Iranian radio, I was overwhelmed by the number of people who contacted me through Facebook and email – all of them lawyers, accountants or doctors– who all said we're around your age, but we really want to do something else. One said I've always wanted to be a motorcycle mechanic, but I'm a lawyer. Another said he was a doctor but that he'd really always wished to be a cook. I grew up in a family where I was always told I could do whatever I wanted. But I always pressured myself to pursue a serious job - work that makes you breadwinner. I work extremely hard, I've worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day, the last four years. But at least if I'm tired it's through doing work I love, so I don't have to moan and curse about my boss, or my circumstances. 

Iranian culture doesn't hold cooking in particularly high regard, it is not considered an art or even remotely as worthy as music or poetry. We don't even have a slightly more elevated word for 'cook' in Persian. Why doesn't cooking merit more respect?
For one, cooking has always been relegated, in terms of space, to the back of a house. To the andaaruni (the private, inner sanctum of a traditional Iranian house), where women are hidden away in the back. I made a point of bringing cooking into the open, into the foreground. People often ask why I don't open up a restaurant, and I tell them that a restaurant would push me to the back again, into the rear. Bringing cooking into the open makes its purity and honesty more visible. 

I'm often told that because I have two degrees, one from Harvard and another Master’s from Moscow State, and came to cooking with this background, it has made my turn to cooking somehow more valuable. But I see that as showing that I did other things first, then turned to pursue something that I loved. When I meet with young people, I always underscore the importance of study and learning, the importance of that to being independent. But I want to dispel the taboo around cooking, especially Iranian cooking; when people ask me what I do, I don't even say that I'm a chef, I say I'm a cook. 

In the West, cooking is communal in a different way than in Eastern cultures, isn't it? There's a modern tradition of everyone standing around the kitchen with a glass of wine during the process of cooking.
It's very communal in the East as well, remember we have the sofreh, [the traditional spread on which Iranians eat] which is so important to how you conceive of eating.  You lay the sofreh and you gather it around it, and then put it away, which is so important to health and diet. There's no kitchen counter, so that you end up like my kids, constantly opening up the fridge or looking on the counter to see what there is to eat. It's a social experience that you lay out, with its own time and moment. It's when we tell our best stories, and have our best encounters. Our concept of eating is communal, but it goes back to women being in the back, as the cooks, so that's cultural. An open kitchen helps [in making preparation communal as well], we're moving forward in this way too.  I hear a lot of Iranian men say – or maybe it's easier for them to say this to me! – they are cooking, that they cook from my book and find it easy to follow. 

Do you teach Iranian cooking at your school?
Quite a lot. In the four years that I've taught, I've only had a total of three Iranian students. The rest have all been Americans or foreigners who come to me and ask, can you teach us how to make that crust at the bottom of the rice? I really helped put tahdeeg on the map. Lots of places now write about Iranian tahdeeg, I teach a course called the Silk Road, where I talk about Marco Polo and Caranvsarai. The food cultures of Iran, India, Morocco and many other countries.

In southern California, where you teach, Iranians have been very successful in sharing a different side of their culture with America. There are famous kabob restaurants, Iranian ice cream parlours, a whole craze around pomegranate juice started by Iranian immigrants. Has this helped project a more humane and evolved side of Iranian that can challenge the stereotypes? 
Yes, through food, music, poetry, these are the easiest ways, through the senses, listening, seeing, taste. We even see this in politics, when presidents come together to hold a serious talk, they sit at the table for a state dinner. In certain evolved cultures, people actually recall the names of their famous chefs more easily than they can some presidents. Whoever comes to eat my cooking school, who tries something Iranian, they're really awed and say how do you match these spices? I say well we've been cooking for about 4,000 years, it goes back to our culture, and this creates a curiosity in their minds about how it all connects together. It's a much easier route than my trying to recount stories of Cyrus the Great and the Achaemenid kings. They eat it, they like it, and conclude the people who cook something like this can't be so bad. 

Iranians unfortunately have reduced our food down to lowest common denominator. Like chelo kabob, I don't even cook it or teach it. Because that's street food. Our food is khoresht (a slow cooking braise or stew) with the time it takes to develop its flavour, its spices, the love that goes into it, what goes into it is very different than chelo kabob or ice cream. The desserts I teach are like saghe aroos, (wedding cookies or Russian tea cookies) even Iranians don't know this is the same as a Mexican wedding cookie or Russian tea biscuit. Did you know that biscuits/cookies first were developed in Iran? The first ovens didn't have thermostats, so the cooks would try a bit of dough at the front of tanoor to check temperature, they would try it and it became a biscuit.

Food studies are very fashionable now in Western academia, and Iranian cooking is described as a harem cuisine, meaning that it belongs to a time and place that permitted that kind of leisurely time and effort. How can we maintain the complexity of our cooking, foods like koofteh tabrizi, when no one has more than 30 minutes to get dinner ready? 
That's exactly what I've tried to do. I had two kids, I had a very busy executive job, and didn't want to feed them prepared foods. Who had time to even soak the rice from the night before, then steam it? I've tried to make all this very simple, you can watch all the clips on YouTube on the Harvard Cookin’ Girl station. Naz khatoon, sabzi polo mahi (fish with herbed rice) I have simplified it all for everyday life today, without compromise taste. I just use a bit less oil, sautee instead of fry. I have some new techniques. 

The cooking of Mrs. Montazemi, Mrs. Batmanghalij, Mr. Daryabandari, they all came before me and I'm not at all the type to pooh-pooh and say mine is better. Their books are great. If you want to cook something and have it come out exactly as intended, Mrs. Montazemi book is excellent as a source, but it's not for our lives today, for my life and yours. I wrote for my own generation.

Out of these Iranian cookbooks, do you have a favourite? I'm slightly obsessed with Mrs. Montazemi's cookbook myself, it was always on the table during my childhood, I have such memories of looking at those 1970s photos of a complicatedly decorated Salad Olivier and French desserts. 
To tell the truth, when I was nine or ten I might have looked at Mrs. Montzami when I cooked pastries with my grandmother. But I'm not a cookbook person, I'm not very empirical. The hardest part of my book was empiricising my cooking into recipes. I'm not a book cook, I don't cook off books. That's not always true, if I'm making some like Kouing Aman, an old Bretagne recipe from France. I would need a recipe for that. But my method is to replicate the flavors I like.

Do your children like Iranian food?
They do very much. But let mention this, American kids really love it as well. Especially something like adas polo. There's a Texas couple and they come to La Jolla once a year as a family, four of them, and spend a lot of money asking me to make them adas polo. I tell them my dears, I made it last time, I taught you, I sent you a video! They say no, make us adas polo. I'm almost embarrassed, my mother calls me a thief, but what I can I do? They love my adas polo!

I know you're not going to like this question, but do you have a favourite meal to cook?
I knew you were going to ask that! For someone shekamoo (gourmand) like me, the biggest torture is to be asked type of food I most like and which dish is my favourite, or which restaurant. I truly do love everything. I eat everything, such a wide variety, it's too hard for me to say. I enjoy simple things, Italian dishes that are truly mouth-watering, made of just three ingredients. Or something like naz khatoon, which is just eggplant, sour grape juice, garlic and salt and pepper. But it's too hard to say. 

I suppose that's like asking a writer to name their favourite novel.
Exactly, it's like me asking you 'Azadeh, what's your favourite book?' It's very hard for you to say isn't it?

Yes, a question like that is unanswerable. 
But so what is your favourite book?

It's very hard to say, one's tastes continually change. 
It does change.  I was an avid reader as a child, I read Anna Karenina when I was 12,  Crime and Punishment when I was 15, books that a 15-year-old really age shouldn't be reading. I read them all again as required reading at Moscow University. And then I re-read Anna Karenina recently, and had an entirely different perspective on it. 

That's very true, there are certain books that you shouldn't read before the age of 40.  In Persian we don't have an established genre of food writing yet. We have wonderful cookbooks that do contain some background on culture, but not a literary genre per se. How do you see that evolving?
I've tried to do that in my book, as I didn't think anyone would want to read my memoir, or my cookbook, apart from the 12 people close to me. But I thought a book that intertwined storytelling and cooking, which are so intimately related, that it might create a new genre in our culture. 

What do you think your grandfather would have said about your work in cooking?
My father you mean, Siavash Kasrai was my father. 

I'm very sorry, you look so young, I just assumed you must be his granddaughter.
Everyone says that to me. Just recently someone said, 'but Siavash Kasrai died so many years ago.' I said yes, poor man, he died slightly young. My father, in his era, got married later than most. Most of his poet friends married young, got divorced, and then remarried later. My father got married late, didn't get divorced, and died early. 

If my father was here he would have truly enjoyed what I do. I tell my customers, if my father was alive he would be sitting right here. Because he always used to say that his wish for his old age was to open up a cafe. People would ask him, why a cafe? He would say, I'll do the sweeping and make the coffee, my friends will come and sit. He loved this concept, and that's what I've ended up doing, I always think my father would have had his own chair there, where he would have sat and died laughing that I had become a cook. 

Your father is a household name among Iranians, and is one of the most beloved poets of the 20th century. Can you tell us a little about him, and what his poetry so widely loved and admired? 
Kasrai has been one of the most controversial literary figures amongst contemporary poets of the 20th century, especially amongst the poet Nima's disciples, because he was politically engaged in a more open fashion than let's say Ahmad Shamloo or Houshang Ebtehaj. Even though he was passionate and passionately loved in Iran, he was very flexible as a human being and truly loved to listen to everyone. Our house was always filled with people of all sides of the political spectrum and the discourse usually ended at the dinner table where we all had a good time listening to each other. That is perhaps why I love so much to bring people to the able!

He also was genuine and people got a sense of that even if and when they disagreed with him. I still can't go anywhere in the world where I don't meet someone who can't wait to share an anecdote or a story about meeting my father. His love for Iran was infectious. He was very young when he wrote Arash and Iranians grew up with this poem, named their kids after him and nurtured Arash in their collective memory. This poem made him eternal even though he had many greater poems after it. In my opinion, Mohreye Sorkh carries a more mature message at the end of his life but it has not yet reached the height of Arash because he left shortly after writing it. One can never be objective writing about one's father that is why I don't want to opine about his political views or poetry. Also, I am not an authority on neither. However, having lived long enough I can talk about Kasrai the human being- One of the most genuine souls I have ever met. One Russian writer once called him "salt of the earth" and I very much agree with her.