NEW YORK (NY Times) -- As 2023 gave way to 2024, the weather snapped, and I was suddenly drawn to very particular kinds of food: comforting, restoring, reassuring. As I leafed through the wonderful book “Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies,” it was her khoreshes — delicate, refined braises — that were clearly calling, inspiring my “Persian” tofu.
Making and eating a veganized version of her two khoreshes, barberry and orange, I felt calm and balanced. Not just in a general way, the way all home-cooked food can sustain and reassure, but in a really specific way. Was there something in this dish, I wondered — the tangy barberries and creamy nuts; the sweet onion, orange and carrots — that was bringing about such an instant feeling of equanimity?
For anyone who knows about Persian food, about sardi and garmi (sardi referring to “cold” foods and garmi to “hot”), or about sweet and sour, the answer will be a resounding yes. For me, though, and for everyone else who doesn’t mind a timely reminder, ahead of the Iranian New Year celebration, Nowruz, on March 20 in Britain (March 19 in the United States), it felt good to take a moment.
Sweet and sour is clear enough as a culinary principle. A sweet ingredient (fruit in many of its forms, or simply an onion slowly sweated down) works alongside a sour one (dried or fresh lime, some tangy yogurt or those barberries) to bring contrast and, ultimately, balance to a dish. Lime juice and vinegar combine with grape molasses and sweet cinnamon in stuffed grape leaves, for example, or they offset dates, apricots and apples in a sweet-and-sour chicken.
The union of sweet and sour is not unique to Persian cuisine, of course. But sardi and garmi are much broader concepts. With sardi and garmi, it’s not about their temperature, per se, so much as about the influence these foods have on the body. Walnuts, garlic and dill are all “hot,” for instance; pomegranate molasses, yogurt and fish are all “cold.” Hot food, the book writes, “thickens” the blood and speeds the metabolism, while cold “dilutes” the blood and slows the metabolism. If someone is feeling out of sorts, then eating more of a “hot” or “cold” food is the Persian way.
The thing I find so soothing and complete about Persian food, though, is how much this balance is often built into the very fabric of a particular dish. Forget eating more or less of just one thing, as we’re often told to do — more nuts! less red meat! — just make fesenjoon, the classic Iranian chicken with walnuts and pomegranates. The “hot” walnuts combine with the “cold” pomegranate molasses to make a nuanced nutty paste and a general sense of wellness and balance.
Persian food is also uniquely packed full of ingredients that combine these contrasts. Think of barberries again: at once sweet but with a tartness that pulls them back.
Oranges are a subset in themselves, not only bringing a sweetness through their juice and zest to all sorts of savory soups and stews and sweet syrups and sherbets but also, in themselves, ranging from sweet to bitter, depending on the orange. While the juice of a navel will bring a pure sweetness to what’s being cooked, you can switch it for the piquant juice of Sevilles — narenj. The juice is a souring agent, which can be reduced to molasses for a more intense flavor or cooked with sugar to make sharbat-e narenj, a syrup that can be used to make a tasty soft drink. The leaves make excellent tea, said to aid digestion, and the peel, when dried, can be combined with bay leaves to make another tea that is said to be good for colds.
Going back to my orange-infused sweet-and-sour tofu, I feel that so much of its power lies in its ability to hold contrasting things. There is something about nuance, about two separate ideas under a single roof, that feels quite special. I’m wary of putting too much weight on food to do more than sustain and lift, but, by contrast, so much of what we consume today — nutrition, sports, music — is so personalized, prescribed and unambiguous.
Reflecting on the start of a new year, I am also thinking ahead to the Persian New Year and spring equinox, which fall on the same day, signaling the end of a long, dark winter. As celebrants of Nowruz jump over bonfires or candles, to mark the victory of light over darkness, is it too much of a cliché to wish some sort of new start, restoration or balance upon the world more generally, beyond our plates?