Every Iranian will tell you, “My mother’s kitchen is special,” and I don’t doubt that it’s true, but my mother’s kitchen is a place of magic and fairytales, a place where dreams are slowly made into reality and a place where past and future melt together. In fact it is the place where our lives took on flavor, simmered and set. In her kitchen my mother invented two new recipes, one was my sister and was me. Of course we did not always see it this way. In fact, it is only now looking back that I realize that this was very much the case.
The pink kitchen in Santa Fe - a home away from Iran
Growing up Iranian in Santa Fe, New Mexico was different from the Tehran we knew as small children and were too young to truly remember, too young to miss, and too young to be homesick for, so we settled for Santa Fe with Iran embedded somewhere within us, a constant tug on our hearts.
As children we never realized it, never understood what it meant, and never truly appreciated it, but our mother, she never let go of Iran for us. She cooked it into every meal she prepared in her pink kitchen. She brought Iran to life and she made it ours, even if it took up hours of her day. Never gave up the traditions, always boiled the slivers of orange peel three times in fresh water when making khoresht gheyhmeh Qazvini, only made her Baghali Polo with fresh fava beans and took pride in grinding her saffron with a touch of organic sugar. She would pickle garlic on the weekend and tell us it would be ready in time to be our wedding presents. She made tah-dig that transformed the darkest winter nights into spring in our hearts and for Nowrooz her sabzi-polo mahi was always fragrant beyond belief and full of hope and possibility for the New Year. Sometimes, peeling an apple or de-seeding a pomegranate she would sing Haydeh songs or break into the chants of Sima Bina.
Day after day, year after year, she never let go of the meals she cooked in that pink kitchen. No matter how many times we came home crying, with a full lunchbox, and a lump still stuck in our throats, begging her to send us with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, telling her, the other kids don’t want to sit with us, they’re disgusted by our food. Never once did she turn to yell at us, saying it took me three hours to make you that meal, nor did she surrender and send us with bagels and cream cheese as we desperately desired. Growing up in Santa Fe, she decided for us, and in her pink kitchen, Iranian culture filled our bellies, Farsi filled our ears and an Iranian past became part of our future.
Our mother, she must have known, that when you let go of the food, you’ve given up the fight to keep the culture. And to this day, having spent many different seasons in Iran, her pink kitchen is still a place of myth and magic, it is perhaps the only place where the tug on my heart is still for a moment or two.
By Manzar Samii