Nowruz: How Bay Area Iranian female chefs celebrate spring with symbolic foods

At her Palo Alto chocolate shop, Shekoh Confections, Iranian chocolatier Shekoh Moussavi transforms prized ingredients like rose and saffron into gourmet European-style confections. But one of her fondest memories around Nowruz, the new year holiday known for sweets, is a pudding made from the humblest of ingredients: wheat and water.

Growing up in Ahvaz in southwestern Iran, Moussavi’s family made samanoo each March as part of the new year celebration and arrival of spring. It’s a symbolic pudding with a cooking ritual that takes days and involves soaking and sprouting seeds that “grow like a carpet.”

“On the last night of cooking it, if you stay up all night, (it is said) you will see the handprint of an angel on the samanoo,” says Moussavi.

This year, Nowruz falls on March 20 — the moment of the equinox is 2:34 p.m. — and during the lead up to the non-religious holiday, Bay Area Iranians like Moussavi and the 300 million people around the world who celebrate Nowruz will be shopping and cooking up a storm.

Sabzi polo mahi, or herbed rice and fish, is the most common holiday meal, but you can make a showstopping centerpiece such as Helia Sadeghi’s chicken-stuffed tahchin studded with barberries, or an endless array of sweets, from that time-honored samanoo to Tannaz Sassooni’s much simpler but equally delicious Marzipan Mulberries.

Nowruz is still meaningful for Moussavi. She opened Shekoh Chocolates, a modern boutique where handmade pâte de fruit and bonbons are displayed like jewels, on Nowruz in 2022. Before training at L’Ecole Valrhona in Paris and diving full-time into chocolate, Moussavi was a chef and co-owner of Saratoga’s Gervais and later Palo Alto’s Shokolaat, a pâtisserie-bistro lauded for French techniques and Iranian flavors that she was forced to close in 2012 after losing her lease. Now, chocolate is her canvas for those colors and flavors.

“They are always in the back of my mind,” says Moussavi, who uses imported Iranian saffron to make her saffron bonbons. She colors them blue to represent the tiles and architecture of Iran. “They are two Persian symbols — art and food — in one,” she says.

Her hibiscus pâte de fruit is inspired by the bright iced tea she grew up drinking on hot summer days. A heart-shaped red “Persian Rose” chocolate is made from a rose water ganache and her own rose petal marmalade. Moussavi reversed the traditional molding technique, painting the bonbons at the end, to yield a velvety texture.

“I wanted it to feel like a rose petal,” she says.

Helia Sadeghi’s Nowruz preparations when she lived in Iran were always frenzied, joyful, month-long affairs. As the Oakland chef behind Big Dill Kitchen tells it, before her extended family eventually crammed themselves around the haft seen –the Nowruz table with its seven symbolic foods — or dug into her grandmother’s green herb-flecked dishes, such as sabzi polo mahi or kuku sabzi, to represent growth in the new year, their home buzzed with excitement.

“It was always such a rush to get ready and be there at sal tahveel,” says Sadeghi, who specializes not only in Iranian food but Iranian-inspired cakes and underrepresented dishes from the homeland. “We would all be running around the house yelling at each other to finish getting ready and put on the new clothes we bought for Nowruz. Then, the last two minutes of the year, we would all make it to the table and be completely silent and reflect on the new year. It was really beautiful.”

One of the things Sadeghi misses most about Nowruz celebrations back home (she moved to the United States in 2016) is the community spirit. “Anywhere you go, there are stands selling sabzeh and sombol and everything else you need for your haft seen. Everyone is cleaning their house and getting their haircuts. It’s about renewing your life.”

To bring some of that energy to the East Bay, Sadeghi and other local Iranian makers held a first-time Nowruz market in the rain on March 12 in Berkeley, with proceeds benefitting the women’s freedom movement in Iran. Sadeghi made ranginak, a date-walnut dessert, and a dish of marinated olives spiked with pomegranate molasses called zeytoon parvardeh.