This Cookbook Takes Us On A Culinary Journey From Iran To Italy

Pomegranates & Artichokes: A Food Journey from Iran to Italy marks the cookbook debut of Saghar Setareh, an Iran food writer and photographer based in Rome, Italy. With a gift for storytelling and passion for beauty, Saghar has been sharing insights about food, gender and immigration on her popular blog and Instagram account Lab Noon since 2014 while teaching cooking classes, photography workshops and leading food tours in Rome. With her first cookbook, her words and images retrace her move from Iran to Italy and the lessons (and foods) she has discovered along the way.

Pomegranates & Artichokes is a cookbook, but it’s really a quest for identity. Food, like travel, shows us how we’re more alike than we think. In more than 80 recipes and countless beautiful images of food, tiles and palazzi, Saghar takes us on a culinary, and personal, journey through flavors that defy borders and cultural boundaries. A topic that is rife with nuance, Saghar avoids stereotypes of painting Persia as “exotic” or Italy as the land of “la dolce vita”. Instead, she studies both areas through a personal lens and historic food writings to highlight what is unique, and shared, between these two civilizations.

In between, she also shares recipes from the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean, a space where so many culinary and cultural fusions have occurred over millennia.

“No one would say Italian and Iranian food are similar,” begins Saghar, “But if you look at some of the regional recipes, you’ll see they’re close to Turkish dishes. And from there you can follow the red thread of common ingredients. After all, we use the same foods and many of the same methods.”

One delicious fixture that is present throughout the pages of the book are stuffed vegetables. Known by many names around the world — dolmeh, dolma, mehshi, gemista, ripieni — these recipes are testimony to the undeniable culinary connection that pervades the vast region spanning Central Asia, the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

A recipe for Sicilian-style stuffed artichokes features breadcrumbs, pine nuts, raisins and anchovy filets. Poached with wine and served at room temperature with chopped parsley, they’re an excellent starter or side for a dinner party. A Greek-inspired filling for bell peppers uses rice, spring onions, tomato paste and ground cinnamon to make a meat-free filling. And Italy’s summer staple — pomodori al riso — are also mentioned. A favorite food to pack on picnics and beach days, stuffed tomatoes with rice are a simple food that are best served chilled, and only get better with time.

“My theory,” writes Saghar, “Is that the further west you travel, the fewer ingredients are used in stuffed vegetables — in this case only rice soaked in the juice of the tomatoes, salt, olive oil and basil.”

Rice is another global staple that features prominently in the book, from crunchy Iranian jeweled rice with pomegranate seeds, to Palestinian maqluba, an upside-down rice bake that uses seasonal vegetables for added flavor.

“Rice came to Italy with the Arabs in the Middle Ages…[and] for centuries, rice was regarded as something exotic, found in spice shops where precious and rare goods were sold,” explains Saghar. By the 18^th century, “[rice was] making its way to the tables of the rich as refined risottos in the north, and majestic sartùs in the south.”

The sartù — a “magnificent” rice timbale from Naples — is a dish that Saghar rightly describes as “something out of a medieval painting”. A laborious recipe served at aristocratic tables in Sicily, it combines rice with a rich ragù made with porcini mushrooms, pancetta, beef, puréed tomatoes and sweet Marsala wine carefully assembled with melted mozzarella and meatballs.

Of course, it took centuries for food to travel around the world, and it took time for ingredients to be incorporated into local cuisines.

In Pomegranates & Artichokes, Saghar explains how people have always had resistance to new foods. Apples, eggplants and bell peppers were just some of the foods coming from the new world (Asia, America) which were unappealing in Europe in the Middle Ages. She notes that the Italian word for eggplant — melanzana — literally translated to “unhealthy apple”. Due to their bitterness, eggplants were considered vulgar and vile before becoming one of the country’s staples, enjoyed in dishes such as Sicilian Pasta alla Norma to the ubiquitous eggplant parmesan.

For Saghar, the migration of food is akin to the movement of people, a concept she has wrestled with given her own immigration story to Italy in 2007. “When I left Iran, I had never considered that I would be an immigrant,” she explains. “You see, the difference between being an expat and being an immigrant is that as an expat, you can return home. But life in Iran is very hard — I can’t go back.”

Discovering the world of food and photography helped her find a community in her new home and provided an outlet for self-discovery. “Food helped me find my identity,” she says. And a sense of freedom.

“[In my research] I found that ingredients, methods and recipes have never abided by borders between nations and religions,” she says. “They have allowed themselves to be transformed, transported and exchanged at each encounter, with each migration.”

Modern borders don’t define where a culture ends or begins, just like borders can’t quell the tide of humans moving to new lands. “As an immigrant, you’re always in between. That can be difficulty , but it’s also an opportunity to connect with more places and make them your own,” says Saghar.

Pomegranates & Artichokes (Interlink Publishing, $35) is available at popular retailers online.