An Iranian transplant to Italy discovers the food of her new home

It doesn't take political strife and persecution to pick up and leave home. All you need is some wanderlust and a desire to build a life elsewhere. Whether drawn to the black-and-white celluloid images of Federico Fellini or the intricacies of Milano's haute couture, many young people journey to Italy to start anew with a suitcase, a dream, and a prayer. Saghar Setareh landed in Rome from Iran without any acute interest in cuisine, but the rich food culture of her homeland inspired her journey into her adopted country's home kitchens. One of the results is her new cookbook, Pomegranates and Artichokes.

I am from there, I am from here,
but I am neither there nor here.
I have two names which meet and part…
I have two languages, but I have long forgotten 
which is the language of my dreams.

-Mahmūd Darwīsh,

Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading 

KCRW: Share your first culinary experiences and your first impressions of Rome.

Saghar Setareh: The first thing that I remember of Rome is that we got out of this rather dodgy train station from the airport and I saw this very blue sky. You must imagine that Tehran is always very polluted, so we don't see a very blue sky often. The aqua and orange buildings with the green of the stone pines, the Roman pines, I immediately fell in love with this combination of colors and to this day, it makes me very happy. That first evening, we went to Isola Tiberina, the island in the middle of the Tiber River.) We had a bottle of white wine, which was, for me, the first time I tried it. I don't remember whether it was that night or maybe the day after that I had pizza Italia, the famous Roman sliced pizza with potatoes, which sounded very weird to me but I loved it. I had that first try of cappuccino and cornetto, (an Italian croissant), which was life changing for me. There was also a brief period of pork steaks that I was obsessed with. I would eat them every day.

Was that the first time you had eaten pork?

It was the first time I had eaten fresh pork. I'd had different types of salamis that were smuggled into Iran but not fresh.

As your time in Italy and your interest in its food grew, you began to recognize similarities between the food of Iran and what you call the "in between," the geographic area between Iran and Italy. One of your first discoveries was about eggplant. Could you talk about that in a bit more detail?

It took me quite a while to see the similarities but what I noticed can be seen very well with the case of the eggplant. In all of these countries, there are many beloved recipes with eggplant and no one could really say that they look a lot like each other, especially if we're comparing the Iranian and Italian one. For example, in Iran, we char eggplants then we add a pulp of tomatoes and later we add turmeric with a lot of garlic. This is a very famous dish called Mirza Ghassemi from the north of Iran. It's very much loved in all of the country. If you travel west, towards the Levant and Turkey, there are many other dishes being made with charred eggplants. Perhaps the most famous of them is baba ganoush or mutabal. They don't add any tomatoes but there's still a lot of garlic and they can be dressed with or without tahini based on the dish you're making. Or you can just have the eggplant with a sauce of tomatoes and onions, as in Mumbai, India and Turkey. Then if you travel south of Italy, those flavors remain very familiar and if you add cheese to that combination, it becomes something very similar to a Parmigiana di Melanzane or even a Caponata. So it looks like there are circles overlapping each other and there's a little bit of the same ingredients and the same flavor that connects them through this whole vast geographical era.

Upon stepping out of the train station in Rome, the first thing travel and food photographer Saghar Setareh noticed was the blue sky and the Roman pines. Photo by Valentina Solfrini.

Can you talk about the importance of onion in Iranian cooking? And the preparation that you tend to make a huge amount of so you have it on hand?

There are a lot of Iranian stews or khoresh or big soups that are based on onions. We have this thing that is called the Golden Onion or Piaz Dagh. You basically cut a lot of onions and fry them in hot oil, not in cold oil as Italians do with sofrito. You add a little bit of turmeric to it at the end and this becomes the backbone of many of these dishes, sometimes even the garnish on top. Since it's hard to fry all of these onions, it's a good idea to make big batches. In Iran, you can now buy this ready made, you don't need to do it anymore. But I remember that my mom would spend one day every six months or perhaps once a year, and she would fry a lot of onions and just put them in the freezer. Then it would be very, very easy to start one of the big stews.

Having done this a lot myself, I was still shocked to read when you said something like one onion cooked down makes a tablespoon or something so small.

Yes, but one tablespoon of Golden Onion is a lot of Golden Onion. So if you want to make a smaller dish, you don't have to do all of these things, you can just start with an onion or half an onion and be done with it. But since it takes quite a lot of time to prepare onions like this, if you have them ready made, it saves you a lot of time.

Is there a dish that you feel embodies a complete blend of the two cuisines?

I have to choose Makaroni, the Iranian pasta because it was undoubtedly inspired by Spaghetti Bolognese, and I think from the American version. But somehow, over the years, it was transformed and it became completely Iranian. There is turmeric and saffron in the recipe and we double-cook it exactly the same way we double-cook rice. I should also confess, it's horribly overcooked when it's cooked like that. So the trick is to boil the pasta for half the time on the package, so that when you do the second cooking, it won't be overcooked. 

We also make tahdig for that, which is absolutely awesome, the crust at the bottom of the pot. I love for it to be potatoes because it also absorbs all the oil and the spicy part of the sauce. It's absolutely lovely. I think it embodies that but at the same time, the dish is really very Iranian. I have made it for my Iranian friends, especially when I was testing the recipe, and they loved it. But I think if you put that in front of Italians, they would freak out.

Well, it doesn't take much to freak out Italians culinarily.

Thank you!

There are so many associations that artichokes have historically had in Italy. Talk about that a little bit and tell us the story about that artichoke soup that gave you so much solace. 

Artichokes, kind of like eggplants, were the things that Italians, or let's say Christians, would not eat. Almost anything that was left aside that Christians would not eat was consumed by the Jewish population in Italy. They would fry most of these things because they didn't have the housing. Kitchens belonged to rich families. In the ghetto in Rome, they didn't have the safety systems that could allow them to have kitchens. That's why they had the frigittore (fryers) outside and they would fry everything. That's how the Jewish people in Italy came up with almost all of the most famous Italian recipes — parmigiana, all the artichoke recipes. For me, it's very, very fascinating that something that was rejected and was left for a people who were rejected has become a central part of a cuisine and a culture and it's not even remembered as such. 

The artichoke soup in the recipe comes with one of my most horrible experiences in Italy. It was the first and perhaps the only time that I was the subject to a very, very horrible racial slur by a man who accused me of doing the thing that he was doing himself, which was getting through the barrier for the Metro station without a ticket. I was naive because I was trying to ask for this guy's help. I was supposed to go somewhere in the station and he closed this barrier in my face. By the time I realized this and I told him something, he said, "Well, at least I'm in my own home and you are not." 

I don't know whether it was that day, or it was actually what he said, but it left me frozen completely. I left the station without going where I was supposed to go. I came back home. I was distraught. I couldn't stop crying. I was absolutely hysterical. My roommate came to my room and she found me in this horrible state. She thought that I'd had a fight with my ex-boyfriend or something. I don't remember what she told me to calm me down but I remember she was amazing. Then, she shared these little jars. 

She's from Puglia, in the south of Italy. She was studying law at the moment so she didn't have time for cooking or anything and [her family] would send her everything. And this thing is called "the bugs from downstairs." It's in the Pugliese dialect. It's not really downstairs. It just means "from the South." [Her family] would send her these little jars. She would have the soups and little stews, and these things that were just amazing, made by her aunts or grandmother. She shared one of these with me and it was very simple. You have potatoes and artichokes, and you blend them. She would always have these pieces of bread at the bottom of her plate with a little bit of cheese sometimes, and some oil and she would put the soup on that bread. 

I really, really wanted to put that story in the book because I really wanted to tell a story where Italy doesn't come out as a perfect dolce vita location. Italy is amazing for many reasons. We know that. But it's not amazing in the same way for all people. Different people who come here are not treated the same way, not just because of that horrible experience with this horrible man. But in general, we don't all feel the same welcome. Sometimes, as much as you try and you think that okay, it's been a long time. Do I finally belong here? Can I say that about myself? Usually, it's very hard for Italians to accept that.

Let's give ourselves more solace by talking about Bucatini Alla Crudaiola. This is something that is so interesting and different for a lot of people. Tell us about it.

The recipe is just another pasta pomodoro, a pasta with tomatoes. It's just the technique that changes a little bit. You do have to have the best tomatoes to do that. The thing is that in Italy, in order to get the best tomatoes, which are really, really, really amazing, nobody can deny that there is a very, very high price to pay, and almost nobody talks about it. Maybe in the news they talk about it but not in the culinary world. 

The people who pick the tomatoes in Italy are almost always migrant workers of color who are paid as little as two or three euros per hour to do one of the hardest jobs on the planet, which is picking tomatoes in the heat of the south of Italy in the middle of summer. Not one summer has passed since I've been here that we haven't had news of someone actually dying while picking tomatoes. They have horrible work conditions. There is always the question of something that can be described as organized crime, who manages their presence, their work visas and the whole thing that they do. So they do this work for very little money, risking their lives. 

Getting back to the recipe, from the South of Italy, this is a recipe that my friend Fiammetta taught me. She is turning 81 this year, I believe. You basically have very, very good tomatoes and you have a little bit of chopped onions and some herbs. Basil, if you have it but it can be anything else. Lots of olive oil. Some bread crumbs. You chop these tomatoes and you put the cut parts facing up at the back of a big [roasting] sheet. You need the bread crumb to absorb the extra humidity but you need to fill it completely with tomatoes. Then a little bit of salt and a bit of olive oil and you put just one layer of bucatini and it has to be bucatini because it needs to be thick but they need to have the hole inside so they can absorb enough humidity without becoming completely mushy. You top them again with tomatoes and you repeat the whole thing. It's very easy. You put it in the fridge for three to seven hours. Then, you just put it in the oven for an hour and you uncover it. It all needs to be covered with foil. You uncover it and you cook it a little bit more so that the top part of it is crunchy and you serve it. The pasta has sucked up all the juices from the tomatoes and it's absolutely unbelievable. You don't need to add anything to it, like cheese. It doesn't need it.

Pomegranates & Artichokes connects the ingredients and flavors of Iran and Italy. Photo courtesy of Interlink Books.