PicoBlog

This is part 1 of 4 in a food series leading up to my trip to Tehran in May. Consider these upcoming pieces as hype for what is to come when I land in the middle east!

Feta cheese is the centerpiece of an Iranian breakfast.

Iranian feta is different than the feta we know here, which is most commonly Greek. Made with cows’ milk instead of sheeps’, Iranian feta is creamy and tangy, as opposed to dry and salty. It still crumbles, but the texture makes it easily spreadable on any kind of bread your mamani (grandma) might have on the kitchen table.

At my grandparents’ house in Tehran where I spent every summer until I was 20, my grandma would set the breakfast table the night before with plates, knives, and walnuts, ready for whoever woke up first. First, you take out the feta cheese and butter from the fridge, maybe some marmalade if you’re feeling sweet, maybe freshly sliced tomatoes if not. Next take out the bread, which could be anything from lavash, sangak, or barbari, stored in plastic bags to keep it fresh.

Turn the kettle on, brew some tea (typically a Ceylon tea mixed at home with dried rose buds and occasionally cardamom), and pour yourself and anyone else around a small cup. My mom likes her tea with a dash of whole milk and so I too started taking my tea like her, but in Iran, no one puts milk in their tea. It’s important to note that once you turn the stove under that kettle on in the morning, it’ll stay on until the last person goes to bed that night— that’s how much tea we drink in a day.

Back to the breakfast table, and now comes the fun part. Tear a piece of bread, and make your little bites filled with whatever you like. Butter and marmalade for a sweet dream, feta and tomato for a juicy kick. Take a sip of tea and grab a few walnuts between every bite.

This is how every morning began every summer I spent in Tehran.

****

I was 25 when I realized English was my second language.

I was hosting a taco night for my friends and we had breifly run out of tortillas.

“Let me grab some more bread,” I announced, when my friends giggled and said, “Bread? Don’t you mean toriallas?”

And so ensued a long debate where I tried to convince everyone in the room that tortiallas are in fact bread, not their own food group. No one was convied. I was dumbfounded. Was I going crazy?

I pulled out my phone and searched the deifntion of bread, convinved it was anything made with flour and water.

Bread

/bred/ noun

food made of flour, water, and yeast or another leavening agent, mixed together and baked

A leavening agent! So tortillas... were not bread.

As my world shattered and I questioned everything I had ever known, I dug deep to figure out why I had been so convinced.

“Noon” in the Persian language refers to all kinds of bread and bread-like foods made from flour and water, even those foods without leavening agents, like lavash or tortillas. I had been calling breads noon my whole life thus confusing the two dangerously close definitions.

So it was at 25 that I realized, even though English had been my primary language for almost 20 years, certain parts of my vocabulary especially regarding food still lived in the part of my brain that grew up in an Iranina household.

And to me, tortillas will always still be noon.

This is part 1 of 4 in a food series leading up to my trip to Tehran, Iran in May. Consider these upcoming pieces as hype for what is to come when I land in the middle east!

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