Persian Cuisine and Sherbet
Englishman describes the food of late 19th century Persia, most notably its sherbets and desserts.
From: 1886 C.E. To: 1886 C.E.
Location: Iran
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
"The Persian Cuisine and Sherbet," from Persia as it Is by C.J. Wills, 1886.
Diet of the labourer—Fruit as food—Cook-shops—Kababs—Food of the wealthy—Silent dinners—Royal Persian Sherbet—Sherbet-spoons—Sherbets.
The food of the Persians is very varied. As a rule the very poor do not get meat more than once a week; while villagers and the numerous nomadic tribes see it very rarely, and only on great occasions, as at marriage feasts. The ordinary diet of a labouring man is bread and cheese in winter, bread and fruit in summer. But even the labourers manage to obtain an occasional bowl of strong soup; and they vary their diet with conserves, dried fruits, basins of curds, and hard-boiled eggs. The actual weight of bread that a muleteer or labourer can consume, and does consume, daily is very great, seven pounds not being an extraordinary allowance.
In the south of Persia dates are the staple food: they are very cheap and satisfying. During the summer, lettuces, grapes, apricots, onions, and cucumbers form the dainties of the villager; and these with bread, cheese, and curds, are their only food.
In every large town cook-shops abound. Sheep are roasted whole in ovens, and sold hot by the slice. The sheep's heads and feet are boiled separately, and their preparation and sale is a trade in itself.
But the edible most in favour among all classes in Persia is the kabab. There are two varieties of kabab. One is made from minced mutton, which is chopped with a few onions into a paste as fine as sausage-meat, carefully moulded over a skewer, toasted over a fierce charcoal fire, and sold and eaten hot.
This is the kabab of the bazaar, the delicacy of the lower classes. At the dinner-hour (sunset), and at the breakfast-hour (noon), crowds surround the shops of the kabab-sellers. Each man carries his bread, which is usually a flexible loaf two feet long, a foot wide, and half-an-inch thick. The customer wraps his kabab, hot from the fire, in his bread, and either sits down and eats it then and there, or takes the meal home to his family.
In any case, a hot dinner of roast meat can be obtained for from one penny to threepence a head; for the price of a single skewer of the steaming delicacy is but a halfpenny. Jars containing about half-a-pint of 'hot, strong, and savoury meat-soup are sold for a penny. These form the invariable meal of the Persian soldier, if he can afford it. The meat is pounded and served with the soup, or eaten afterwards as a separate plat. But in Persia, as in the rest of the East, bread, rice, or dates are the real food the meat merely the sauce or bonne bouche.
Persians of all ages are very fond of confectionery, and are constantly devouring sweets. These are generally pure and good; but there is little variety in colour, most of them being white, and nearly all are flavoured with lemon-juice.
The lower-class Persian will eat several pounds of grapes, cucumbers, or apricots for a meal; they eat onions as we eat apples. Pomegranates and melons are in great demand as food; and the melons, which run to 14 lb. in weight, are very nutritious. Cucumbers are looked on as a fruit, and are eaten in large quantities by rich and poor. They are not indigestible. Seven pounds' weight may be often had for a halfpenny. Grapes are in infinite variety and of the most delicious kinds, from the huge long grape, which measures 2 in., to the tiny sultana, sweet as honey to the taste.
The curds, or mast, is simply made by adding a small portion of rennet or else old curds to warmed milk: in a few hours it sets into a mass, the cream on the top. If eaten the first day, it is like a junket; if allowed to remain, it becomes sour and will keep good any time. In this sour state it is preferred, and is either eaten with honey, sugar, or grape-sugar. Eggs boiled hard, and dyed a gay colour, are much eaten: from forty to fifty can be had for 9d. These things, then, form the cheap and varied diet of the working classes. Beef, too, is eaten by them; never by the well-to-do.
The townspeople and the wealthy among the Persians devote much attention to good living. Breakfast generally is a comparatively light meal, but consists of several plats of varying merit, but always served hot: it is taken about noon, At about eight o'clock at night , dinner is served. Persian cookery is extravagant partly because the Persians are lavishly hospitable, partly because all house-servants are fed from the leavings of the masters' table.
Kababs of another kind to those we have described take the palm among Persian dishes to the European taste, probably because they are free from grease. Small pieces of lamb, the size of a walnut, are skewered on a slender rod of iron; two pieces of lean and a piece of the delicate fat of the huge tail of the Oriental sheep are put on alternately, a soupçon of garlic or onion is added, and the kabab is toasted over a fierce fire and handed hot: it is eaten with a little salt and a squeeze of lemon. Pillaws are merely boiled meat, venison, or fowls, smothered in mountains of rice. This rice is delicately boiled, and a little clarified butter is added. We fear to say how much pillaw a Persian will consume. Tiny chickens, quails, pigeons, doves, and young partridges are handed hot, on the spit itself, to each guest.
Except the partridge, game is not much appreciated in Persia. The hare is not eaten by the religious, and there are no rabbits. Fish is seldom seen, save on the sea-coast. Entrees of various kinds are served; they are nearly always eaten with boiled rice, which is served plain, without butter, and termed chillaw. Among such entrees are the fizzinjhan, which consists of a chicken, partridge, or lamb-meat boiled to rags, served hot with a sauce of pounded walnuts, pomegranate-juice, and clarified butter. A similar entree is made upon the same bases with unripe grapes and butter; another with stewed apricots and butter, or stewed plums of Bokhara and butter. All these are eaten with large quantities of plain boiled rice; seemingly very rich, yet in combination with rice they are to the Persian taste delicious; and Europeans residing in Persia soon appreciate them. Confectionery and pastry are consumed in large quantities. Lambs a week old, and weighing only a few pounds, are roasted whole and stuffed with dates, raisins, chestnuts, pistachios, and almonds. Ducks, tame or wild, are not much liked.
Sherbet, in large china bowls, is always served at dinner. It consists of fruit syrups or eau sucree; it is usually iced, and is drunk from huge wooden spoons. These are sometimes so thin as to be in parts transparent; they are of native manufacture and delicately carved. They are often of great value; and the wealth of a Persian is often shown in the variety and value of his wooden sherbet-spoons.
In its way the Persian cuisine is as scientific as that of France. Everything is good and plentiful; there are no adulterations; the only fault is on the side of profusion. The free use of clarified butter, it must be remembered, is to enable the partaker to swallow the rice which is served with most dishes. Unlike the Turk, the Persian never serves a dish that is nasty. We once saw a Turkish dish which consisted of aubergines stuffed with garlic, stewed in oil and eaten cold! It had the rather appropriate name of " The Imam fainted!"
Persian dinners are always preceded by pipes (hubble-bubbles), while tea and sweets are handed round. Then servants bring in a long leathern sheet and place it on the ground; the guests take their seats round it, squatting on the ground. A flat loaf of bread, of the kind we have described, is placed before each man. Music plays. The dinner is brought in on trays and placed on the ground on the leathern sheet; the covers are removed; the host says "Bismillah" ("In the name of God"), and in silence all fall to with their fingers. There is no talking at dinner; and when it is over all retire to rest or return to their homes at once.
Royal Persian Sherbet. Under this sounding title, most of us have a remembrance of a white effervescing powder, flavoured with essence of lemons, which in the summer-time was sold to us as children; a large spoonful was stirred into a tumbler of water, cool or the reverse, and known to boys as a "fizzer." It is not to this mawkish draught we wish to draw the reader's attention, but rather to the real thing as used in Persia and throughout the East. Persian sherbet is a very comprehensive term, and there are many varieties of it. Before we come to what it is, it may be as well to explain when and how it is drunk. Sherbet is used as a thirst-quencher, and a cooling drink in hot weather; it is either the drink taken at meals, or it is handed to visitors in warm weather in lieu of coffee. As a drink at meals, it is placed in Chinese porcelain bowls, there being usually several varieties of the sherbet, more or less, according to the size of the party and the position of the host. Each bowl stands in its saucer; and across the vessel is laid one of the pearwood spoons of Abadeh, famed for their carving and lightness throughout the Eastern world.
A sherbet-spoon is from one to two feet in length; the bowl, cut from a solid block, holds from a claretglass to a tumbler of the liquid. This bowl is so thin as to be semi-transparent, and is frequently ornamented with an inscription, the letters of which are in highrelief. To retain their semi-transparency, each letter is undercut, so that, although standing up an eighth of an inch from the surface of the bowl, yet the whole is of the same light and delicate texture, no part thicker than another. One-half of the surface of the spoon-bowl is covered by two cleverly applied pieces of carved wood, which appear to be made from one block.
But this is not the case they are really cemented there. These pieces are made in such a delicate manner as to be almost filmy in appearance, resembling fine lacework. The handle of the spoon at times twenty inches long is formed in separate piece, and inserted into the edge of the bowl in a groove cut to receive it. This handle is also elaborately carved in delicate tracery; and a wonderful effect is produced by the rhomboid-shaped handle, at times four inches broad at the widest part, and only a tenth of an inch thick. The groove where the handle is inserted into the edge of the bowl of the spoon, and the point of junction, are hidden by a rosette of carved wood, circular in shape, only a tenth of an inch thick. This, too, is carved in lace-like work, and it is cemented to the shaft of the spoon. A kind of flying buttress of similar delicate wood-work unites the back part of the shaft to the shoulder of the bowl. The spoon, which, when it leaves the carver's bench, is white, is varnished with Kaman oil, which acts as a waterproof and preservative, and dyes the whole of a fine gamboge yellow, similar to our boxwood. The weight of the spoon is in the largest sizes two ounces.
The tools used by the carver are a plane, a rough sort of gouge, and a common penknife. Each spoon is of a separate and original design, no two being alike, save when ordered in pairs or sets. The price of the finest specimens is from five to fifteen shillings each. These sherbet spoons are really works of art, and are valued by Oriental amateurs. Many of the merchants are very proud of their sherbet spoons; and being wood, they are "lawful;" for a metal spoon, if of silver, is an abomination; consequently, the tea-spoons in Persia have a filigree hole in the bowl, and thus can be used for stirring the tea only, and not for the unlawful act of conveying it to the mouth in a silver spoon. Of course, these high-art sherbet spoons are only seen at the houses of the better classes, a coarser wooden spoon being used by the lower classes. The spoons at dinner serve as drinking-vessels, for tumblers are unknown; and the metal drinking-cups so much in use are merely for travelling, or the pottle-deep potations of the irreligious.
During the seven months of Persian summer, it is usual to serve sherbet at all visits, in lieu of coffee, for coffee is supposed to be heating in the hot afternoons, at which time formal visits are often made; and as the visitor must be given something for he is never sent empty away sherbet in glass tankards or istakans a word borrowed from the Kussian term for a tumbler is handed round. These istakans are often very handsome, being always of cut or coloured glass, often elaborately gilded and painted in colours, or what is termed jewelled that is, ornamented with an imitation of gems.
And now, what is Persian sherbet? A draught of sweetened water flavoured to the taste of the drinker. The only exception to this definition is the sherbet-ikand, or eau sucree, which is simply water in which lump-sugar has been dissolved. The varieties of sherbet may be divided into those made from the fresh juice of fruit, which are mixed with water and sweetened to the taste; and those made from syrup, in which the juice of fruit has been boiled.
It will be thus seen that the effervescing qualities of royal Persian sherbet only exist in the imagination of the English confectioner. But there is one all-important point that the English vendor would do well to imitate: Persian sherbet is served very cool, or iced. Blocks of snow or lumps of ice are always dissolved in the sherbet drunk in Persia, unless the water has been previously artificially cooled. Fresh sherbets are usually lemon, orange, or pomegranate; and the first two are particularly delicious. The fresh juice is expressed in the room in the presence of the guest, passed through a small silver strainer, to remove the pips, portions of pulp & lumps of sugar are then placed in the istakan; water is poured in till the vessel is two-thirds full, and it is then filled to the brim with blocks of ice or snow.
The preserved sherbets are generally contained in small decanters of coloured Bohemian glass similar to the istakans in style. They are in the form of clear and concentrated syrup. This syrup is poured into the bowl or istakan, as the case may be; water is added; the whole is stirred, and the requisite quantity of ice or snow completes the sherbet.
When bowls are used as they invariably are by the rich at meals, and by the poor at all times the spoons are dipped into the bowl, and after being emptied into the mouth, are replaced in the bowl of sherbet. Thus the use of glass vessels, until lately very expensive in Persia, is dispensed with. Probably with the continuous introduction of the ugly and cheap, but strong and serviceable, Russian glass, the dainty sherbet-spoon of Abadeh will gradually disappear, the more prosaic tumbler taking its place.
One kind of sherbet is not a fruit-syrup, but a distilled water: this is the sherbet-i-beed-mishk, or willowflower sherbet. The fresh flowers of a particular kind of willow are distilled with water; a rather insipid but grateful distilled water is the result. Of this the Persians are immoderately fond, and they ascribe great power to it in the "fattening of the thin." It is a popular and harmless drink, and is drunk in the early morning, not iced, but simply sweetened.
Persians are very particular as to the water they drink, and are as great connoisseurs in it as some Englishmen are curious in wines. The water they habitually drink must be cool, and, if possible, from a spring of good repute. It is often brought long distances in skins daily from the favourite spring of the locality. Given good water, and pleasant, grateful beverages of all sorts, it is easy to refrain from the strong drinks which Mahommed so wisely forbade his followers to indulge in, making drunkenness a crime, and the drunkard an object of disgust and loathing to his fellow-man. Undoubtedly, strong drinks in hot climates, or even in hot weather, are incompatible with good health.
The varieties of the preserved syrups are numerous: orange, lemon, quince, cranberry—the raspberry is unknown in Persia—cherry, pomegranate, apricot, plum, and grape juice; while various combinations of a very grateful nature are made by mixing two or even three of the above.
Wills, C. J. Persia as it Is. S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1886.
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