“There was a time when you would have had to look hard to find a restaurant serving Persian food. Iran, to put it mildly, was not an appetizing word.”Footnote 1
For the past several years, a growing interest in the Iranian diaspora has resulted in impressive volumes on the political commitments (i.e., voting patterns and engagement with Iranian politics) of emigres in the west, as well as their cultural output (i.e., film, literature, and music).Footnote 2 These studies have privileged the California experience, with a particular eye to Shi'as, due to the preponderance of Iranian immigrants who settled in California.Footnote 3 Iranian cultural products outside of subjects like film and politics, however, have been overlooked (though there are signs that this is changing). The everyday life of Iranian-Americans and their presence in less politicized industries (e.g., medicine, food, and engineering) has been elided, despite impressive archives that add nuance to the somewhat flattened experiences of Iranians in the west.Footnote 4
This article examines food to add texture to the immigrant experience, which is often defined by an effort to alternatively assimilate, dissimulate, and exert one's unique character onto the landscape of a host society. The study emphasizes American print media, whether cookbooks, newspapers, or periodicals, written in English for an Anglo-American audience. The focus is on 1960–1979 because publications on the topic became more numerous by the 1960s (though I do offer exceptional occasions preceding 1960), and the approach of food writers shifted substantially after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, which I gesture toward here. I also do not limit the study to California; I search for evidence of national engagement with Iranian cuisine, even in areas with few Iranian actors.
“Cooking Iranian Food in America” offers a lens to understand the Iranian diaspora in the pre-revolutionary period, as food writers and restaurateurs presented their culture to an American audience. This piece plays with the concept of “authenticity,” a complicated term; as Monica Perales writes, “Authenticity is the holy grail of popular food writing and foodie culture; it undergirds tourism and attendant ideas about region, race, class, and culture.”Footnote 5 Like Perales and other food historians, I believe that the notion of authenticity is itself “historically contingent,” often “resulting not only from industrialization and urbanization” but also “status.”Footnote 6
By examining Iranian presentations of their cuisine (whether engaging in the discourse of fusion or authenticity—a friction that dominated the food writing of the period under study), we can also analyze the ways in which the Anglophone public digested (and regurgitated) the idea of that cuisine.Footnote 7 In the United States, Iranians struggled with competing impulses that offered unique challenges in the food industry. Iranian restaurateurs, for instance, attempted to provide an “authentic,” yet familiar, dining experience against the background of an alternatively hostile and orientalizing clientele. Although scholars of Arab cuisine and culture, such as Nadine Naber, Anny Gaul, and Graham Auman Pitts, have laid a useful foundation for this study, food history “is still in its infancy.”Footnote 8 Scholars of Iran have not yet taken up the topic of food with the same rigor as art, film, political activism, and other markers of the Iranian diaspora's footprint in the west—despite clear interest from a wider (including non-academic) cosmopolitan readership. Consider, for instance, the popularity of Laleh Khalili's piece on Iranian cookbooks, which focuses on the Iranian diaspora in the post-revolutionary period.Footnote 9
Although there is scholarly literature on Iranian food, it privileges the construction of a sophisticated culinary tradition in Iran, emphasizing modernization and nationalism.Footnote 10 Of course, where human beings live and who they live near shape their self-conception, evinced by the foods they eat. Thus, food traditions in the Iranian diaspora prove distinct from food traditions in the homeland. Indeed, the ways we eat and present food represent the most significant ways that we communicate and formulate our heritage. For instance, Khalili writes, “The insistence on the use of ‘Persia’ (instead of Iran) in the title of all [the cookbooks she reviews from the post-revolutionary period] but Batmanglij's cookbooks gestures at another set of diaspora politics.” The consensus, from historians to popular food writers, seems to be that the revolution politicized the term “Iran” (which was no longer “appetizing,” as journalist Colman Andrews put it in 1984).Footnote 11 “Persia, on the other hand, is associated with luxury,” Khalili argues.Footnote 12
Quite to the contrary, however, I find that the preference for “Persian” among food writers and restaurant promoters long preceded the revolution.Footnote 13 In fact, between 1960–1979, Iranian dining establishments seldom drew attention to “Iran”—instead, they built on the public imagination of “Persia.” By focusing on 1979 as the definitive sociopolitical disruption for Iranian-Americans, what do we miss about the public relations campaign waged by Iranian food promoters in the pre-revolutionary period?
More broadly, how did writers and chefs fit Iran into a busy gastronomic landscape for Anglophone foodies, engaged with many Eastern culinary traditions? Why did they choose particular terms, market to Anglo consumers, or emphasize particular ingredients and techniques? The answers to these questions depend on demographics, the zeitgeist of American food culture, the tastes of high-status patrons, the pressures on immigrants, and the relationship between Tehran and Washington DC at any particular moment.
Methods and theory
A robust literature has emerged examining not only the political tensions between the leaders of Iran and the United States (i.e., diplomatic histories), but also the Iranian immigrant experience in the United States and the way Americans envisioned Iran (influenced by popular representations, tourism, immigration, and other forms of interaction with Iran). This vision changed in scope and character over time, as Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet explores in Heroes to Hostages. Her book charts new territory in the study of US-Iran relations, emphasizing the role of culture in diplomatic history. This article represents a humble contribution to this growing Iranian diasporic literature for the pre-revolutionary period.
If Kashani-Sabet's book “explores US-Iran relations principally through the vantage point of Iranian society and the experiences of an evolving Iran that strived to accommodate American and great power politics,” this study is narrower in its ambitions, though it takes up Kashani-Sabet’s useful framework.Footnote 14 “Cooking Iranian Food in America” explores US-Iran relations principally through the vantage point of food writers and restaurateurs in the United States, emphasizing ever-evolving demographics and diplomacy.
Due to my disciplinary training, as a historian of Iran who analyzes textual (both cultural and non-cultural) sources, I first wish to establish the types of materials (and, therefore, communities) that I seek to study. Since I am interested in the pre-revolutionary dialogue between Iranian food promoters (whether restaurateurs or writers) and Anglo-American audiences, I examine Anglophone media. Although their market incentives differed, in the pre-revolutionary period, Iranian restaurant promoters and food writers both appealed to Anglo-Americans, as they represented the largest share of the potential consumer base. This dynamic, of course, shifted after the revolution, when a significant number of Iranian emigres arrived in the United States and placed new market pressures on Iranian food promoters.
Adopting a wider lens would make this project unwieldy; the deficits, however, offer an opportunity to other scholars (including those trained in anthropology, sociology, and economics) to complicate my arguments. My frame, of course, limits my study to English-language sources, which are accessible through newspaper archives and published monographs. Thus, many sources published within the United States do not feature here. For instance, consider the robust print media associated with the Iranian diaspora, written in Persian, which advertised and reviewed foods, especially in the state of California. Even periodicals like Pars, an economic magazine available at the University of California, Los Angeles archives, which focused on the stock market, cost of living, and geographic disparities in income and housing, contained advertisements for food—including supermarkets, cabarets, and restaurants. These publications are, however, outside the purview of this study since they were not in dialogue with Anglo-Americans (and circulated more widely after the revolution, with an increasing number of Iranian emigres in the United States). Similarly absent is fiction, in both its print and visual forms. Although English speakers and readers came across information about Iranian cuisine through literature and film, I limit my sources to those explicitly and exclusively intended to shape the way Anglo readers and consumers interact with Iranian foodways.
I argue that, over the brief twenty years under study here, the American cosmopolitan imagination assimilated Iranian food into the national discourse as, first, part of a healthful, Asian culinary tradition and, later, as a distinctly Iranian, dangerous, and unappetizing culinary tradition. By cosmopolitanism, I mean “a mode of attachment beyond the local that implies both an openness and a sense of attentiveness toward different ways of life” that is tourism-minded (and therefore connected to “authenticity”) while striving to achieve social goals, such as embracing diversity or maintaining a healthy lifestyle.Footnote 15 Where a cultural anthropologist might examine the ways food syntax (preparation, description, consumption, etc.) reflects social rules and cultural boundaries, I track the changes in those rules and boundaries evinced by cultural texts, thereby analyzing an emergent Iranian-American discourse about assimilation and fusion within the United States.
Although I do not adopt anthropological or ethnographic methodologies, the roots of food scholarship may be found in cultural anthropology, evinced in texts such as Claude Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked and Mary Douglas's classic 1972 piece “Deciphering a Meal.” These texts introduced a systematic approach to analyzing the “small-scale social relations” that characterize the experience of preparing and sharing meals in different contexts.Footnote 16 Cultural anthropologists formed the study of “foodways”: “the history of how a group or society feeds itself and what that signals about identity.”Footnote 17
Historians have taken many notes from anthropologists in researching the story of global(izing) foodways. Sidney Mintz's famous 1985 book Sweetness and Power, for instance, offered a novel means for historians to integrate food into their research by decentering the “primitive” nature of non-western food cultures, and the ways those non-westerners preserve their unique characteristics in the modern age, by emphasizing the role of sugar in globalization.Footnote 18 “Cooking Iranian Food in America” represents a contribution to the marriage of immigration history and food studies, though one could imagine a foodstuff study around products such as pomegranate molasses or Iranian saffron, tracking their identification with Iran, their distribution/accessibility in the United States, and the politics of their use following sanctions.
Like many food historians who examine diaspora and immigration, I am not interested in “what” a particular food tradition is but “how” food traditions become identified with a particular place.Footnote 19 As Donna Gabaccia writes in We Are What We Eat, “shifting, blended, multi-ethnic eating habits” are intrinsic to the American experience, as a certain product, such as a bagel, “highlights ways that the production, exchange, marketing, and consumption of food have generated new identities—for foods and eaters alike.”Footnote 20 There is an opportunity to engage in this type of research for Iranian cuisine, i.e., by analyzing Iranian emigre articulations of their food culture (restricted by accessible ingredients and a shared cultural vernacular with locals) and dialogue with Anglo-Americans who engaged with Iranian culinary products.
Many in the United States (i.e., professional chefs, cookbook writers, food critics, and audiences) contributed to associating particular “foodways” with Iran in the print media. The sources I study are classic tools for analyzing food culture. It is no wonder that Priscilla Parkhust Ferguson and Sharon Zukin open their 1995 article, “What's Cooking?” with “[a]lmost everyone who has read a newspaper or visited a restaurant in the past fifteen or twenty years knows that, in the richer countries of the world at least, food permeates popular consciousness.”Footnote 21 I would add bookstores and libraries to the physical spaces that illustrate the domination of food in our popular consciousness.Footnote 22
These sources are, of course, gendered. Unlike Mary Douglas, Carole Counihan, Amy Bentley, Jessica Harris, and others, who make gender central to their analyses of food, my study emphasizes belonging. In this piece, food represents the cultural product that familiarizes cosmopolitan Anglos with Iranian civilization—a means of earning Iranians a place in the diverse landscape of their host society. By bringing together interviews with restaurateurs, writings of food critics, non-Iranian contributions to fusion recipes, and the production of cookbooks, I place female-coded cultural products (i.e., cookbooks and newspaper write-ins) into dialogue with male-coded cultural products (i.e., professional kitchens and works by food critics). As Shaheem Black writes,
Although professional kitchens have been considered notoriously male-dominated spaces, cookbooks promoting domestic proficiency since the nineteenth century have often been written by and aimed at women. Cooking as domestic labor is often seen as an extension of maternal practices of feeding, tied […] to acts of female reproduction.Footnote 23
Although this dynamic is present in this piece, it is not the central focus.
Instead, I focus on the development of a cosmopolitan sensibility around Iranian cuisine between 1960–1979, when immigration patterns to the United States changed substantially (explored in the section below). Although there are exceptional examples of American engagement with Iranian food culture before 1960, Iranian food promoters began to garner more attention in the decade preceding the Islamic Revolution. During this period, Anglo consumers became interested in the Asian world, indicated by an emerging market for Asian products (cookbooks, ingredients, and experiences—whether in a restaurant or on a tourist adventure), which Iranian immigrants capitalized on.
That cosmopolitanism, or openness to (in this case) Asian culture, is captured in the phenomenon of “fusion” cuisine. The term “fusion cuisine,” coined by Florida chef Norman Van Aken in 1988, “refer[s] to combinations of flavors and culinary techniques from two or more cultures.”Footnote 24 Iranian emigres embraced the cultural flexibility that the American food scene has historically rewarded. Although they continued to use narrower ethnocentric terms, such as “Persian” (which ironically denied the inherent diversity of Iranian cuisine), Iranian writers and restaurant owners who engaged in the pre-revolutionary food discourse adopted the vernacular of both authenticity and flexibility (or fusion) to cater to a curious Anglo clientele.
When and why was Iranian cuisine most open to adaptation, eschewing “authenticity”? At what point did those in a higher social status embrace elements of Iranian cuisine as elegant and worthy of emulation (or adaptation)?Footnote 25 What made those elements, which authors and restaurateurs pointed to as intrinsic to the character of Iranian cuisine, authentically Iranian? And finally, what does the cosmopolitan reception of Iranian culture reveal about the pre-revolutionary Iranian immigrant experience in the United States?
Iranian-fusion interruptedFootnote 26
“Iranian stuffed eggplant is a romantic dish. Here it is made to please the American taste with the addition of wheat and barley kernels, which provide greater nutrition and an improved texture to the true Iranian recipe.”Footnote 27
Yotam Ottonlenghi, the Israeli chef who gained western notoriety with Jerusalem: A Cookbook, offers a Persian fusion dish in the pages of the New York Times with his recipe titled “Sweet and Sour Tofu with Barberries.”Footnote 28 A meditation on the tradition of Persian “hot” and “cold” foods (digestive markers), endeavoring toward internal balance, he prefaces the recipe with a discussion of Najmieh Batmanglij's 1983 cookbook Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies.Footnote 29 This book, like Julia Child's 1961 Mastering the Art of French Cooking, provides readers with suggestions to capture the essence of Iranian culinary tradition while acknowledging the changes within cooking and eating practices (evinced even by the title).Footnote 30
Food of Life illustrates a way of thinking about food and, although not all of the recipes are as vivid and delicious as classics such as Fesenjoon, it is a book of proofs, evidence that there is a rich tapestry of diverse food traditions that differ across the topography, tribes, and faiths of Iran. It is, in fact, the most well-known Iranian cookbook in the English language. Before the revolution, however, The Art of Cooking: A Collection of Iranian and Foreign Cuisines, published in 1964 by Roza Montazemi, was the most well-circulated among Iranians, both in the homeland and abroad.Footnote 31 In 1990, Grace Kirschenbaum, a reporter for the Oakland Tribune, wrote that Montazemi's cookbook
was written to fill a need that is no longer relevant. In pre-revolutionary Iran, women were interested in food that was a change from their daily fare, such as the French and Italian recipes Montazemi included. Iranians in exile, however, wanted to return to their Persian-Iranian cuisine.Footnote 32
Hence, the popularity of Batmanglij's works.
In a way, the effort to become more insular and authentic demonstrated the challenges of Iranians to access home, whether physically, through travels to Iran, or psychologically, as nostalgia for the Pahlavi period intensified.Footnote 33 Following the 1979 revolution, Iranian restaurateurs and cookbook writers presented the cuisine as static rather than elastic. Anglo-American audiences, by the mid-1980s, returned to Iranian tables, so to speak, their curiosity piqued by the secrets of this exotic land that had erected barriers to American tourism. In other words, the chef had replaced the travel agent; the professional kitchen had become the authentic destination.
Ottonlenghi strips us of this context, writing to a cosmopolitan audience—interestingly reminiscent of 1960s to 1970s’ food writing about Iran. He is interested in what Persian food can teach us about complementary ingredients. In other words, a recipe with tofu and barberries, the former a commonly understood East Asian ingredient and the latter associated with Iran, represents yet another contribution to a now vast discourse on “fusion” cuisine. Cara De Silva considers the American culinary landscape uniquely receptive to fusion precisely because of immigration:
Inevitably, food culture is part of that negotiation. The accommodation starts when immigrants, especially the first to arrive, must use the ingredients available in the new country to make the dishes of the old. In that sense, ethnic foods are often, and inescapably, fusion foods.Footnote 34
But neither Ottonlenghi, nor the reader who contributed a recipe to the Honolulu Star in 1955, represents the Iranian immigrant, negotiating their culture with their host society's. In fact, the purpose of these pieces, found in the pages of American newspapers, was to introduce a receptive audience to elements of Iranian culture that non-Iranians, as trusted mediators, consider(ed) adaptive and admirable. Scholars of foodways in the United States have been particularly attentive to the “emergence of contested spaces within which the chefs and their restaurant customers/patrons construct their cosmopolitan identities and acquire cultural capital and status through food practices.”Footnote 35 Fusion dishes became popular in these “contested spaces,” particularly among young urbanites.
These types of foods became celebrated in the American gourmet foodscape of the 1970s for “confer[ing] a cultural cosmopolitan identity,” as “[h]igh-income young urban professionals found value in what they perceived as ‘authentic’ international experiences, while chefs saw an opportunity to market ‘Asia’ to this highbrow clientele.”Footnote 36 Pieces in both the New York Times and Honolulu Star, separated by around fifty-five years, contribute similarly to ascribing value to supposedly “authentic” markers of Iranian cuisine and adapting them for an Anglophone audience interested in more highbrow culinary experiences.
Of course, food is more than the sum of its parts (i.e., its ingredients). For Ottonlenghi, Iranian food is characterized by “calm and balance.” As he writes: “Was there something in this dish, I wondered—the tangy barberries and creamy nuts; the sweet onion, orange and carrots—that was bringing about such an instant feeling of equanimity?”Footnote 37 An emphasis on the cosmopolitan patron, who would ascribe a cultural value to appreciating this exotic approach to cuisine, is also attested in the emphasis on a lifestyle, rooted in sustainability (here manifested in veganism).
If Iranian food has the ability to build “balance […] into the very fabric of a particular dish,” though, and the lessons of so-called Persian food move us beyond the individual dishes, then why is Ottonlenghi's fusion recipe such a rarity? In fact, in 1960, Mohammad Reza Shah himself insisted his chef serve a fusion cuisine at his court. As Louisiana's Monroe News-Star reporter, Jeanne Lesem, wrote, “Seyed Mahmoud Nateq-Abassi, head chef for H. I. M. Mohammad Reza Pahlevi and his court in Tehran, said that the Shah likes both Western and Persian food.” This effort to “blend,” as she called it, informed the shah's selection of head chefs. For instance, Nateq-Abbasi, who had been a court chef for eighteen years (since the age of fourteen, under his father's supervision) and head chef for seven years (since the age of twenty-five), had one foot in the doors of both Iranian and American restaurant life.Footnote 38
I argue that such a market existed before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, especially by the early 1970s. Newspapers, food magazines, and cookbooks were replete with fusion recipes that played on the exoticism of the Orient (placing Iran within the broader Asian culinary tradition) while attending to the balance inherent to the sweet and sour interplay, understood as the hallmark of Iranian food. Consider, for instance, a 1972 dish, “Persian Beef Exotica,” headlined in The Napa Valley Register. Pineapples, not a traditional ingredient in Iranian food, were added to the recipe to highlight “the Persian preference for the sweet and sour,” while compensating for the challenges of locating ingredients such as pomegranate syrup. “To the meatball creation, raisins, brown sugar, pineapple, nuts, vinegar and soy sauce are added […] Ease in cooking this is no further away than your grocer's shelf.”Footnote 39 A dialogue had emerged between Iranians and an intellectually curious Anglo audience, eager to blend Asian ingredients into accessible dishes for the home cook.
With the substantial increase in Iranian emigrants following the revolution, why have these types of recipes receded in favor of more “authentic” recipes? Did Iranian food writers and professional chefs shy away from fusion forms as “abrasive and impersonal” or a dilution “of clarity within flavor profiles”?Footnote 40 This is a well-known change that took place in the East Asian food landscape in the United States by the 2000s.
I argue that the Iranian diaspora experience sheds more light on these changes than broader Asian-American culinary trends, despite their connection in the pre-revolutionary period. The inclination of Iranian immigrants to preserve the traditions of the homeland became more pronounced after the revolution, as fewer immigrants could or wished to return home regularly (or at all), especially true for Baha'i and Jewish Iranians. The post-revolutionary period not only introduced new political pressures on Iranian immigrants, but also new incentives to market the cuisine to an emigre (rather than Anglo) audience. This analysis seeks to encourage historians of the Iranian diaspora to reckon more directly with non-fiction “exile literature,” especially food culture.Footnote 41
Iranian food writers, like those from the Levant, “[sketch] a diasporic network, bringing together the experiences and memories of an emerging community of Middle Eastern expatriates.”Footnote 42 The revolution and subsequent Iran-Iraq War created an environment that disincentivized return to Iran. As Mohsen Mobasher writes, “Unlike the steady emigration of students before the revolution and the swift flight of elites, high-ranking members of the former government, and investors during it, the post revolutionary period consisted of several phases of exodus,” including more diverse backgrounds (both in class and ethnoreligious identifications). By the time of the Iran-Iraq War, “middle-class and upper-middle-class professionals left Iran,” especially men, as many left “to escape the military draft.”Footnote 43 Ultimately, the influx shifted the local articulations of Iranian foodways.
Historians of Levantine and Iranian foodways similarly emphasize the variability of cuisine, which often makes unifying narratives challenging to construct.Footnote 44 Cooking is a lens, suggesting a voyeuristic impulse to peer into a culture, a family, that may or may not belong to you. Author of Persian Cooking: A Tale of Exotic Delights, Nesta Ramazani, the most successful pre-revolutionary Iranian cookbook author residing in the United States and writing for an Anglophone readership, gestured toward the difficulty of using restaurants as an accurate mediator of Iranian cuisine: “Very few of the wide range of Persian foods can be found in restaurants; their menus are almost invariably restricted to just three or four Persian dishes.”Footnote 45 Before 1979, food writers visiting Iranian restaurants (either in the United States or Iran) emphasized the Iranian-prepared basmati rice, various yogurt sides, and chelo-kabob, exemplifying the simplification of the cuisine discouraged by Ramazani. As described above, however, this phenomenon is commonplace, as host societies slowly identify certain techniques, dishes, and ingredients with a national cuisine—an indication that the community has articulated a coherent vision of its food culture to the public, which can then be adapted, assimilated, or rejected.
Although dishes differ from one family to another, the memory of Iranian food has slowly coalesced around particular traditions, collapsing familial/personal stories into national ones, privileging more elite culinary traditions over others. Consider, for instance, cookbook author Forough-es-Saltaneh Hekmat's warning, in 1961, to not synthesize “Persian dishes” into one legible national cuisine: “Not only do Persian dishes vary from one section of the country to another—just as, in China, Cantonese cuisine differs from Peking cooking—but from family to family.”Footnote 46 As one Baha'i from Yazd once shared with me, “I see these foods and recognize nothing; all we ate were root vegetables. We would boil them and mix them with rice.”Footnote 47
Indeed, access to spices (turmeric, allspice, saffron, and cinnamon, to name a few common ingredients in Iranian cuisine), careful combinations of complementary produce, and sophisticated plating were not of interest to most families. People ate what they could access. True of any national culinary tradition, the elites set standards not only for ingredients and preparation, but also for style and consumption patterns. Of course, Iranian emigres to the United States were, by and large, from elite families due to the structure of American immigration policies; thus, this elite culinary culture defined American understandings of the national cuisine.Footnote 48 Perhaps put too simply, Iranian elites taught cosmopolitan Americans how to adapt Iranian foodways to American lifestyles, traditions, and markets.
Iranians both in the homeland and abroad are diverse, of course, and food writers picked up on the warnings of Iranian cookbook authors, such as Ramazani and Hekmat, early on. Consider, for instance, an aside by one Louisiana food writer in 1970 describing Iranian kabobs as “Persian-Armenian” rather than Iranian, gesturing toward both the composition of the diaspora and the diversity associated with Iran.Footnote 49 One would thus imagine that Iranian food, fundamentally a fusion of different cooking traditions, would be ideally suited for the American fusion discourse.Footnote 50 Nevertheless, culinary historians may observe a brief but profound rupture in popular understandings of Iranian food, indicated by restaurant culture and cookbook market demands, following the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
According to the Statistical Yearbook produced by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, the late 1970s represented a transformation in Iranian immigration patterns. Between 1931–40, 195 Iranians were admitted to the country. In 1941–50, this increased dramatically, by about sevenfold, to 1,380 Iranians, though the number was still rather low. Between 1951–60, 3,388 Iranians were admitted. My study begins in 1960, the decade that observed a noticeable increase in the number of Iranians immigrants, with 10,339 entering the country. By 1971–80, however, 45,136 immigrants from Iran settled in the United States, a more than fourfold increase.Footnote 51 The years of the revolution, however, proved especially active.
Beginning in 1976, a significant number of “non-immigrants” began entering the United States from Iran; this category represents those who came to study or work, intending to leave upon the completion of their authorized stay. In 1970, for instance, there were 14,475 non-immigrants, compared to 1,825 immigrants (and no refugees or asylees). Compare this to 1976, with 72,549 Iranian non-immigrants arriving in the United States (a fivefold increase) and 3,731 immigrants (a twofold increase). By 1978, there were a whopping 130,545 Iranian non-immigrants admitted to the United States (an almost twofold increase from just two years earlier) and 5,861 immigrants (about 1.5 times the number of two years earlier, but still relatively low in absolute terms). The post-revolutionary period observed a steady increase in immigrant numbers and a steady decrease in non-immigrant numbers; though, by the 1990s, these numbers stabilized to under 15,000 immigrants and under 30,000 non-immigrants. To illustrate the rapidity of the change, consider 1985, when 16,071 immigrants were admitted from Iran and 57,831 non-immigrants (already about 44% of the 1978 high), with 5,420 asylees. By 1987, the immigrant number was somewhat stable, at 14,426, but the non-immigrant number had collapsed to 29,950 (about 23% of the 1978 high). In the post-revolutionary period, these large numbers of emigres led to a dramatic transformation in market demands, not only for food (i.e., restaurants, supermarkets, food writing, etc.) but also a host of other services.Footnote 52
Before the revolution, recipes with an Iranian “twist” could be found without much concern for authenticity, pitched to a non-Middle Eastern readership; restaurants presented as ambiguously and mysteriously Oriental with non-Oriental options (for the less adventurous); and cookbook authors proved expertise by adopting the role of a cultural mediator for uninitiated Anglos. Post-revolution, promoters of Iranian cuisine in the United States responded to political pressures and new immigration patterns. By the mid-1980s, those interested in Iran were not non-Iranians exoticizing the Orient, but Iranian immigrants, nostalgic for home. Thus, the chatter about Iranian food became increasingly introspective. As the trauma of the hostage crisis subsided among non-Iranians in the US, and the atmosphere around Iranians in America shifted (with a general recognition by Anglo-Americans that Iranian exiles were themselves displeased with the revolution), an opening emerged in the food discourse.
Nevertheless, the landscape would remain changed. No longer were the interlocutors white Americans or Iranians with European “credentials” (a parent, spouse, or network of friends of European descent), but Iranians who declared their full Iranian heritage (or, at least, could visit). Iranian restaurateurs leaned into their heritage and offered distinctly regional food—menus featured fewer hamburgers and more khoresh (stew). These writers and restaurateurs, uniquely capable of reproducing the cuisine for an Iranian readership, also built an elite, cosmopolitan American patronage curious about the authentic Iranian experience, which many could no longer access through travel after the revolution.
A delicious initiation: cookbooks
“Scheherazade could have used some help from Nesta Ramazani.” Footnote 53
In the pre-revolutionary period, Iran represented an exotic and distant other, which food writers mapped for Anglo readers. It would not be until later, in the 1970s, that Iranian food acquired its own cultural ambassadors, like Nesta Ramazani, with popular cookbooks published and restaurants with local followings. This is the Iran exhibited by early Iranian cookbook authors, who attempted to introduce Americans to Iran through food (consider the above 1955 excerpt introducing Iranian-style stuffed eggplant: “It was long ago, in the fabled land of Persia, that Aladdin commanded savory meals to appear before him on platters of exquisite silver”).Footnote 54
Cookbook historian Waldo Lincoln writes, “In the history of Western publishing, cookbooks have produced more bestsellers than any other genre.”Footnote 55 The genre developed a commercial niche in 16th-century Europe, as imagery and narratives began to animate the texts. In the west, there was, since the 18th century, a recognition that there were different readers for cookbooks—the professional chef (coded as masculine) and the amateur home cook (coded as feminine). For instance, Hannah Glasse's 1747 Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (similar to contemporary titles such as Forough-es-Saltaneh Hekmat's 1961 The Art of Persian Cooking or the framing of Maideh Mazdah Magee's 1960 cookbook as ideal for the “homemaker-hostess”) “aims to demystify the egoistic masculine fantasy of culinary elitism” by insisting that “anyone can cook,” including the housewife.Footnote 56
Nassrollah Islami, an Iranian cookbook writer (unique in his gender), argued that his 1960 contribution, Persian Cookery, proved especially significant because the short soft-bound book would be less expensive and more “handy to […] housewives.”Footnote 57 Indeed, while restaurateurs were almost exclusively men, cookbook writers were almost exclusively women, with different audiences and concerns (especially revolving around the healthful characteristics of food and the feasibility of recipes for the American home cook).
For these books to become bestsellers, it was imperative to argue for the value of Iranian cuisine for the American diet. After all, it is one thing for an English woman to offer other English women the tools to cook English food. Here, Iranian cooks invited non-Iranians to recreate dishes with which they were not familiar. Islami wrote that Persian housewives proved the ideal conduits of this knowledge, but they were simply too busy “in the kitchen, […] practicing the theories she has inherited from her ancestors,” to communicate their ancient knowledge with English-speaking audiences.Footnote 58
After the 1979 revolution, the presentation of Iranian dishes took on a different flavor (pun intended): no longer were they confided in understanding tones from woman-author to woman-reader (the latter curious if low-information and orientalizing) but from cookbook author to a potentially hostile public or a nostalgic Iranian reader. Iran slowly transformed from regionally ambiguous, finding its way into the minds of Americans as a healthful Asian cuisine, to political and therefore unappetizing. The incentives shifted from creatively diluting Iranian recipes for an Anglo-American audience to championing authenticity for a more diverse readership. As Gabaccia reminds us, those who sell ethnic food in America must balance “a desire for authenticity” with “the promise of good profits.”Footnote 59
In the 1960s, though, cookbook authors attempted to introduce Iranian cuisine to American readers. Maideh Mazda Magee, for instance, “a Persian woman now living in the United States,” published In a Persian Kitchen in 1960. The only three ingredients from the book that the Chattanooga Daily Times considered inaccessible to the average American were “Baklava pastry, pomegranate juice and sumac.” Married to Charles Magee, an associate professor of languages at the US Naval Intelligence School, this “Persian housewife” produced recipes that would appeal, especially, to Americans. After all, she was married to an American man and boasted American friends who “vouch[ed]” for her “flavors.”Footnote 60 This is quite distinct from the phenomenon of the later, post-revolutionary cookbook authors described by Khalili, who “all insist on establishing their Iranian bona fides through their own or their parents’ histories.”Footnote 61 In the pre-revolutionary period, cookbook authors established their bona fides by demonstrating an understanding of the Anglo-American flavor palate, culture, and kitchen.
In so doing, Magee mediated Iranian cooking through new applications of familiar ingredients, such as yogurt and eggplant. She seemingly succeeded in attracting readers, as her book broke out into the regional press, with reviews appearing in places such as Missouri's Carthage Evening Press and the Indianapolis Star.Footnote 62 The newspapers were clear about the readership: “The recipes presented here are just different enough to appeal to the homemaker-hostess who wants to surprise friends with something new.”Footnote 63 Indeed, Magee remained in the public eye, offering lectures and interviews to those curious about Iran for years to come.Footnote 64 The role of the woman cookbook author was understood, early on, as a project to humanize Iranians for Anglo-Americans and increase global awareness of Iran's civilizational (here, culinary) contributions.
The following year, Forough-es-Saltaneh Hekmat, residing in Los Angeles, published The Art of Persian Cooking, which offered both philosophical wisdom and the beauty of ancient cuisine (similar to Food of Life, published over thirty years later). The book emphasized the healthful properties that Iranian cookbook authors promoted, a phenomenon that resonated with Anglo home cooks. Indeed, American cookbooks published since the post-World War II period have “cater[ed] to a generation […] whose search for self-help guides—perhaps especially for eating—propels them to seek easy, quick answers to problems associated with weight gain, dietary disorders, and other similar issues.”Footnote 65
Framed as an invitation to a cosmopolitan Anglo audience, earnestly bridging cultural divides, Hekmat's text was distinct from her contemporaries, as she challenged the homogenization of Iranian cuisine while asserting her local heritage as important to her cooking credentials.Footnote 66 “In general the peerage of Shiraz has always been famous throughout Persia for exceptional skill in the culinary arts, and many of the recipes in this book are from Shiraz, handed down to me by my grandmothers.”Footnote 67 For Hekmat, Iranian cooking was a reflection of the contribution of Iranian women to the national and regional cultures; according to Hekmat, “the influence of Persian culinary art spread to all the Middle Eastern countries,” specifically “Turkey, Iraq, Armenia, and Syria,” an interesting grouping of culinary peers.Footnote 68
On the other hand, cookbooks produced in Iran, which appealed to an Iranian emigre audience, welcomed western influences, i.e., European dishes fused with Iranian sensibilities. Most famously, Roza Montazemi's The Art of Cooking, mentioned earlier in this article, offered over 600 Iranian and non-Iranian recipes.Footnote 69 Khalili's “The Savor of Memory: A Review Essay on Iranian Cookbooks,” opens her piece with Montazemi's “venerable cookbook.”Footnote 70 Having taught hundreds to cook in Tehran, Montazemi's cookbook proved incredibly popular, with more than one million copies sold.
Americans in Iran noticed elite Iranians melding local and foreign techniques and ingredients. Consider another cookbook, spiral bound, produced by the American Women's Club of Tehran in 1965, Americans Cook in Iran. The text represented a compilation of beverages and appetizers, breads and pastries, salads and soups—though not restricted to Iranian recipes. Here, the recipes were crafted for the Iranian market, and the inclusion of “some recipes for Iranian dishes” reflected the dynamic food culture among cosmopolitan and western(ized) elites in Tehran.Footnote 71
In the 1970s, Iranian cookbooks penetrated more elite American circles (outside the diplomatic circuit on the Hill), particularly those with more unusual lifestyles. By then, a fusion discourse had emerged around Iranian food. For instance, Cybill Shepherd, who claimed to use “Iranian, Egyptian, Middle Eastern cookbooks” to entertain friends, considered these cuisines flexible enough for a diet concerned with sustainability.Footnote 72 Shepherd was not the only celebrity interested in Iranian cuisine's unique characteristics. Jennifer O'Neill, who visited Iran to shoot the film Caravans, described her love of “Persian bread,” which she felt offered meaningful benefits as someone who “read a lot about vitamins and minerals.”Footnote 73
Vegetarians, interested in varied grains–such as bulgar–and the nutritional benefits of yogurt, were especially drawn to Iranian food. Indeed, Islami's first recipe in his short 1960 volume Persian Cookery offered instructions to make yogurt from scratch, in no small measure because “[a] Persian housewife[’s…] ancestors have had this ‘health food’ for generations,” and are both delicious and nutritious.Footnote 74 Thus, Iranian food entered the public repertoire as part of cosmopolitan food culture, particularly for more health-conscious foodies (not dissimilar from Ottonlenghi's recent piece in the New York Times, described at the start of this article).
It was not only actors in Beverly Hills extolling the virtues of Iranian cuisine. The Oakland Tribune offered the headline, “Karen Cooks with Culture” about the wife of Malcolm Whyte, the founder of Troubador Press, famous for revolutionizing coloring books. The Complete Yogurt Cookbook by Karen Cross Whyte emphasized the healthful characteristics of yogurt, building on Iranian recipes and offering a vision of their particular lifestyle.Footnote 75 In fact, in 1968, the United Nations noted Iran's “Mast (Yogurt) and Cucumber Soup” as one of “The World's Favorite Recipes.”Footnote 76
The first major Iranian cookbook published in the English language to be seriously reviewed by Anglo writers, however, was Nesta Ramazani's 1971 Persian Cooking: A Table of Exotic Delights. In this, the author writes about her unique background, particularly her English mother and Iranian father. Raised in Iran, she attended an American high school and a French college. She taught ballet, contributing to the founding of the National Iranian Ballet Company following World War II. She thus personified the melding of East and West, which is likely why she became the break-out star of Iranian cookbook authors; her smiling photographs made the cuisine more welcoming and approachable, and she effectively branded herself within both the book and marketing campaign promoting its sales.
Ramazani moved to Charlottesville, North Carolina, in 1952 with her husband, Rouhollah, who earned a PhD in law. A professor of International Law and Middle East Affairs at the University of Virginia, her husband anchored her and her four children in the United States, though she remained invested in Iran. During her 1968–69 Fulbright trip to Tehran with her four children, she collected recipes for her cookbook. Her lifestyle, elite class (“[b]rought up with servants, Mrs. Ramazani did not actually begin cooking until she married,” reported journalist Elizabeth Howard), and heritage made her a dynamic character for Americans.Footnote 77 Ramazani elevated the Iranian aesthetic as a wealthy conduit for the cuisine, despite the humble origins of Iranian food.
In general, journalists seemed to trust elite Iranian women, especially those with American spouses, to explain the virtues of Iranian food. Returning to the discussion earlier in this article on the status conferred by high-brow cuisines, Ramazani reached a cosmopolitan audience specifically because of her familiar yet exotic background, boasting an elite upbringing that made the food more desirable for urbanites. The press and print media introduced Iranian food to Anglo readers through these types of women. For instance, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin devoted a third of a page in their cooking section in 1976 to an Iranian computer scientist who “didn't know how to cook” until just five years earlier, when her Anglo-American husband made an Iranian dish from an Iranian cookbook they had been gifted. “We had servants in our home in Teheran,” Sina Mowzoon shared with the reporter, “We didn't have to cook.” Therein lay her credibility for the American reader: she learned just as an Anglo-American would, almost as an outsider, protected by her class from the busy-work of cooking. And her husband served as the cultural mediator, allowing the reader to access “Persian cooking” just as he had—not from his wife's “Persian touch,” but from his skill as an outsider.Footnote 78
Although Ramazani and Mowzoon both came from affluent families and arrived to cooking later in life, Ramazani had become determined to not only teach Americans about the unique aspects of Persian food, including the nutritious benefits of ingredients such as yogurt, but also Iranian sophistication, casting Iranian food as comparable to “French or Chinese.”Footnote 79 She argued that “the Iranian diet” had “remained principally the same,” static—though, for Americans, novel since so few had experienced “fresh quince, Chinese parsley, fenugreek, dried lime, and pomegranate syrup.”Footnote 80 These unusual ingredients would require effort to procure, but they would be worthwhile, she promised.Footnote 81 The introduction of her cookbook opened with 19th-century European observations of Iranian food, allowing their (perhaps unearned) credibility with the reader to prove the value of Iranian foodways.
Ramazani's Persian Cooking was even reviewed by academic outlets such as the Middle East Journal. Mary Hooglund applauded her effort in 1975, writing that Ramazani's cookbook allowed Iranian cuisine to enter the frame of America's healthful foods. “This volume,” Hooglund wrote, is “compatible with current concerns in eating habits.” Hooglund also believed that Ramazani's identity made her uniquely qualified to make Iranian food legible for an American audience. “Although Nesta Ramazani is half Iranian and grew up in Iran,” Hooglund argues, “her many years of experience in cooking Iranian food in American kitchens has qualified her to adapt Persian cuisine to American conditions and cooking habits” without sacrificing “authenticity.”Footnote 82
Indeed, Ramazani presented herself as a cultural interlocutor, explaining, for instance, that Iran, a “Muslim country,” does not offer “cocktail appetizers,” but “there are a number of Persian dishes that, in their original form or slightly modified, do lend themselves to being served as hors d'oeuvres or appetizers, although, admittedly, that was not their original purpose.”Footnote 83 This nimble approach to Iranian cuisine—asserting the values of the nation while accommodating forms to suit American dining culture—proves indicative of her overall approach. Although this book fits in the mold of introducing Americans to “authentic” Iranian food—rather than the fusion Iranian recipes popular in the 1970s—Ramazani's message differed from those of her predecessors in the 1960s. She adapted the Iranian cooking style to the American kitchen, with a (purported) fluency in the Anglo-American palate.
There were, of course, locally consumed Iranian cookbooks, especially in California, where many Iranians settled. For instance, in 1974, Parvin Nadimi, of Hayward, California, was convinced by her students at the San Leandro YWCA to compile all of her lessons and recipes into a book.Footnote 84 Indeed, I believe there are many local community cookbooks, both written by Iranians who worked directly with curious Anglo home cooks and edited community collections that included Iranian recipes. These cookbooks could add a more social history dimension to cookbook culture, with local authors responding to the interests and curiosities of their immediate communities. These recipes might reflect the demographic makeup of their students and environment, with ingredients and techniques unique to the cultural composition of local towns populated by Iranian emigres.
Too hot in the kitchen
“The restaurant will be closed for a while.” Footnote 85
Before the Islamic Revolution, Iranian food was, more or less, nondescript; a cuisine that could be folded into more familiar East Asian or Mediterranean traditions. In some ways, this mirrored the conflicted relationship between Iranian emigres and American institutions. In the highly racialized landscape of mid-20th-century America, Iranians presented challenges in classification. Although some Iranians could “pass” as white, restrictive laws in the United States did apply to those of Middle Eastern descent.Footnote 86 Iranians, nevertheless, benefited from the robust relationship between American and Iranian institutions.Footnote 87 In fact, these very relationships elicited a curiosity about food—consider, for instance, a 1958 ad in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, authored by one Rita Gonzalez “looking for recipes for Iranian cookies and other foods from this nation, so she can entertain servicemen from Iran with ‘home cooking.’”Footnote 88
This was likely an unusual experience, as one food writer in 1960 illustrated in an article about Maideh Masda Magee's Iranian cookbook, which opened with: “You're not likely to be entertaining Persian guests—(if you do please let us know right away).”Footnote 89 Indeed, one Nancy Olthof did reach out to the Grand Rapids Press in Michigan when she hosted an Iranian guest in 1977, and the paper rewarded her initiative by publishing Olthof's recipe for Persian rice.Footnote 90
Iranians themselves, rare as they were to find in Johnson City, Tennessee or Grand Rapids, Michigan, were becoming more numerous in the United States, especially after the passage of landmark immigration reforms, such as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. By 1970, even the Midwest had received numerous students from Iran (i.e., non-immigrants), with the city of Chicago alone boasting about 1,000.Footnote 91 That did not necessarily mean that the cuisine had achieved notoriety or a critical mass of customers. In fact, Kiu Haghighi, an Iranian architect in Chicago, considered opening an Iranian restaurant with his “Chicago-born wife” and business partner, but ultimately agreed that “there would be fewer problems with” a shop that sold Iranian imports such as art, mosaics, and vases.Footnote 92
Although much work needs to be done on the topic of the Iranian culinary landscape in the pre-revolutionary years, it appears, based on the works of food writers who visited Iran, that Iranian chefs operating in upscale environs like northern Tehran considered western food elite (unsurprisingly). Thus, they prioritized “the pseudo-French ways”—methods, style, cuisine—that they had likely learned through culinary training.Footnote 93 There are some allusions in the record (though, again, little work has been done on this topic) to Iranian chefs training in the west, introduced to the art of modern cooking and restaurant management through the French chef apprenticeship circuit.
Even if Anglo-Americans traveled to Tehran, it was possible to seldom encounter “authentic” Iranian cuisine and, instead, eat western fare prepared by Iranian chefs. For the tourist who wanted to try “the [true] staple and the glory […] of Iranian cooking,” food writers insisted their American compatriots
wander into the older parts of town and take a chance on any of the smaller food shops that claim to offer some variety of chelokebab, the Iranian national dish, and the standard by which all their cookery is measured.Footnote 94
One travel writer in 1966 expressed frustration with the challenges of finding “a middle-class Iranian restaurant” with few tourists in Tehran.Footnote 95 Thus, elite Iranian emigres, arriving in the United States for education or economic opportunity, identified Iranian cuisine as an area in which they could assert their heritage, contrary to their colleagues in urban Iran, who prioritized western cuisines and/or forms for their western(ized) clientele.
In the United States, up until the revolution, Iranian restaurants were uncommon; most restaurateurs and managers gestured toward an Oriental theme, one or two uniquely Iranian dishes (i.e., lamb kabob), and an assortment of fusion dishes or western fare.Footnote 96 Consider the advertisement for the Persian Gardens in Tustin, California: “Treat the family to our specialty shish-kabob in a different atmosphere” with live entertainment, a “Persian dancer,” alongside an image of the dancer rather than the food.Footnote 97 Relatedly, embracing an ancient ethnolinguistic heritage (“Persian” rather than “Iranian”) seemed commonplace well before the revolution. Consider, for instance, the names of the following restaurants, which operated between 1960–70: Persian Garden Restaurant (in Tustin, California), the Persian Room (in Modesto, California), another Persian Room (in Reno, Nevada), or the characterization of restaurants as Persian, such as “the Persian restaurant, the Scheherazade” (in Hollywood, Los Angeles) and The Shah, billed as an “Afghan-Persian restaurant” when it opened in 1969 (in Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles).Footnote 98
Leaning into Persian-ness continued into the 1970s. Consider Oakland's Persian Village, for instance, founded in 1973 by Morey Abidi, an engineer who arrived in the Bay Area in 1959, and his restaurateur brother, Fred, who joined Morey in California in 1971.Footnote 99 Interestingly, many of the restaurant owners and founders had earned professional degrees and arrived to the restaurant industry later in life, with independent capital. Although they offered Iranian dishes, they did not necessarily code their restaurants as Iranian or Persian, at all; rather, they selected American names and offered more familiar dishes alongside Iranian cuisine.Footnote 100 Like the Persian Village, Shari's Food Safari was an Iranian family-operated business. Located in San Francisco, it became “a full-fledged Iranian restaurant” by 1975, serving three nightly “Persian stews” (ghormeh sabzi, fesenjoon, and gheymeh) in addition to French fries, sausage, BLTs, and bacon burgers.Footnote 101 By leaning into Anglo-American patrons, restaurant owners attempted to expand their customer base. Reza Teharani, who had studied industrial management and economics at the University of San Francisco, exemplified this trend, opening Persian restaurants with nondescript names in Berkeley, such as The Metropol and Bernini's. He was not unique. Mamoucher Mohammadi, “who runs The Burgundy Steak House” on Shattuck in Berkeley, was a graduate of California Polytechnic State University's mechanical engineering program in 1958. “Students,” the steak house's primary customers, “like Persian food and they like this atmosphere,” Mohammadi explained to a reporter from the San Francisco Examiner, “pointing to the Middle Eastern decorations on the wall.”Footnote 102 Still, the branding and marketing used to draw clientele indicated an effort to present Iranian food as cosmopolitan.
For instance, The Shah, a popular Southern California restaurant, presented itself as a high-brow fusion kitchen. One advertisement read as follows:
Featuring the cuisine of kings. Historic dishes of the Afghanistan and Persian Empire. Also American entrees. […] Dinners […] include soup, salad, bread and cheese, entree, vegetable, potato, rice and dessert. Specializing in lamb, beef and chicken Shish-Kebab, plus exotic gourmet dishes.Footnote 103
This coheres with the research of sociologists Pyong Gap Min and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, who examine Korean and Iranian entrepreneurship in Los Angeles, particularly since the 1980s. Where they found Korean businesses leaned on “ethnic resources” such as “private loans, unpaid family labor, and co-ethnic members,” Iranian businesses depended on “class resources,” such as “high education and access to financial capital,” to run their businesses.Footnote 104 These restaurateurs often emphasized their own education and class background, and carefully coded Iranian cuisine as upscale, even when their clientele consisted of undergraduate students.
Of course, restaurants were not the only places an American could encounter Iranian food. Iranians invited non-Iranian friends to their homes with offers of food. Universities with Middle Eastern Studies departments or programs that emphasized the region hosted potlucks so that students could benefit from a more holistic understanding of the region. For instance, The Oregonian profiled Professor Kazem Tehrani in 1977, whose course concluded with a “potluck” dinner. “Tehrani, a native Iranian […] has become a one-man cultural emissary to the Portland community.” For Portland State University, “[c]ooking classes are part of the whole Middle Eastern concept […] and for two or three months in advance of each ‘potluck’ students share recipes—‘and mistakes,’ one student noted—before preparing them for their guests.”Footnote 105
A restaurant, however, sold the Iranian experience through its atmosphere and food. What American would buy this product after the Islamic Revolution and hostage crisis?Footnote 106 In March 1969, Pari and Anwar Afzali founded The Shah, an Afghan-Iranian restaurant, in California's Manhattan Beach, which Torrance California's The Daily Breeze declared “unique […] with interesting and delicious cuisine”—“in a class by itself.”Footnote 107 In 1979, Afzali announced that The Shah would now be known as The Silk Road in an effort to “show our support for the American people.”Footnote 108 Ultimately, Anwar, the Afghan partner in the operation, became the public-facing owner.
The Shah of Manhattan Beach was not the only shah in dire straits. In 1979, the New York Times described the efforts of the owners of Shah Abbas, a high-end restaurant opened in 1978 within the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel using the moniker of the famous Safavid king to rebrand the hotel. After spending “$2 million decorating their restaurant,” presumably in the Iranian style, they
decided that they cannot make a go of it any longer as an Iranian establishment. They informed their 40 employees yesterday that they would be laid off for the next few weeks until the restaurant can reopen under a new name, serving what was described as “Mediterranean cuisine.”
This would be more palatable to hungry Americans who did not want to be reminded of politics while dining out with their families. “According to the dining-room manager, Patrick Grey, business fell by as much as 35 percent after the takeover of the American Embassy in Teheran.”Footnote 109
Is Iranian food “Mediterranean,” though? Can the cuisine be evoked by allusions to the “Silk Road”? Presumably, the owners of Shah Abbas, four of whom were naturalized Americans born in Iran, hoped to maintain some elements of a “Persian” menu, but believed they could do so while presenting their cuisine under the broader umbrella of “Mediterranean.” The use of the term, which gestures toward Iran's proximity to countries that touch the Mediterranean, demonstrates the challenge of situating Iranian food within other traditions, the way that Lebanese and Moroccan cuisines have effectively been absorbed into this wider Mediterranean world. Is rose water quintessentially Mediterranean or Iranian? Is saffron just another Mediterranean ingredient or, like caviar, does it have some intrinsic connection to Iran, which cannot be elided by a nod to a body of water?Footnote 110
Nevertheless, the decision to dissimulate was made under extreme pressure. Iranian restaurants became targets of violence, just as Iranians themselves experienced discrimination and violence. In November 1979, patrons found “[a] small hand-lettered sign on the front of Shari's Food Safari in San Francisco” stating: “[t]he restaurant will be closed for a while.” Located on Union Street Plaza, Shari's had been “ransacked” by “anti-Iranian vandals.”Footnote 111
By 1981, when the wife of one Iranian clinical professor in obstetrics and gynecology at New York University shared her tentative plans to create “a line of Persian food,” she had a clear understanding of her customer base. She was not selling the Iranian experience to curious Anglo-Americans, she was selling the experience to Iranians in the United States who “miss the food they ate back home.”Footnote 112 An Iranian grocer would be in a unique position to capitalize on this nostalgia, as
new ethnic consumers often preferred to buy from businessmen with ties to a specific ethnic community rather than from a corporation with no ethnic authenticity to its credit. The ethnic revival encourages, in turn, a revival of small businesses as a growing segment of the American economy.Footnote 113
In the United States, this type of revival certainly transpired after the Islamic Revolution.
Humanitarianism for foodies
“There are so many Persian students and Iranian residents here [in the United States] who miss the food they ate back home, the idea [a line of Iranian food for supermarkets] would sell.”Footnote 114
Cookbooks and other methods of recipe-sharing have, for some time, represented not only a means of preserving a culture but also humanizing a people. For instance, during the heat of the revolution, Arundel Living's Cook of the Week was Pat Collins, who boasted living in Iran for three years, learning Persian, and developing the skills to effectively communicate the art of Iranian cooking (which she claimed derived from her reading of Zinat, a cookbook). “Cooking is an all-day occupation in Iran,” wrote Nana Whalen, who featured Pat Collins for The Baltimore Sun, “The women shop for each meal, each day. Special breads are purchased on each shopping trip. Once food is brought into the kitchen, it must be treated immediately.”Footnote 115 This portrait of the Iranian kitchen contrasted the hyper-masculine public space, which occupied the imagination of Americans, with men (and some women) protesting in the streets and taking American hostages in the embassy.
During the early 1980s, “Iran, to put it mildly, was not an appetizing word”; still, there was a marked shift by the mid-1980s, especially among liberal urbanites, as Americans slowly put the revolution and hostage crisis behind them.Footnote 116 Furthermore, the composition of the emigrants (many of them anti-regime and/or exiled), made the cookbooks–increasingly addressed to Iranians themselves–fundamentally less threatening to American readers. Iranians had suffered more from revolutionary Iranian radicals than had Americans, food critics gently implied, as they encouraged their audience, foodies and cookbook enthusiasts, to overcome their prejudices and indulge in Iranian food.
Iranian exiles began to mediate Iranian cuisine for an American audience, reassuring readers and restaurant patrons about Anglo positionality to the cuisine. These exiles, as betrayed natives, insisted that they did not support the Islamic Republic even though they did respect Iran's culinary tradition. Consider a profile in the Springfield Leader and Press on the Dastmalchi family in Springfield, Missouri: a story about Iranian food, the reporter highlights the fact that the family left Iran in 1978. Although the reporter does not state directly that the family could not return, the language implies this.Footnote 117 Another profile on the Jewish holiday of Passover conveys a similar story: a New York Times reporter interviews the matriarch of the Amini family, who explains that she is herself working on a “Persian Jewish” cookbook and serves Persian seder dishes. The Aminis suggest that they do not plan to return and, in fact, according to their narrative, “Persian Jews began their exodus to the United States and Israel about 35 years ago.”Footnote 118 That Iranians cooked for nostalgia, and did not feel comfortable returning “home,” offered an entry point for Anglo readers alienated from Iran by the revolution and hostage crisis. As an elite professional wife, inexperienced in Persian cooking but knowledgeable about its form, represented the entry point for a previous generation of curious Anglo readers of cookbooks, the alienated Iranian exile became the new interlocutor, translating the values of Iranian civilization.
Through the 1980s, tensions slowly thawed, and food critics coded interest in Iranian cuisine as indicative of humanitarianism, gesturing toward the value of cultural exchange to build bridges and peace. Food critics searched for authentic Iranian food, encouraging their readers to visit “restaurants [that] uphold the Persian tradition.”Footnote 119 In five short years after the hostage crisis, Iranian food had become, according to one Los Angeles Times writer, “[a]part from Chinese, the most influential cuisine in Asia.”Footnote 120 In fact, food critics were taken by these “foods of faraway lands,” which appeared to remain a kind of insider secret among those residing near large expat communities in places such as Los Angeles.Footnote 121 Authors wrote pieces about the “hearty, hunky, fluffy, and sublime” nature of Iranian cuisine.Footnote 122 In 1985, even outside of Los Angeles, The Pittsburgh Press took out a full page dedicated to Persian New Year and “authentic” recipes Iranians made for the occasion.Footnote 123 Thus, for the more cosmopolitan reader, the press offered implicit permission to express interest in this cuisine—Iranian food, once coded as healthful, now represented a means to build bridges with immigrants and, perhaps, heal from the trauma of the hostage crisis.
These writers, who wished to approximate the Iranian experience, searched for the elusive “slice of Iranian life” through restaurants founded by emigres, emissaries of Iranian culture. Iranian food, as articulated in the English language for an Anglophone audience, cannot escape the revolution. The Islamic Revolution's legacy and the reputation of Iran as an unfamiliar and unsafe country continued to frame cookbooks for decades to come. Authors trade on that exoticism to explain their commitment to traditional approaches (not replacing lamb with tofu, for instance). The readership's inability to visit Iran (whether true or imagined) justifies the general discomfort of authors to wander too far from the nation's culinary consensus.
Since the earliest cookbooks written in English for American audiences, there has been a conscious effort to introduce Iranians through their food. Inviting patrons and readers into the world of Iranian food goes beyond evaluating the culinary merits of Iranian food; the work is often conveyed as activism, an effort to de-escalate tension between peoples, celebrate differences, and learn about a civilization that US passport holders might not be able to explore. Of course, this is not unique to Iran. Food has always represented a means for emigre communities to introduce themselves, frame their civilizations (through food fairs or festivals where they group with similar cultures), and appeal to American sensibilities by diluting (or enhancing) their culinary specificities.Footnote 124
Ultimately, when things were too hot in the kitchen, restaurant owners tried to turn the temperature down by, perhaps, not reminding their patrons that they were “supporting,” through their dollars, Iranian businesses. Nevertheless, there would be others who could, later, trade on that volatility as a means to attract attention from curious Americans who did not feel comfortable traveling to Iran but did want to learn about the civilization—and not the ways that it cohered with other cultures but the ways in which it stood alone, as the Islamic Republic's peculiar theocracy exoticized Iran—a nation behind an (imagined) Islamist iron curtain.
Conclusion
At the start of this essay, I posed several questions: When and why was Iranian cuisine most open to adaptation, eschewing “authenticity”? At what point did those in a higher social status embrace elements of Iranian cuisine as elegant and worthy of emulation (or adaptation)? What made those elements, which authors and restaurateurs pointed to as intrinsic to the character of Iranian cuisine, authentically Iranian? And finally, what does the cosmopolitan reception of Iranian culture reveal about the Iranian immigrant experience in the United States?
I hope that “Cooking Iranian Food in America” begins to answer these questions, at least for the period under study (with an eye to the post-revolutionary period as a point of comparison). In the 1960s and 1970s, Iranian cookbook authors and restaurateurs marketed their contribution to the Iranian culinary arts quite differently than they do today, and more in line with the trends observed by historians of East Asian food in the United States. Although Iranian cookbook authors, mostly women, presented their foods as “authentic,” they were also elite cultural mediators, easing Anglophone readers into an exotic and unfamiliar territory. Through their intimate knowledge of American or European civilization, these authors claimed to make careful adaptations that did not sacrifice the unique elements of Iranian cuisine. They simply made cooking the meals more accessible, they insisted, especially for the homemaker.
Restaurateurs, through their advertisements and media engagements, made these trends more explicit. By articulating their cuisine as worthy of fine dining, they hoped to earn an urban cosmopolitan clientele while also inviting less adventurous guests—i.e., offering hamburgers alongside kabobs. This balancing act manifested not only on the menu; for instance, an owner might name his restaurant The Burgundy Steak House but decorate the interior with Iranian art. A menu could only be so long, however; the restaurateur had to make calculated choices about dishes to include and exclude, which resulted in the simplification of Iranian cuisine (often decried by cookbook authors freer to introduce Iranian cookery in a comprehensive form through recipes). This simplification, however, proved crucial to the cosmopolitan American consciousness, as certain meals and techniques were readily identified as “Iranian,” or rather “Persian,” and therefore permeated other cooking traditions, becoming a piece of the rich tapestry of ethnic foods in America.
These strategic decisions, meant to entice customers and appeal to Anglophone audiences, were successful, as Anglo-Americans engaged with Iranian cuisine, integrating elements they understood as identifiably Iranian into their repertoires through fusion dishes. Evidence of culinary adaptation and flexibility, as well as a cohesive vision of Iran's contribution to America's gastronomic landscape (i.e., as healthful food rooted in an ancient, but mysterious, tradition), changed after the Islamic Revolution. At this point, both the political zeitgeist and market incentives transformed.
It would take some time for American readers and customers to return to Iranian cuisine—and, by then, they were less interested in the western bona fides of chefs and more invested in the “latest from abroad” in “[t]heir search for foreign, haute, or at least nouvelle cuisine,” which opened “new opportunities for foreign-born and trained immigrant chefs.”Footnote 125 Already, cookbook authors and restaurateurs had adjusted their approach to appeal to recent Iranian immigrants, nostalgic for a home to which they could not return (as the Pahlavi monarchy crumbled and “home” became a time rather than a place). As Anglo cosmopolitan consumers returned to Iranian food, it had become more insular and, therefore, (to their eyes) more “authentic,” effectively replacing the experience of traveling to Iran, which most Americans could no longer easily do.
By examining the potentiality of Iranian cuisine's integration into the mainstream American palate and the interruption of this process as a result of the Islamic Revolution, we may better understand the exchange between Iranian immigrants and their host society. Furthermore, a historical analysis of food culture sheds light on the dynamics that shaped Iranian entrepreneurship and consumption patterns. There are, of course, variables that I do not cover here; for instance, by offering a national rather than regional story, I inevitably flatten the culinary contributions of those I study (surely the market incentives were quite different in Los Angeles, where most Iranian restaurants could be found, and North Carolina, where the most famous pre-revolutionary cookbook author resided). Additionally, although I touch on foodstuffs, I do not take this subject up with the depth and seriousness it deserves. Still, considering the intention of this piece—to demonstrate the way Iranian cuisine assimilated in the foodscape of the United States preceding the revolution, especially within the broader story of ethnic, immigrant foods—I hope I have made some small contribution and will inspire further scholarly discussion.
