Samar Halarnkar: A Persian apricot chicken in the shadow of war

India’s link with Iran goes back to the days when it was Persia, enriched over the centuries by the exchange of people, of course, language, culture, food and, when I was in school, football.

There was “Badshah” or Majid Bishkar, and his East Bengal teammate Jamshid Nassiri. Both were Aligarh Muslim University students before they became Indian legends, Nassiri scoring more than 100 goals in India. In 2019, when Bishkar returned to Kolkata after his playing days were long done, landing at 3am and wondering how to get to his hotel, he left the terminal and saw hundreds of East Bengal supporters wearing the team jersey and waving flags. They were shouting, “Badshah is here”, Bishkar recalled to reporters. “I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. I had left the city decades ago, yet they had not forgotten me.”

I have not forgotten either the hundreds of Iranian students who swanned around in Bengaluru in the 1980s, riding Yezdis, being effortlessly stylish, some staying as paying guests with family friends, and cheerfully becoming a part of the city’s great melting pot. Thousands left India as the Islamic Revolution dragged on, but many stayed. Bengaluru itself is home to about 40,000 Iranians, The Times of India reported last week. Some among those came during colonial times, such as Aga Ali Asker, trader of fine Persian horses, who left a mark strong enough after his arrival in 1824 to have a road named after him.

Irani cafes still exist in Bengaluru, where they bought corner plots that no one else wanted, as they did in Mumbai, where the influence of their food is more evident in the struggling but surviving Irani cafes—and that great, eclectic shrinking community that has always punched above its weight despite being 0.006% of India’s population, the Parsis. And don’t forget Persian was the official language of the Mughal empire until the late 1830s, with its ghosts lingering on, including words like taluka and zilla.

As Donald Trump threatens to bomb Iran back to the “Stone Ages”, writing about food might seem odd. But conflict and food are entwined. When homes, libraries and universities are destroyed, recipes live on in minds and exile. I have written before about how refugees from Palestine and Syria use food to hold on to cultures lost, often permanently. Iran is no different—and its people have faced twin devastations: American and Israeli bombs and decades of repression by the Ayatollahs from within. Resistance, remembrance and resilience have always had a place at the table.

Stand-alone Persian food never really became widely accepted in India because it wasn’t spicy enough for our taste, but it greatly influenced Mughal food and has stayed in our kitchens. I remember a recent Insta reel from Vishakapatnam, where an influencer chatted with a young visiting Iranian naval officer, who grinned and widened his eyes when asked about Indian biryani. “Too spicy!” he exclaimed. He displayed his sword, his “shamsheer”, after a ceremonial march-past in Vizag and spoke lovingly of that Iranian staple, gormeh sabzi, drawing out the vowels as the Iranians do: gormeeh saabzii.

I considered making the gormeh sabzi as a tribute to him, but I did not have dried lime, a key ingredient. I could have tried substituting it with tamarind and lime juice, but it didn’t sound the same. If I had to modify, better to try something that my kitchen could adapt to. So I found this recipe from a blog I follow called cakesandcoriander.com. I made my own modifications, adding some pepper and a blend of onion, garlic, and chilli powder from Kerala. I hauled out my treasured, weighty Le Creuset Dutch Oven, which my sister had lovingly carried for me across continents, and let the flavours come together over 90 minutes of high heat.

I ate the chicken with disquiet, my thoughts returning to that jovial Iranian officer. I couldn’t get that reel out of my head—that young man later boarded the IRIS Dena, the unarmed Iranian frigate sunk on the voyage home from Vizag by an American submarine.

PERSIAN APRICOT-CRANBERRY CHICKEN

Serves 4

Ingredients

750g chicken, bone-in with skin

2 medium onions, thinly sliced

200g cooked chickpeas

2 tbsp garlic, chopped or smashed

Quarter cup red wine (ideally white wine)

One-and-a-half cups chicken stock (I used a Knorr cube dissolved in warm water)

1 tbsp cranberries

6 apricots

Half a lemon, thinly sliced

3 tsp black pepper

3 tsp Kashmiri chilli or onion-garlic powder

Half tsp cinnamon powder

2 tsp coriander power

Half tsp saffron strands

2 tsp butter

Juice of half lemon

Salt to taste

Method

Marinate the chicken for half an hour in black pepper and Kashmiri chilli, or in onion-garlic powder (the one I have incorporates a mild red chilli), along with some salt. In a Dutch oven or oven-proof dish, place all the ingredients except the chicken and the wine. Sprinkle some salt over the layer of ingredients. Arrange the chicken over the ingredients, and pour the wine over. Preheat the oven to 220 degrees Celsius. Place the Dutch oven in the main oven, cover it, and bake for 80 minutes. Remove the lid, spoon over the stock, switch to broil, increase the heat to 250 degrees, and let it run for 20 minutes, spooning over the stock every 5 minutes while the chicken browns. Have with white rice or lemon rice.

Our Daily Bread is a column on easy, inventive cooking. Samar Halarnkar (@samar11) is the author of The Married Man’s Guide to Creative Cooking—And Other Dubious Adventures.