Sheekamou Part I: Baghali Polo-e Tahmeeli
Mar 2nd, 2008 by azadeh
Welcome to a new section of my blog, Sheekamou, dedicated to food, cooking, and the sensibility of the glutton, which in Farsi is more gently and approvingly referred to as the Sheekamou.
I was inspired to add this section earlier today, after a particularly fraught and unsatisfying experience with the dish known as Baghali Polo, a pilaf of fluffy Persian rice with dill and lima beans. Now extricating the lima bean from its thick, extra-terrestial skin, and then de-podding the bean itself from its outer skin, is an enormously time consuming process that should only be undertaken by women with obscene amounts of free time or household staff. My baghali polo was tahmeeli, or imposed, by my bi-weekly organic produce box, which often arrives with such random and unexpected items. If you present an Iranian woman with a bunch of lima beans, she will have no choice, indeed no other impulse, but to turn them into baghali polo, which is what I proceeded to do at my own peril.
Disappointingly, my rice ended up all broken and nubby, not like those elegant, long grains of basmati that proper Iranian women manage to cook. I obediently made a little mountain of my polo, so the steam would circulate, but this resulted in the beans on top not cooking all the way through. The only thing that saved the meal was the potato tahdig, the layer at the bottom, which was crisp and perfect: a tahdig that would make any mother-in-law proud.
Conclusion: Iranian cooking is truly the haute cuisine of the andaruni, a product of a society in which women were sequestered, and enjoyed vast hours of leisure time, during which they devised recipes of incalculable complexity…multiple types of painstakingly dried herbs, myriad of finely chopped, subtle ingredients that are then cooked in challening and involved phases. This is of course not an original reflection, scholars who do food anthropology have published all about the haute cusine of the andaruni. I would have done well to recall all this, and to have boiled my lima beans into the everyone-pods-their-own street food that vendors sell on the streets of Tehran in the winter.