Food of Life

The 40th Anniversary Edition of Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies by Najmieh Batmanglij contains more recipes and more photos. Each recipe has been restructured for more clarity, including tips and suggestions from her fans over the years. Food of Life provides 400+ authentic Iranian recipes as well as an introduction to Persian art, history, and culture. The book‘s hundreds of full color photographs are intertwined with descriptions of ancient and modern Persian ceremonies, poetry, folktales, travelogue excerpts and anecdotes. This book is a labour of love that began in exile, after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, as a love letter to Najmieh‘s children. It is the result of 40 years of collecting, testing and adapting Persian recipes for today‘s kitchen. All the ingredients for cooking Persian food are now readily available throughout the U.S. enabling anyone from a master chef to a novice to reproduce the refined tastes, textures, and beauty of Persian cuisine. Food-related pieces from the 10th century Book of Kings, and 1,001 Nights to the classics of Persian poetry, the humor of Mulla Nasruddin, as well as Persian miniatures are all included. Each recipe is presented with steps that are logical and easy to follow. Readers learn how to simply yet deliciously cook rice with its golden crust tahdig, the jewel of Persian cooking, which, when combined with a little meat, fowl, or fish, vegetables, fruits, and herbs, provides the perfect balanced diet. Najmieh Batmanglij, is an acclaimed American chef, cooking instructor, best-selling cookbook author. She is also the co-founder and executive chef of the award winning Persian restaurant Joon, in Vienna Virginia. She encourages her readers to use her books as she was taught in Iran, to cook, to laugh, to tell jokes and stories, to recite poetry, and to enjoy the meal. Over the past 40 years, Batmanglij‘s books have acted as a both a beacon and a bible to Iranian-American and mixed-ethnicity families in the English-speaking world. Her life and her work meet at the vortex of feminism, tradition, ceremony, and the nourishment of body and mind, proving that none of these concepts need be foreign to one another.