“Food is a common language around the world. It doesn’t need translating. It doesn’t need explanation,” Atoosa Sepehr says. Its real magic, as she shows in From a Persian Kitchen, the 2018 cookbook on the Iranian dishes she grew up with, is that cuisine can morph from universal to personal. “When you smell something, when you taste something, it can take you right back to times and moments.”
My English Persian Kitchen, the play based on her life, centres around ash-e reshteh, a traditional Iranian stew made with noodles, lentils and herbs. Another contender was a prune and chicken stew, the signature dish of Sepehr’s grandmother, who died the day after Sepehr fled Iran with no time to say her goodbyes.
“Because the ingredients are different here it doesn’t taste quite the same – the prune is very, very sour in Iran,” she says. “But still, every time I make that, I am in my grandma’s kitchen and I can feel her.”
It’s remarkable that it’s taken so long for the creative worlds of cooking and theatre to combine as with My English Persian Kitchen. Now in its second residency at the Soho Theatre in London, and about to visit Dublin and Belfast, the play begins with our protagonist starting to make a
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