We joined Nilou Ghalchi and her daughter Chantal in their family home on Long Island to capture their family recipes. This is their story. 

“Just imagine yourself in the middle of your senior year — you’re looking forward to driving, to going to college… we didn’t have prom, but it was a special year,” Nilou Ghalchi explains. But everything was disrupted on the night in the late 1970s when she fled Iran during the revolution. Cars were overturned and set ablaze and she remembers how her extended family was particularly worried about her, her sisters, and her mother as a family of all women, since her father had passed away. 

“We had to leave overnight without saying bye to my friends, without letting them know that we're leaving,” Nilou shares. They believed they would be able to return in three months, but her aunt still insisted that they tuck silver into the rug they were eating dinner on, pack it up, and take it with them — just in case. 

They came to Los Angeles, where some family members had already settled. And when they unraveled the rug, it revealed grains of rice from home in Tehran. 

The Iranian community in the city grew and within about six months, there was a Persian television program that aired on Sunday mornings. Everyone would tune in and ask “When are we going back? We were all hopeful,” Nilou says. But overtime, they realized more people were leaving than returning. She has never gone back — and no longer wishes to — but “we always long for the culture,” she adds.   

It’s one she’s maintained in her home in the Persian Jewish enclave of Great Neck on Long Island. Her kitchen cupboard is filled with homemade pickles called torshi, tea service is set up in the living room with rock sugar and petite dried roses for the next time the family hosts, and an intricate blue and cream colored Persian rug covers a section of the living room floor.

Nilou met her husband Soly on Valentine’s day when he was visiting Los Angeles. They married around Thanksgiving and moved to New York in 1985 when the Persian community was still small, so her mother would pack ingredients in her suitcase to bring with her whenever she visited from the West Coast. 

When Nilou moved, her cooking skills were shaky. Her sister-in-law helped her learn and “my mom was always available on the phone to tell me what to do,” she adds. She also learned through trial and error. The first Persian dish she believes she prepared for her husband was joojeh bademjan, tender chicken cooked with eggplant and tangy sour grapes, which she keeps a stash of in the freezer.

Nearly 40 years later, there’s no shard of hesitation as Nilou works in her sun-filled kitchen beneath high shelves where she displays more than two dozen tea pots she’s collected. To help us document her recipes, she deftly prepares Shabbat dishes like flavorful and plump gondi, the quintessential Jewish Persian dumplings along with the joojeh bademjan. She shares a recipe for a green stew as well called karafs khoresht with beef, celery, and herbs. And shots of vodka infused with sour cherries from a tree in their backyard are served. 

There’s also a freshly prepared pot of ash-e anar, a tangy pomegranate soup loaded with herbs and studded meatballs that’s a winter weeknight staple, and an intensely nutty aroma perfumes the kitchen as she shows her daughter Chantal (and us) how to make Persian halva with rosewater and saffron. The sweet, which has a fudgy texture, is made with toasted flour and is topped with slivered almonds; it’s typically reserved for momentous occasions like weddings, births, and even funerals. 

Chantal remembers large meals with family friends from her childhood and that Shabbat was rarely celebrated with just immediate family. But there were also challenges growing up deep within the community. “It was hard, honestly, especially as a girl,” she explains. “Even though it was totally modern compared to what they were used to, it was really traditional and understandably so. I can see that and understand it now — they were really trying to hold on to this community and culture.” Today, she’s grateful for the dinners and large network of close family friends. 

As we cook, Chantal explains the idea of taarof, a form of etiquette and generosity that’s crucial to Perisan and Iranian culture. By way of illustrating, she offers an example from a meme of one man holding a door for another with one saying, “No, you go first,” and the other countering, “No, you. I’ll hold the door” and the first replying, “No, you. No, please.” Fifteen minutes later, no one has crossed the threshold. She acknowledges that even when it feels a bit pushy, “sometimes it really comes from a beautiful place — from wanting to share everything.” 

It's something we experience personally when she and her mother generously gift us containers of leftovers from the meal they’ve prepared — and even insist we take home a treasured jar of torshi. This is a Persian household, after all.