The Persian Winter Shabbat Recipes Cooked Under a Grandmother’s Blanket (2024)

The door to Rachel Hoshmand’s home at the southern edge of Tel Aviv was always revolving on Shabbat. Ayelet Latovitch, her granddaughter and the culinary director of Asif, remembers her nine cousins, aunts, uncles, and parents, flowing in and out. In the warmer months, Ayelet would arrive for a late Saturday breakfast, then head for the beach or a hike, and return before the end of the day for another meal. When it was raining, she and her cousins would pass the entire day at their grandparents’ home, clearing furniture in the living room to play or piling onto the couch to watch tv or a movie. The rhythm of Shabbat was marked by Rachel’s cooking.

On those cold winter mornings, Rachel would wake up early to check on dishes left to cook overnight on a plata or blech, a large hot plate common in religious Jewish homes. Pulling back a blanket that she used to insulate the pots, she would make sure there was enough water in her halim, a Persian porridge of wheat berries, chickpeas, and arborio rice flavored with marrow bones that she served for a late breakfast. “As kids, this was our treat,” Ayelet adds. She and her cousins would top their dish with sugar, cinnamon, and lemon when they were young — and in later years, the family started to serve it with the Yemenite hot sauce schug.

Under the blanket there might also be a pot of polo shabati, or rice enriched with chicken thighs and calf tongue, perfumed with cinnamon and sweetened with dried fruits, that she served for Seudah Shlish*t, or the final meal of Shabbat. Ayelet believes the dish is unique to the Jewish community of her grandmother’s hometown of Mashhad in northeastern Iran, near the border with Turkmenistan.

In Mashhad, Rachel was married “quite young, and very fast, and not to the person she chose necessarily,” Ayelet explains. This was a time, she adds, when marriage served as a protection for young Jewish women living in a largely Muslim society. She had four children there and in the early 1950s, the family moved to Israel where Ayelet’s mother was born.

Rachel was modern and forward thinking, a feminist in a community where that model for a woman of her generation wasn’t common, says Ayelet. She changed her name from Khorsheid to Rachel and insisted on speaking Hebrew at home. She worked at first in agriculture, later in a drape factory, and when she injured her back, Rachel started her own business arranging tours for Persian Jews visiting Israel, often looking for a bride or groom for their children.

“She liked the good life,” Ayelet explains, a life she was in control of. Perhaps because of her career and how hard she worked, Ayelet adds, her cooking repertoire was narrow, but delicious, focused on the dishes most beloved by family members. She used cooking as a way to stay at the center of family life.

Her recipes and the Saturday gatherings left their mark on the family. Rachel passed away 15 years ago, but the cousins continue to gather today for meals on Fridays when they can and take an annual trip around Rosh Hashanah to a beach in Eilat that Rachel loved. When Ayelet makes her recipes, she says, “I feel my roots, I feel grounded.”