Foods to celebrate Nowruz, the Persian New Year

March 20 marks the beginning of Nowruz, the traditional Persian New Year festival celebrated in Iran, Afghanistan, and the Kurdish regions of Iraq, Turkey and Syria, throughout Central Asia, and by members of the diaspora worldwide. Coinciding with the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, Nowruz is a two-week celebration that centers on visiting relatives, picnicking, travelling, and eating traditional foods.

Although specific foods and customs vary from location to location, some of the dishes common to the Persian New Year celebration include:

• Sabzi polo ba mahi — rice mixed green herbs and served with fish,
• Kuku sabzi (aka kookoo sabzi) — an herbed omelet or frittata,
• Reshteh polo — chunks of lamb with rice and noodles;
• Ash reshteh — a thick green soup with noodles, chickpeas and beans
• Shirin, or shekar polo — a sweet rice pilaf.

Sweets are also important at Nowruz, including items such as baklava (such as the Baklava from Bake From Scratch Magazine pictured above), toot (mulberry), nan-e nokhodchi (chickpea cookies with pistachio), Nan-e berenji (Persian rice cookies), and Ka’ak bil ma’amoul (date-stuffed ring cookies).

In addition to these foods, a Nowruz table called a haft sin is set with seven traditional foods, each beginning with the Farsi letter “S”: sabzeh, senjed, sib, seer, samanu, serkeh, and sumac. Each item has a symbolic significance – for instance, senjed is dried fruit (lotus fruit, for preference) that stands for love. Each family may also add other items of significance to the table such as a book of poetry.

You can find many more celebratory Persian foods in one of the hundreds of Middle Eastern cookbooks in the EYB Library, and dive down even farther to a subset of books that are exclusively Persian. Jenny wrote a post that includes some of her favorites (as of 2017) – and I bet she has many more that she would add today. In addition to all of the Ottolenghi books, I am partial to SUQAR: Desserts & Sweets from the Modern Middle East by Greg and Lucy Malouf, Flavors of the Sun by Christine Sahadi Whelan, and every book by Sabrina Ghayour.