Del be Del / دل به دل
Photo of shir berenj (rice pudding) by Tannaz Sassooni, painted overlay by Sophie Levy
The Persian word for heart is ‘qalb’. When you talk about the throbbing, blood-pumping organ in the middle of your chest, ‘qalb’ is the word you use. But there’s a different word for the part of you that pangs when your crush walks by, or pulls when a friend is hurting. That word is del, and anatomically, del refers to the stomach.
So when you have a stomachache, it's your del that hurts. But when it comes to what English-speakers know as matters of the heart, in Persian, they sit squarely in the del. When you're forlorn and missing someone, you're deltang — your del feels tight, not your qalb. When you sympathize with someone's misfortune, you're delsooz — your del burns for them. When you're overflowing with emotions and need to unload them, your del is por, or full. And the friend who listens supportively as you unload your woes is your deldar — they have your del.
In May, months into a worldwide catastrophe like nothing most of us had experienced in our lifetimes, the global del was so full that it strained. Able only to be in close physical space with those in our own households, we couldn’t even rely on the comfort of being with friends. But dels have a way of connecting to each other.
I have a friend named Zeynep. She has a pixie haircut and a mischievous smile. She often wears clothes cut in unusual shapes – sometimes pieces she’s sewn herself—with artful tattoos sneaking out from the sleeves. I know her because I used to work with her husband Onur. Like Onur, she speaks with a slight accent that betrays her Turkish nationality.
A few years back, they invited me over for dinner. I was the only guest, but the table was filled with enough hand-cooked dishes to feed ten of us. Over course after course, I got to know this couple: they are cosmopolitan and cultured, left-leaning and secular, overwhelmingly warm. We drank wine with dinner, followed by frosty raki in tiny, elegant glasses. Hours of conversation later, Zeynep brewed tea in a stovetop double boiler, just like my mom makes at home, just like I do.
Our preferred tea-making method is one of many little connections and similarities we always seem to find. When I traveled to Turkey in 2011, it was the closest I’d been to Iran since I left the country with my family as an infant. So many things felt familiar, things I understood innately even without having experienced them firsthand. Foremost was the hospitality – the very same doting overcaring, that way of anticipating your feelings and holding you before you even ask, which I’d annoyedly shrugged off from my own parents, was the default way I was treated in Turkey, by strangers even. I loved it.
On our last night in Istanbul, my travel companion and I took a ferry to the Asian side and, per Onur and Zeynep’s recommendation, had dinner at the restaurant where they had their wedding. On that balmy summer evening, we sat out on the patio as a parade of small plates filled our table. Our waiter listed the night’s two entrées: seabass and sardines. When my seabass arrived, I carefully peeled away the charred grape leaves in which it had been grilled. The tender filet inside was the most perfectly cooked piece of fish I’ve ever had.
We finished our meal with the one dessert on offer – a tahini-based concoction that was chilled like a semifreddo, but with the unmistakable density and nuttiness of halva. The flavors took me back to the tiny halva and butter lavash sandwiches my mom used to make me as a kid, but this was like nothing I’d ever eaten before. It was a revelation, and I’ve walked through the world craving sweets made with tahini since.
Zeynep and I don’t see each other often these days, but we keep track of each other’s lives through Instagram. She’ll post a few seconds of video from a noisy bar, a frosty pale-colored cocktail in a coupe glass sitting in dim light. Her knobby ceramic mug of tea steaming in a sunny windowsill with violin music in the background brings me a moment of calm amid the chaos of social media.
About a year ago, she started posting stories from a rainy city while it was unquestionably sunny here in LA. After a few posts, it became clear that she was back in Istanbul. Interspersed with her cityscapes were black-and-white photos of a young woman: classic ponytail, perfectly drawn eyeliner, and the kind of dressy outfits that make it impossible to discern the age of people in old photos. Her face was unmistakably Zeynep’s. My stomach twisted at the thought that floated up.
A post a couple days later confirmed what I’d feared. She’d gone back to Istanbul because her mother had died. There were so many sympathetic comments, but I just couldn’t participate: it felt too light a gesture for something so heavy. There are limits to what I can express in small, public blips.
A couple weeks later, she was back in LA, and her stories showed a pot of something caramel colored and rich on the stove, her hand vigorously stirring it. I DMed her.
Halva?
For Iranians like myself, halva is a funerary food. We have several types of halva, including halva ardeh, the sesame confection best known in the west. To make the variety called halva tar, “wet” halva, you toast flour, then cook it with fat to make a dark roux. In Jewish households, oil is favored over butter, to keep the dish dairy-free so we can eat it with meat meals and still respect kosher laws. Once the roux is properly thickened and dark, you mix in a sugar syrup flavored with rose water and saffron. At this point, the cook must stir and stir, to avoid lumps and ensure that the halva doesn’t burn, until it comes together in a smooth, uniform texture.
It’s an old, modest dessert, earthy and only lightly sweet. After Iranian Jewish memorial services, large trays of halva tar and cut fruit fill tables alongside shiny samovars of tea and bowls of raisins and toasted chickpeas, offering a bit of nourishing hospitality to the distant relatives and acquaintances who come to show their respect, weary with grief.
I never thought about halva being a funerary food for anyone outside of Iranian Jews, but as soon as I saw Zeynep’s story, I knew just what was going on, and it broke my heart. Here was this poor young woman, stirring halva in memory of her dead mother. I imagined her letting grief work its way through her body through this slow, repetitive act.
Her reply was sparse.
Yes.
I kept poking, gently.
Is it a symbolic food for Turkish people?
And this time, I got a meatier reply.
Yeah. There are a bunch of helva types. Tahini helva is big and people love having it after seafood dinner in winter. This one’s semolina and is made at home (or there’s flour version). You can make it whenever as a dessert but it’s especially made in relation to someone’s death/funeral.
I was just writing to a friend about your question. She asked me the same thing. Her parents are from India and they have similar dishes, also called helva, and while explaining it to her I said as far as I know Persian cuisine has similar desserts and then your message popped up.
We chatted more about this tradition – how it’s clearly not tied to Islam, Judaism, or any one religion, how with minor variations, it covers large swaths of the Middle East and South Asia. Finally, I was able to say what I’d wanted to all along.
Anyway, all of this to say, I see that you're grieving, and I'm sorry you are. The thought of you making helva in your mother's memory is making me tear up as I sit here.
Know that you have a community of people out here (Iranian, Indian, whatever) holding you up and thinking of you.
Sending big hugs. I know it's so hard.
Her response was simple, but it gutted me.
Thank you Tannaz. ♥️
Thank you.
I started to cry and told her so.
I’ll make more food conversation so maybe that’ll help distract you, she quickly wrote back.
Do you know about the rice dish made for weddings in Eastern Turkey called perdeli pilav? That’s by far my favorite. It’s a rice dish that is encased in a thin dough.
The story is, the rice represents the wealth for the couple, the chicken meat inside is the bride and the rooster meat is the groom. The spices are the good and the bad things in life. And the almonds on top of the casing on the outside is the kids to come.
So there.
Now don’t cry. ♥️
But I was crying. And smiling.
Here's to more occasions for perdeli pilav, I wrote back.
Pardeh is the Persian word for curtain, and as I typed, I got such a strong image of this opulent rice dish draped under a thin curtain of dough. I already knew the answer, but I asked the question anyway.
Is perde curtain?
She confirmed.
Thought so.
You could say I’m a collector of Iranian Jewish recipes. For years, I’ve sat down with Jewish women from different cities in Iran, usually moms and grandmas, and asked them a couple hours’ worth of questions: What did they cook for each holiday? What was their Friday night meal? How did they break their Yom Kippur fast? What were the recipes that didn’t have a specific celebratory purpose, but existed only in Jewish households in their city?
I’ve collected over a hundred recipes, some so tightly regional that I’d never heard of them before, in hopes of publishing a cookbook and preserving this beautiful foodway. In the meantime, Instagram is where I share these recipes and the stories behind them, along with the stories that come as they find new context in my hands and my life.
May 29 was a grim day. Being nearly three months into quarantine and newly anxious over premature lifting of restrictions would have been enough, but four days before, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Police had arrested him for allegedly using a counterfeit bill. An officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes, despite his cries for breath and his dead mother, despite the people standing by watching, despite the whole thing being recorded on video. In what was already the most unsettled time of our lives, this event reignited a generations-long smoldering, setting the entire nation ablaze with grief and rage. Alone in my home, starved of physical touch for months, my body felt tense and tight as it tried to process this act and all the horror it stood for.
May 29 was also Shavuot. Known in Persian as Moed-e gol, the festival of flowers, it’s a celebratory holiday, commemorating the day Moses received the Torah at Mount Sinai. Many Iranian Jewish households traditionally eat shir berenj, rice pudding, on this day, and though I had no intention to celebrate the day in any meaningful way, I did try my hand at making a pot. I measured out basmati rice and sugar and stirred them into whole milk. I smashed a couple green cardamom pods and threw them in, the heat of the steamy pot instantly awakening their warm, sharp fragrance. We were in that late spring moment where cherries seemed to be everywhere, so as the pot simmered, I made a simple cherry sauce to go on top.
When the rice was soft and the pudding had properly thickened, I stirred in a splash of rosewater to finish it off, then crafted the picture-perfect serving, carefully spooning the blood-red cherry syrup directly into the center of the bowl of shir berenj.
I snapped a photo, and began writing a post for Instagram. I tried to forge ahead with something generic – informing people about this relatively unknown corner of the Jewish food world that I grew up with, keeping things buoyant and pleasant for social media – but I couldn’t. The world was on fire; nothing was normal. Masses of people had taken to the streets, howling for the justice that has eluded black people in this country for centuries. It was hardly anything, but I added three more sentences before hitting the “Share” button.
I should note: while this post is about celebration, my mind is on darker subjects: systemic racism, oppression, and violence. I’m sad and I’m angry. It’s so simple that it shouldn’t need to be said, and yet. Black lives matter.
Within minutes, there was Zeynep in the comments.
Thank you for this. I will make rice pudding now and will add mastic gum. It will give comfort in all this. ♥️
And she did. Within a couple hours, she’d posted a photo of four small terra cotta baking dishes of rice flour pudding, the tops browned in the oven.
I saw @tannazsassooni made shir berenj, so I made fırın sütlaç. With everything going on, this type of cooking is a healing ritual. ♥️
Once again, it was Zeynep’s cooking that finally brought the tears. I had tried so hard to stick to the script – it’s a holiday, Tannaz, make something sweet, write something celebratory. But the country was bereaved and angry, and I was right there with everyone else. It took Zeynep to remind me that the comforting ritual that I needed on this day was something I’d had all along.
The word del has an interesting history. Just as the halva tradition exists in India, Hindi has the word dil. It originates from Persian, and in Hindi can mean heart, but also mind or soul. In Turkish, that old meaning of dil as heart also exists. More prominently, though, dil is actually the word for tongue and language, with a completely distinct Ottoman Turkish origin. This tiny word carries so much – from heart, to stomach, to tongue, and even soul.
There’s a Persian expression that my mom uses often, del be del rah darad. As we sit in our homes, solitary and trembling at the gravity of the moment, we can’t look to friends and family for the comfort that comes from feeding and being fed. Yet, we can still share our food through images and words, cultivating love and care as we spark connections through mind, heart, soul, and stomach. Del be del rah darad: there is a path from del to del.