It’s not everyday you upload videos of you and your mum cooking on TikTok, and it goes viral – and then eventually leads to the two of you writing a cookbook.
That’s exactly what happened to Roya Shariat and her mother Gita Sadeh, whose cookbook Maman and Me: Recipes from our Iranian American Family is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever laid my hands (and eyes) on. The book has helped Roya connect with her mother and her Iranian culture in more ways than she can imagine, and was an intense labour of love.
Roya says growing up as a first-generation American in Maryland was tough, to say the least. She says that all she wanted was to wake up one day “looking like Sabrina the Teenage Witch.”
“I wanted to be blonde and I wanted my name to be Britney,” she says. “I felt just not good in my own skin. And part of that is not seeing yourself represented in media and culture – and being a young Iranian kid post-9/11 in the United States with other kids calling you a terrorist.”
Roya constantly felt pulled between the two cultures, and never quite felt at home (“I was too American for Iranians, and too Iranian for the Americans,” she tells Missing Perspectives), unable to figure out where she fit.
But she continued to lean hard into her Iranian American community, and eventually moved to New York City to study when she was 17. “I didn’t find confidence in my own culture and story until later – when I realised how lucky I was,” she says. And it was then she began cooking, given she could no longer rely on her mother’s hospitality as she was away from her family while studying at New York University.
So – moving forward to 2020. It’s the pandemic. Roya and her mother Gita are in lockdown together, and Roya begins to upload videos of her mother cooking, showcasing her incredible cooking skills, hospitality, and humour (to this date, Gita still doesn’t have TikTok, Roya tells me). The videos, which chronicled and celebrated their Iranian heritage and cuisine, go viral after their tenth video – but going viral was never Roya’s intention.
“I was using [the videos] as a time capsule to document having fun with my family,” Roya tells me – never spending hours on a polished video, but rather keeping it natural and organic – and amassing a large following in the interim (the pair currently have 116K followers on Instagram alone).
Publishing a cookbook had been a long-time dream for Roya, and that’s exactly what happened. Roya attended a cookbook proposal writing class, worked on a book proposal, and then Maman and Me was born. The book is a beautiful exploration of Iranian-American cuisine, written with love, sweat and tears by Roya and Gita. “This book is a project for immigrant kids,” she reflects.
The process of writing Maman and Me was not an easy one. “We wrote eighty recipes. Drafting them, testing them, styling, and prop styled. Writing a book took over a year,” she says. “Every Friday and Saturday over July, we worked through the recipes. It was physically demanding – non-stop on your feet. It’s not just making the food, it’s putting the backdrop in, tablecloth, and thinking about how to make it unique from the last couple of shots.”
Reading Maman and Me is like sitting in Roya and Gita’s kitchen in their family home, learning about their favourite recipes, tips, and history; it’s more literature and family history than your average cookbook. Roya says that she wanted readers to learn about her culture, and the dishes. She reflects: “Authenticity is what you make of it. Authenticity is not how someone made it 100 years ago. Iranian food is not just kebabs and stews, it’s also hotdogs and scrambled eggs. Even the scrappier, easier meals are as important. Authenticity is in the eye of the beholder and mouth of the consumer.”
Roya shares that the bigger point she wants to drive home is that cookbooks are an act of history. “If we didn’t keep recipes alive, then we’re losing such an important part of our heritage. There’s a sense of urgency in the book; a fear of losing my mum, our recipes. I hope other people feel the urgency to write,” she says.
Maman and Me is packed full of mouth-watering recipes including syrupy semolina cake (Cake-e Sharbati), but in my humble opinion, one of the heroes of Maman and Me is tahdig. “Imagine if rice had a crispy crust,” Roya explains. “Something that was crunchy that you’d bite into at the bottom of the pot.”
Best tahdig in New York City? “Sofreh and Eyval in Brooklyn.” See you there?