Good Persian food is something we eat too rarely in the Northeast, except when we’re lucky enough to visit Lala Rokh on Beacon Hill, with its mouth-puckering torshi (Iranian pickles) and gormeh sabzi (aromatic beef stew with dried limes). All too often Persian restaurants here in New York serve overcooked kebabs and not much else. But Persian cuisine is a wonderful thing, a bridge between what we call Middle Eastern food (the cuisines of the Eastern Mediterranean) and Indian food. Above all, there is a huge emphasis on the careful preparation of long-grain rice, usually with much more subtle spicing than that found in India and Pakistan. The rice is often cooked with potatoes or fruits.

Of course, Iranian rice (polo) is not easily found here, so we made do with tilda basmati. Washed multiple times, and soaked for hours, it was then boiled in salted water and cooked slowly on a bed of ghee in a heavy pot tightly sealed with towels to absorb the moisture. At the same time, we sauteed zereshk, barberries (above), in a mixture of ghee and sugar. The top part of the rice, the polo, gets mixed with the zereshk for an astoundingly sour, sweet and buttery confection that is the basis of the meal.

The bottom part of the rice forms a circular crust. You carefully separate this with a wooden spoon on all sides and then invert the pot to drop a (hopefully) circular crunchy, browned rice disc onto a plate. This salty, buttery rice crust is called tahdig. You just grab chunks of it with your hand and eat it like bread.

Along with some vegetables and pickles, this would have been a meal in itself, but we made chicken as well. Jujeh is the Persian word for chicken. We took Murray’s breasts, pounded them, cut them into chunks, and brined them for several hours. We then set them to marinate in the fridge overnight in lime juice, orange zest, garlic, saffron, yogurt and several cups of chopped onion.

We threaded the chicken pieces on to skewers and cooked them under the broiler for a few minutes, then roasted them. The result was astounding – intense sour lime and onion laced right through the kebabs, with a nice sear on the outside. The juice from the chicken was poured over the polo. We crunched on the tahdig. A honeyed, mellow 1990 Geschwister Erhard spätlese from Uva in Williamsburg complemented the food perfectly, along with Linda Jo Rizzo on the turntable.

These recipes were mainly based on Najmieh Bamanglij’s New Food Of Life, plus some experimentation.

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