Smoked White Fish

Smoked fish is traditionally served with herb rice (sabzi polow) as the main meal on Nowruz, the Persian New Year. It never fails to remind me of the annual visit of Khanum Rashty, the “lady from Rasht,” a town near the Caspian Sea. She was an old family retainer who would suddenly appear in our garden two weeks before the New Year. There she would be, a short, wiry woman with two gray braids tied on top of her head, her colorful scarf falling down around her neck. She always offered us a l