A simple porridge with rosewater

Fereni, or firni (sometimes written phirni), is one of those foods common across today’s Iran, the Levant and India. You’d know it by the name kheer in India — but this is a word you should not really say in front of Iranians, because they’d either laugh at you (and that would be embarrassing), or they’d go red in the face (as they’d be embarrassed), because it sounds very much like a rude word in Persian for penis.

In the Levant, these ‘spoon puddings’ a