A Little History

From Tehran we traveled over high mountain passes and descended through rice paddies (see the photo) and tea plantations before arriving at Rasht, the capital of Gilan province and the major city of the Caspian region of Iran.

The “Caspians”/Kaspia was the name of an ancient people living along the southwestern shore of the Caspian Sea (though technically, it’s a very large lake), known to the ancient Assyrians as the “great sea of the rising sun.” Iranians commonly refer to the region simply as “the north/shomal” and to the sea as “the Sea of Mazandaran”/darya-ye mazandaran. Hundreds of years before the formation of the first Persian Empire, the people of this region (Marlik, south of present-day Rasht) had wonderfully sophisticated cooking implements, as well as fine gold jewelry depicting pomegranate buds and olive branches. Pomegranates and olives remain some of the region’s favorite cooking ingredients.