Acknowledgments

A part from my immediate family—my parents and my auxiliary mother, my maternal aunt Mani Masi—there are four friends who are responsible for this book. Almost twenty years ago, Alice Waters, who loves all new years, suggested we celebrate my favorite of the three observed by Parsis, Jamshedji Navroz, at Chez Panisse. There she has given me carte blanche, year after year, to play with ideas about Parsi food. Ten years after our first Navroz dinner at Chez Panisse, Catherine Brandel and Fran McCullough suggested that, since my wide-ranging interests clearly sprang from a polyglot Parsi approach, it would be a good idea to begin right there and write a book about how Parsis eat. Two years later, Alta Tingle gave me the keys to her Healdsburg house so that I could work on an unwieldy investigation of tropical food plants, but at the end of a week in isolation, I came back with the nucleus of this book instead. Thank you, Alice, for your friendship and generous-hearted support. Thank you, Catherine, sister of my heart and colleague for close to thirty years. Thank you, Alta, for the ongoing gift of solitude in beauty, and thanks to Fran for being coach and midwife to this book throughout its long and sometimes impossibly difficult gestation, and for never being too busy to talk.