Many Iranian ways with yoghurt

The Iranian adoration of yoghurt is a love story going back to ancient times, with yoghurt appearing as ‘Persian milk’ in Al-Baghdadi’s celebrated thirteenth-century cookery book, Kitab al-tabikh (‘The Book of Dishes’). Yoghurt is ever-present on the Iranian table, mostly just in plain form as something to spoon alongside literally everything, but especially rice, and in particular mixed polows such as lubia polow.

Vegetables — even raw, but often cooked — when drowned in yoghurt are called borani in Iran. Indeed, in A Safavid Period Cookbook, documenting the food of the Persian court in the 1600s, it says ‘all types of qalie (stews/khoresh) to which yoghurt and garlic is added are borani’. This could indicate that boranis used to have meat in them, too — or that multiple varieties of meat were added to the kings’ borani merely to please the royal palate.