Upside-down saffron rice cake, two ways

For a lavish, fragrant and highly celebratory dish that is usually prepared for gatherings or ordered in restaurants, tahchin is relatively easy to make. The rice is parboiled as in the master Iranian rice recipe, but is kept a little more al dente, because its second cooking (steaming or ‘brewing’) will be in a batter of yoghurt and eggs, spiked with saffron and freshly ground black pepper.

Tahchin gets its name from laying pieces of either lamb, chicken or condiments at the bottom of a cooking pot. But don’t confuse it with tahdig, which is literally the crust at the bottom of a pot of rice, and can be made with anything from plain rice to slices of potato, flat bread or pumpkin (winter squash), and even lettuce (not a favourite of mine). Tahchin is always a rice cake that, when unmoulded, keeps the shape of its container, thanks to the batter of yoghurt and eggs. And there’s always a stuffing of meat, poultry or vegetables. Amazingly, it looks a lot like another lavish rice cake from Naples, called sartù di riso, which hails from a time when cooks of the court were challenged to come up with a rice dish delicious enough to satisfy the maccheroni-loving Neopolitan royals — a dish in which the rice is also held together with a batter of eggs and parmesan, encasing a filling of ragù and fried meatballs, and sometimes aubergine or other ingredients.