This story aired on the November 12, 2024 episode of Crosscurrents.
When you’re a part of a diaspora, there are many things you miss from your homeland. The sights, the sounds, and - the flavors. In the heart of Petaluma, a small farm is keeping a cherished Iranian food tradition alive.
Sama Mansouri grows Sabzi, a vibrant mix of traditional herbs that accompanies every meal in Iranian homes. And it’s something that many in the Iranian diaspora have long missed while living here in the Bay Area.
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I’m in the kitchen, preparing an Iranian dinner with my friends. There’s rice with dill and fava beans and lamb shank, there’s an eggplant dish with fried onions and curd, which tastes sour and savory, there’s rice and chicken with Iranian dried plums. And there’s one very important dish I’m going to put out on the dining table, Sabzi.
Sabzi is a big dish full of fresh, raw greens. Herbs like mint and cilantro, chives, parsley, dill, purple basil, plus Iranian leek, Shahi- Iranian cress, and radishes. It’s a vibrant and fragrant dish and some of the herbs have a touch of spiciness, some are sweet.
And my guests today know it well.
The table is still being set.
Sabzi is a cold dish, so it's among those first things to be placed on the table. It is our appetizer. And We don't eat it with utensils like how we eat salad. We simply take a bunch by hand and just eat it.
A warm deep aroma of saffron and steamed rice is in the air and the toaster is beeping- That means the Sangak bread is ready. We take a piece of bread, scoop up some feta cheese and add a handful of Sabzi to it and start the meal.
Sabzi is an important part of Iranian cuisine that accompanies every meal. No Iranian table is complete without the big dish of greens.
Living here in the Bay Area, when I would go to the grocery store, I would find some elements of sabzi - the cilantro, the dill, the parsley… But I wouldn't find our traditional herbs like Iranian leek or purple basil, or our tarragon.
I was craving these flavors of home. I missed having a complete Sabzi dish on our dinner table.
Then one day I saw a photo of a bundle of sabzi on Instagram. It was beautiful- Someone online was selling sabzi bunches- green bundles, beautifully wrapped in white tissue paper.
I loved it. Turns out it was from a farm called Reyhan Herb Farm and it was in Petaluma. Close enough! Its owner was Sama Mansouri. I eagerly got in touch with her and set a time to meet her at her farm.
So, on a sunny spring March morning, I got in my car and drove to Petaluma. And after chatting a little, Sama got to work, harvesting the herbs.
“I think I'm gonna start with the hardest one for me today, which is going to be like a Gishneez.”
Gishneez is cilantro in Farsi. This was the first harvest of the year.
Mansouri’s story begins years ago. “In the early pandemic, I was calling relatives, you know, checking in, keeping busy. And one question that I was asking them was, if they could tell me about Iranian plants. Across everyone I spoke to what kept coming up and what people wanted so badly and missed so badly was sabzi.”
Mansouri started growing food when she was in college. She worked in a school garden for a few years afterwards. And she spent a couple of years growing Iranian ingredients, especially sabzi, in her backyard in Oakland. But she realized she wanted to go bigger.
“Sabzi is not difficult to grow. If I were able to get the seeds. I think I could do this and give them to these people who are missing them so badly. So that's what kicked off the backyard or farming project. And my hope is that other people also start similar projects because I can't be the only person growing Iranian food out here. But do I want to grow Shatoot, and all different stone fruit and like Chaghaleh Badoom, and Pesteh and Anar and all of these things?"
Shatoot is Black mulberry. Chaghaleh Badoom is unripe or green almonds. Its sour and one of Iranians favorite snacks. Pesteh is Pistachio and anar is pomegranate.
“Absolutely - The problem is I’m just one guy. Like I can’t do all of this. Hopefully there is a lot more to come but I'm really excited about sabzi right now.”
Sama walked me across the field and carefully observed the herbs to see if they were ready to pick. I could see how she was adoring them. The experience of being inside a field with rows and rows of green and fragrant nostalgia was something I have never experienced before.
“I was such an inside child, I did not know any of this stuff growing up. and then come to find out like a year ago, I went and visited some family in Southern California. And my grandfather's sister goes, you know, your grandpa had a farm, right? And turns out, I had relatives farming on both sides of my family. And I had no idea.”
Every week after the harvest she prepares the Sabzi bundles, and drops them off for her customers. Some at The Middle East market in Berkeley others at The Oaktown Spice Shop in Oakland.
After that farm visit, at the end of the harvest season, I visited Sama in her Oakland home. We decided to talk in the backyard. As I was expecting, there were different flower pots with plants and also a big one with lots and lots of Iranian mint.
“Mint in a garden you might have heard before, it just spreads so quickly, and it takes over. So that was a concern for me for bringing it to the farm. So I just decided to build a raised bed in my yard and grow the mint here in Oakland. And that's one way of thinking of it.”
It reminded me of back home, of Iranian people loving to have mint with almost everything from their black teas to the yogurt and cucumber combination in summers, to the sabzi dishes besides their meals or even having it as a medicine to calm their guts. I was curious how come she grows this much mint in her backyard?
“It feels like a parallel to the story of how the mint got here, I got this mint from someone who got it from someone who got it from someone... That someone just wouldn't say where they got mint from."
Sama kept asking the person who gave the mint to her how they got it. They kept giving no clear answers, just saying so and so brought it here many years ago. But she insisted. And finally the answer that touched Sama:
“And the person like, who is an older Iranian person, and generally like pretty stern She got a little smile. And she goes, Well, she brought it between her breasts. And that was like, okay, that's why you're resisting telling me.”
She was holding the mint close to her heart….
“This person was moving to the US from Iran many decades ago, and just could not imagine living the rest of her life without this mint. And so she brought it here, right next to her heart. And I think that's really beautiful. And so I think that was also in the back of my head as I was deciding where to grow it. I was feeling like it couldn't be very far away from me, I don't think I would be able to tolerate that.”
"It's basically up to us as the collective organism of the diaspora to keep this stuff moving forward. To keep it progressing, even to allow it to change. So that we don't forget." -Sama Mansouri
Today Sama likes to hold events related to Iranian culture. For the past two years, she has been holding a Nowrooz event, the Iranian New year at spring solstice- and also Teergan (which is the summer solstice that ancient Iranians celebrated).
“The goal for it for me, is actually, for people who come from this culture, from the sabzi eating culture from this Teergan or Nowrooz celebrating culture, to be able to engage in that practice, without explanation, without like, without the need to, like pause and explain what's going on.
Because I just think we deserve spaces where we can just be and do the thing that we want to do without necessarily also turning outward and saying like, okay, in order to make you feel more comfortable here, we're going to tell you what's going on. It's basically up to us as the collective organism of the diaspora to keep this stuff moving forward. To keep it progressing, even to allow it to change. So that we don't forget.”
Sama says she wants to see more and more people of Iranian descent holding events like her and creating cultural experiences for diaspora - so the traditions don’t die off over time. She especially wants to feature more of the people who lived recently in Iran, and have fresh memories of it.
This year’s harvest season came to a close in July. Since then, Sama’s head has been in February of next year hoping that more Iraninans in the Bay Area will enjoy sabzi right next to their meals in 2025.
As for me, I’m not able to pick up sabzi every week, but I bought Sama’s seeds like Iranian cress, purple basil, and Iranian leek-hoping to have them ready by spring, when I will be able to have sabzi on my table everyday…
