“When you let your soul feed your body, that’s when you’ll truly taste the feast.”Rumi wasn’t talking about Fesenjoon, but he might as well have been.

Fesenjoon is one of those dishes that feels like it could only have been invented in a place where the land is generous and the people know how to coax poetry out of ingredients. Northern Iran — Gilan, Mazandaran — where rainstorms roll in off the Caspian, pomegranates grow heavy on their branches, and walnut trees stand like old storytellers. Up there, food doesn’t just sustain you. It seduces you.

This stew is simple on paper: ground walnuts, pomegranate molasses, and meat. Chicken, duck, or whatever your grandmother insists is the “real way.” But the taste? Sweet, sour, dark, ancient. Like someone condensed a thousand years of cooking into one pot. It’s Persian cuisine in miniature — a constant chase for balance, contrast, harmony.

And the roots run deep. Walnuts and pomegranates have been Persian staples since before most countries had names. They’re symbols of fertility, luck, celebration — the kind of ingredients that show up in stories long before they show up in recipes. It’s why Fesenjoon appears on nights like Yalda, when families stay awake waiting for the longest night to give way to dawn. It tastes like warmth against cold, abundance against scarcity.

My introduction to Persian food wasn’t in Iran. It was in Los Angeles, where Iranians rebuilt entire universes from saffron, sumac, and grill smoke. Those trips to see family always ended the same way: hunched over jeweled rice, kebabs dripping fat, stews so deep and aromatic they almost felt emotional. Even as a kid, I knew this wasn’t ordinary food. This was identity on a plate.

Years later, teaching English to Iranians in the diaspora, I learned just how much that identity carries. These are people living in the Netherlands, France, Germany — brilliant, funny, successful — but always half-rooted somewhere they can’t return. Payment systems keep them from hiring teachers in Iran, so they hire me instead. And during our lessons, food comes up more than politics ever does.

Gormeh Sabzi, the herb stew that tastes like green velvet and childhood. Tahdig that cracks like thin ice under a winter boot. And always the quiet ache when they talk about mothers, aunties, grandmothers — women who fed them dishes infused with the kind of love you can’t translate.

Then Fesenjoon drifted into my orbit, whispered by a dozen online recipes and a Farsi one handed to me by my friend Saeed like a family secret. Walnuts toasted in a pan until my kitchen smelled like a forest after rain. Pomegranate molasses staining the spoon red. Chicken simmering until it surrendered its structure to the sauce. It felt old. Serious. Like cooking someone else’s memories.

It’s funny — you can learn grammar over Zoom, you can discuss life in Europe, you can live an ocean away from the Caspian — but the moment Fesenjoon starts bubbling, something ancient stirs. Something rooted. Something that refuses to let go.

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s why Rumi said what he said. Because some dishes — the real ones, the ones that come from identity and loss and love — don’t just feed your body.

They feed the part of you that remembers where you came from. Even if you’ve never been there.