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Features 400+ Recipes

The 40th Anniversary Edition of Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies by Najmieh Batmanglij contains more recipes and more photos. Each recipe has been restructured for more clarity, including tips and suggestions from her fans over the years.

Food of Life provides 400+ authentic Iranian recipes as well as an introduction to Persian art, history, and culture. The book’s hundreds of full color photographs are intertwined with descriptions of ancient and modern Persian ceremonies, poetry, folktales, travelogue excerpts and anecdotes. This book is a labour of love that began in exile, after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, as a love letter to Najmieh’s children. It is the result of 40 years of collecting, testing and adapting Persian recipes for today’s kitchen. All the ingredients for cooking Persian food are now readily available throughout the U.S. enabling anyone from a master chef to a novice to reproduce the refined tastes, textures, and beauty of Persian cuisine. Food-related pieces from the 10th century Book of Kings, and 1,001 Nights to the classics of Persian poetry, the humor of Mulla Nasruddin, as well as Persian miniatures are all included.

Each recipe is presented with steps that are logical and easy to follow. Readers learn how to simply yet deliciously cook rice with its golden crust tahdig, the jewel of Persian cooking, which, when combined with a little meat, fowl, or fish, vegetables, fruits, and herbs, provides the perfect balanced diet.

A landmark of seventeenth-century travel writing—now available for the first time in a complete, fully annotated English translation. When the Roman nobleman Pietro della Valle set out for the East in 1614, he imagined a pilgrimage. What he produced instead was one of the most vivid and detailed portraits of Safavid Iran ever written. His letters from Isfahan, Shiraz, Farahabad, Qazvin, and Basra—part reportage, part ethnography, part personal confession—capture a world in the midst of transformation under Shah Abbas the Great. In these pages, della Valle records court ceremonials and bazaars, gardens and palaces, mineral lore and medical practices, and the daily life of Persians, Armenians, Turks, Kurds, and Indians. He writes with equal intimacy about politics and architecture, marriage customs and music, caravan life and commerce. His account of Isfahan—its Maydan, palaces, caravanserais, and tree-lined avenues—remains one of the greatest city descriptions of the early modern world. Despite the enormous popularity of Viaggi in the seventeenth century, no complete English translation has ever existed. Drawing on the authoritative two-volume 1843 Brighton edition, Willem Floor has translated and annotated every letter concerning Iran, including della Valle’s Baghdad letters and materials from Muscat and Basra when relevant. The result is a monumental work: over 1,100 pages of translated text—57 percent of the original Viaggi—presented with meticulous notes, modernized place and personal names, and a detailed index and bibliography. Elegant, intimate, and encyclopaedic, Travels in Persia, 1617 to 1622 of Pietro della Valle opens an unparalleled window onto Safavid Iran and stands as an indispensable source for historians, scholars, and general readers fascinated by the early modern Middle East.

Engaging and insightful, Simorgh is Milani at his best and will enthrall both those new to his work and those already familiar with it. 

Some of the most fascinating human epochs lie in the borderlands between history and mystery. So it is with the life of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire in the sixth century bce. By conquest or gentler means, he brought under his rule a dominion stretching from the Aegean Sea to the Hindu Kush and encompassing some tens of millions of people. All across this immense imperium, he earned support and stability by respecting local customs and religions, avoiding the brutal ways of tyranny, and efficiently administering the realm through provincial governors. The empire would last another two centuries, leaving an indelible Persian imprint on much of the ancient world. The Greek chronicler Xenophon, looking back from a distance of several generations, wrote: “Cyrus did indeed eclipse all other monarchs, before or since.” The vision of the biblical prophet known as Second Isaiah anticipates Cyrus’ repatriation of Jews living in exile in Babylon with these words of the Lord: “He is my shepherd and will accomplish all that I please.”

Despite what he achieved and bequeathed, much about Cyrus remains uncertain. Persians of his era had no great respect for the written word and kept no annals. The most complete accounts of his life were composed by Greeks. More fragmentary or tangential evidence takes many forms – among them, archaeological remains, administrative records in subject lands, and the always tricky stuff of legend.

Given these challenges, Discovering Cyrus: The Persian Conqueror Astride the Ancient World is a remarkable feat of portraiture. In his vast sweep, Reza Zarghamee draws on sources of every kind, painstakingly assembling detail, and always weighing evidence carefully where contradictions arise. He describes the background of the Persian people, the turbulence of the times, and the roots of Cyrus’ policies. His account of the imperial era itself delves into religion, military methods, commerce, court life, and much else besides. The result is a living, breathing Cyrus standing atop a distant world that played a key role in shaping our own.