Chapter Four: Araghi-yaat (Herb and Flower Extracts) and Aragh (Iranian Vodka)
There are two completely different types of drinks that bear the name aragh. In its literal sense, aragh means both “perspiration” and “condensation” in Persian, with the latter describing all kinds of distilled liquids--alcoholic or otherwise. The hard liquor produced as a result of the distillation of raisins and dates is one variation of the term aragh in Iran and a number of Eastern Mediterranean and African countries. Meanwhile, a wide range of flowers and herbs are distilled in Iran, mainly but not solely in the province of Fars, to produce an aromatic soft-drink commonly referred to in the plural, as araghi-yaat.
A Potion Called Araghi-yaat
When I was coming of age in the early ‘70s, the Shah’s notorious Organization of State Security Intelligence, the SAVAK (the group’s acronym in Persian) was rumored to utilize a disgusting and horrifying form of torture that involved sodomizing a prisoner with an empty, glass bottle of Pepsi-Cola or Canada-Dry--always asking them first which one they preferred. The implication was that the interrogators would pretend to be offering the prisoner a beverage; knowing that the choice was between the unrelenting torture of the cylindrical Pepsi-Cola bottle or the brief respite offered by the Canada-Dry bottle, which tapered in the middle. I remember the Pepsi-SAVAK jokes about a tough Shirazi who is taken to the torture chamber on a hot day and asked if he prefers a bottle of Pepsi-Cola or Canada-Dry. The man, cool and confident, responds, “Give me a bowl of sweetbrier aragh instead, may God bless you!”
The moral of the joke is that we Iranians love satire and have a long history of mocking our way through hard times and oppressive regimes. People in Shiraz did typically drink herb/flower aragh from a ceramic bowl, either mildly diluted with water and sweetened like a sherbet, or undiluted and served in a heavy, calmingly blue bowl. They were served in ice cream stores, as well as in araghi-yaati (soft-drink pubs that exclusively sold and served a wide variety of araghi-yaat). Developing a liking for araghi-yaat requires some cultural taste training, as does developing a taste for most foods and beverages--in this case a longer training perhaps, even for natives. Once you develop a taste for it, however, you will fall for aragh so badly that it seems nothing else could quench your thirst and fatigue in the middle of a hot, summer day.
With the exception of rosewater, none of the other flower and herb extracts are used in mainstream recipes, as their taste and flavor do not withstand the high heat required in cooking. In fact, only a few types of araghi-yaat are used in an alternative form, to flavor an ice desert called faloodeh. Every ice cream store in Shiraz offered a number of Shiraz-specialty coolers, namely mixed ice cream and carrot juice and faloodeh--an iced dessert and street snack made of frozen cornstarch. Like Shirazi salad, Shirazi faloodeh has won nationwide popularity. In the case of faloodeh, it seems Shirazis have partially retained its exclusivity by flavoring it differently. Everywhere else in Iran, Shirazi faloodeh was flavored with lime juice and sometimes mixed with saffron while being made. In its birth place, faloodeh was usually plain white and served in glasses or disposable cups; flavored with either lime juice or an aromatic variety of aragh poured into the cup from small, glass drizzlers that sat in every ice cream store.
The most renowned, exclusive soft-drink pub that sold the best quality and widest variety of araghi-yaat was called Vakil. It was located next to the Bazaar Vakil’s south entrance, across from Saray Moshir, an historic caravansary built in the 1870s that was reconstructed before the revolution and turned into a beautiful collection of handicraft exhibits and cozy tea houses. Vakil is, in my mind, a cold, albeit attractive, location--perhaps because its products were meant to cool one down or perhaps, more metaphorically, because it was surrounded by herbal groceries (attaari) and failed miserably to compete with the sensations they radiated. The neighboring herbal groceries displayed a rainbow of spices, teas and herbs in waist-high gunny sacks placed all along the bazaar so their charm and perfume could seep through the entire area. Vakil sold and served a range of transparent liquids that, as aromatic and flavorful as they were, had travelled too far from their birthplace in Shiraz to retain and reflect the dazzling beauty of the orchards they were drawn from, or measure up to the warmly-colored contents of the neighboring herbal groceries.
Elevated three steps off the ground, the Vakil araghi-yaati was a relatively large space with a wide, glass entrance door behind which stood a chest-high, beige, marble counter where the thick-muscled, polite and pious owner installed himself to take orders and money. You could tell that he was a pious Muslim by the way he avoided eye-contact with women, and less indicatively from the Quranic inscriptions in calligraphy that he had framed and hung on the wall that faced the entrance. Behind him, one could see portions of a kitchen or storage area, where all-male waiters roamed about preparing and serving the orders.
The in-store seating was bright enough with natural light, but further lit by white, fluorescent tube lamps that ran all the way across two walls, stopping only at the third, which was fully covered with a huge mirror. A dozen metal folding chairs were installed against the fluorescent-lighted walls behind a few unmatched tables that were too short to rest the bowls or glasses on. Customers could take a long pull right off their large glass of aragh while standing outside the entrance, or they could face themselves in the mirror while sipping their bowl of aragh. The choices we had at Vakil went way beyond sitting inside or outside, drinking from a bowl or a glass and having a small or large serving. The real question was which aragh to drink, for it is not only a refreshing soft drink, but a potion to adjust your temperament or a medicine to soothe the throat, reduce fever, ease joint pain, give vigor or serenity--all that and much more, if you are a believer.
Hot, Cold and Equilibrium
The dualism between mind and body is often reflected in the biomedical arena through distinctions made between physical health and emotional well-being, but the same duality does not exist in traditional Iranian cosmologies. Put simply, for the majority of Iranians there is a strong link between environmental factors, emotions and the body. Many people believe that maintaining a balance or equilibrium between and among all the above factors is the key to the proper functioning of an interconnected mind and body—a state that medical anthropologist and nutritionist, Lynn Harbottle, cleverly calls “well’th” (health + wellbeing= well’th) (13).
According to Harbottle, historically popular health beliefs in Iran originated from Galenic-Islamic medical principles elaborated on by Ibn Sina from Arabic, Greek, Latin and Indian philosophies (14). Within this system, individual temperament is believed to be derived from a distinctive balance of four essential humours; each of which has distinct properties: blood (hot and moist), red bile or bilious (hot and dry), phlegm or serous (cold and moist) and black bile or atrabilious (cold and dry).
While the four-humour philosophy formulated by Ibn Sina during the third and fourth centuries has weathered the test of time, the specific properties he once identified and associated with each “humour” are no longer referred to, except perhaps in obsolete herbal groceries in small Iranian towns. Interestingly enough, however, the notion of garm (hot) and sard (cold) has survived among many Iranians--well enough to have made the long, overseas trips with millions of Iranian émigrés to Europe, North America and elsewhere.
“Hot” and “cold” qualities refer not to thermal temperatures, but to certain innate attributes or “properties” associated with foods, medicines and body conditions. Many people believe that the human body functions best when the overall foods we eat are balanced in relation to their hot/cold qualities. By the same token, different illnesses are believed to be caused by an imbalance in the hot/cold equilibrium. Such illnesses are then prevented or cured by eating various foods with opposing qualities. Garlic, for instance, is generally believed to be hot, while fish is cold (no national consensus on which food items or ingredients are hot or cold, mind you). In this case, the garlic and fish combination in ghalyeh makes perfect sense, as the two ingredients counterbalance the potentially negative effects of one another.
Let us say that when frying your herbs to make ghalyeh, you used excessive garlic to make it even tastier. Let us also say that for dessert, not only did you have halva but lots of dates with your tea, followed by yellow melon--all of which are hot substances. In such a scenario, one might find themselves experiencing the side effects of too much heat; namely a sore throat, an agitated heartbeat, acne or a fever. To prevent this from happening, one might eat a lot of watermelon or another cooling fruit.
According to the traditional and popular beliefs in Iran, daily health maintenance can be achieved through equilibrium, and there are several factors that influence such equilibrium. For instance, it is generally believed that different people have different bases depending on their gender, age, life stage or inherited characteristics. Women have a cold base, which makes them prone to coldness symptoms like gastro disorders, dizziness and too much water in the mouth. Men have a hot base, while children and the elderly are supposedly more susceptible to cold ailments as well.
Another factor: sickness can make people more vulnerable and prone to imbalances. For instance, catching a cold (a common cold not an intrinsic one) is believed to make us more susceptible to hotness symptoms. That is why for the duration of a cold we are advised not only to avoid spicy and fried foods and shift instead to neutral kateh and simple and plainer versions of aash, but also to drink lots of fruit juice--particularly sweet lemon--an amazing cooler. Antibiotics and almost all other biochemical medicines, to my knowledge, are considered too hot, which is why patients are encouraged to eat and drink lots of vegetables and fruits with their juices when on medication.
Throughout my teenage years, once a month when I was laid low by abdominal pains with my menstrual period, I was given a small glass of extremely hot saffron, brewed just like loose tea. In addition to the ground saffron that we kept with the other spices, my mother always kept a separate bottle of uncrushed, dried saffron flower stamens. This was to be brewed in a special, little china teapot used for this purpose only. Sometimes a piece of pure crystallized sugar (nabaat) was dissolved in the hot saffron drink to further intensify its hotness. I remember taking so much secret delight in those unique-tasting brewed saffron, not because it reduced my pain necessarily, but because it painted my lips with a bright, thick orange when I was not yet allowed to use lipstick.
I have no idea why menstrual pain was associated with coldness, or why hot substances were believed to subdue it. I do know that the matter was taken fairly seriously, not only in my family but in many others like mine who did not otherwise always consciously observe hot/cold principles. For the first couple of years of monthly cycles, when I was not yet accustomed to my new body, one week per month I found myself under the watchful supervision of my older sisters or mother when we sat around the sofreh for a meal. Atefeh in particular, whom I was very fond of (still am), always kept a tight watch. I was thirteen and she was twenty. If I reached for a bowl of torshi, I would suddenly feel the weight of her piercing stare, her rigid posture demanding my response without publicizing the matter or embarrassing me. The firm arch of her raised eyebrows was a loud and clear reminder that vinegar is poisonous at this time of the month—as was Shirazi salad with lots of lime juice and cucumbers and tomatoes or fried cabbage and yogurt.
At first, I was so uncertain about permissible food items that I had an eye on her at meals as if an irresistible movie were being screened on her face. It took me a while to learn that whatever was bad for cold was good for the period pain. It took a bit longer to realize that if I had both pains simultaneously, I was having really bad luck, and longer still to discover that taking too much saffron, dates and nabaat during my period effectively leads me to one illness or another.
When we fail to maintain a balance through a regular and controlled hot/cold diet, and an illness strikes, then medicinal items are introduced as a means of treatment--biomedicine for serious illnesses and botanical or herbal medicines for minor ailments. People all over the world turn to “alternative” medicine, particularly in desperate instances of very grave illnesses or when mainstream options fail to live up to their promises. A physician in Iran may not send you off to the herbal grocery for borage tea as a tranquilizer, but chances are they would not object to you having some in addition to the prescription drugs they recommend. A good doctor tends to advise their patient about the types of foods they should seek out and avoid. During my first few years in Montreal, each time I visited a doctor, I waited patiently until they finished scribbling a prescription before I asked the key question: “What should I eat?” to which they always replied, with a bewildered look, that I should have whatever I liked.
Araghi-yaat stands somewhere between diet and medicine; between preventive and active treatment as well as traditional and modern practice, in addition to serving as a cooling soft-drink.
On one of the walls of the araghi-yaati in Shiraz, behind its thick-muscled, eye-contact-avoiding owner, a hand-written, laminated chart had been hung to guide undecided customers through the process of choosing an aragh. All I knew back then was that the more beneficial it was meant to be, the harsher an aragh tasted. Mint, for instance, might be charming in a fresh sabzi assortment, but your stomach had to be highly upset to submit to drinking one full cup of mint aragh after each meal. I never studied this guide back then, mainly because I was rarely in need of a “special-effect” araghi-yaat. Like many, I chose among a few of the most commonplace types with a vague knowledge of their hot/cold nature. Shaatareh and chicory were the least fragrant or expensive choices with cooling effects, usually taken undiluted or mildly diluted as a tasty soft-drink. Sweetbrier, however, was richer in every sense with an energizing hotness effect. The rest, I assume, were for serious drinkers.
I am intrigued by the fact that only a handful of these medicinal araghi-yaat were popular enough to be exported to other Iranian cities back then, and to Iranian stores abroad now. More often, the seeds, leaves, roots, berries or flowers themselves are dried, brewed and drunk as herbal medicine. Liquorice, for instance, has many followers as the ultimate treatment for digestive malfunction and cold symptoms, and is almost always used in powder form. Many Iranian national fans of herbal medicine take much pride in reminding everyone around them that cough syrups sold in North American pharmacies are made of our shirin-bayan.
The hot/cold properties of each herb or flower are distinct from their healing potential, I suppose. I never could convince my visiting sister to drink aloe-vera gel in the absence of thyme powder or extracts, even if she was convinced of its natural anti-arthritis benefits. We did not have aloe-vera back home; so how could she know if it is hot or cold in nature!? We don’t replace aash-e reshteh with beef noodle soup, why should we replace thyme powder with aloe-vera gel?
The City of Gardens
In the summer of 1997, when Maji was visiting Montreal for the first time, we used to go out of our way to take her on sight-seeing trips in and around the city, which she usually commented on less than affectionately, being more interested in shopping for her grandchildren than touring the Olympic stadium. As the months of June and July arrived, I gradually discovered that what impressed her the most was a spectacle we took for granted after almost two decades of residing in Canada: lush, green fields; huge, concrete planters and hanging baskets filled with flowers along the city’s boulevards and beautiful, at times exquisite gardening in virtually all front yards.
She was fascinated by the richness of the flowerbeds and the colorful spectrum of shrubs, bushes and trees rushing by in a green blur as we travelled by car in the Montreal downtown and suburbs. She marveled at the “flower-crazy” Montreal women that were the constant gardeners in most neighborhoods. She could not understand why the natural, bright and beautiful dandelions were categorized as “weeds” that sent everyone walking on their knees to viciously dig up their roots--only to plant other types of flowers in their place. She was puzzled by the fact that we drove for hours, fussing over finding a location that we deemed “a picnic area,” when every corner and median was green enough to qualify by Shirazi standards.
“So much rain, so much water, no doubt yields all of this greenery,” she often remarked with a tinge of envy. “God has been more generous to you even in that!” All this coming from a person born and raised in Shiraz--the city of flowers, gardens, poetry and wine—the contradiction would make sense only to someone who appreciates how much less generous God has been to people in Shiraz in so many other ways.
The flower and fruit gardens in Shiraz manage to thrive despite an annual average rainfall of between 14 and 18 inches that falls entirely in the months of November through March. Perhaps abundance is a relative term as well, and that is why we used to call Shiraz the city of flowers and nightingales before seeing North American cities. Perhaps it was because God was stingy with our share of water that we treasured each and every rainfall, cheerfully running through the drops when we were young and finding its tapping on the roof heartwarming and romantic when we were older. Perhaps it was precisely because of a shortage of rainfall that we so cherished each spring petal and every locally-grown summer fruit. Aprils (ordibehesht) in Shiraz were heavenly; with long days of warm, radiant sun and the surprisingly cool shade of the rejuvenated trees. Streets and alleys were crowded with the potent scent of sour orange blossoms floating through backyards and gardens. Blue dusks and cool evenings intoxicated us with an unidentifiable yet familiar mixture of flower scents that tenderized our soul, as if we were under the influence of a pleasantly strong cocktail.
It was during the months of April and May that I often walked past Baagh-e Safa (the “pure heart” garden), a garden that housed the old distillery workshops and fulfilled the araghi-yaat needs of the city. Baagh-e Safa remains, to date, the main supplier of floral and herbal extracts for retailers and individual customers alike and one of the main sources of literature about the process. As the consumption of araghi-yaat became increasingly popular, other Iranian cities came to produce different types of it. But just as the highest quality saffron comes from Mashhad, and the best rosewater is exported from Ghamsar, the finest floral and herbal extracts were produced in Shiraz’s Baagh-e Safa.
From Flower Petals to Aromatic Drinks
The Shiraz that my older siblings recall is so much smaller than the one I remember, thanks to the rapid industrialization and modernization that the city underwent from their childhood, to mine. The Shiraz of the late ‘50s was a small town with the majestic Narangestan-e Ghavam (Sour-orange Grove) at its heart. To the north of the Dry River, which ran west and east was Baagh-e Eram, which sat in close vicinity to Baagh-e Naari (Pomegranate Garden), Baagh-e Safa (Serenity Garden) and--further east near the mausoleum of Sa’di--Baagh-e Delgosha (Heart’s ease Garden). Both Safa and Delgosha were, and continue to be, relatively secluded gardens, although Delgosha is better known, given its display of historic art. Eram Garden, on the other hand, is the pride of any Shirazi tour guide and a fine example of Qajar architecture. Eram is a fabulous, royal villa in the middle of a vast and beautifully landscaped field that features a long pond leading to the main building. Tiled, rose-edged walking paths wind under the nets of dancing shade cast by palm, cypress, pine, and sour orange and persimmon trees. Most of the country’s epic movies and every Shiraz-produced television show had at least one shot of Eram Garden, sometimes with the suggestion that it was some rich man’s backyard.
The southwestern Shirazi suburbs of the late ‘50s were clusters of small, private orchards plotted along a field that later became Ghasr-edasht Street. Baagh-e Afif-abaad and Baagh-e Khalili were the two most significant gardens among this cluster, and are the only ones that have been partially preserved to date. Shiraz vineyards and wineries were located much further west, some thirty kilometers away from the city, in the shadow of the mountain and waterfalls of the beautiful village of Ghalaat.
In the ‘60s, Pari (aged 12) cycled about five kilometers from our old house located in the Nader district to where we moved eight years later, between the Dry River and Ghasr-edasht, on Hedayat Street. She remembers crossing through rows of wheat fields. Slightly over a decade later, when I was about 15, the two houses were connected by heavily-trafficked streets and the Dry River was a part of the inner city. By then, not only had Baagh-e Safa been integrated into an upper-middle class, thinly populated neighborhood, it had been squeezed into a regular sized garden to make room for several alleys, shops and cottages. These cottages now besieged the garden and availed themselves of its charm and scented breeze.
During final exams in June, the sidewalks of that entire area, including those in our neighborhood, were crowded with high school students from sunset through the early morning hours. Young boys, and occasionally girls, held their text books or notes in their hands and paced up and down a designated length of fifty meters or so, looking down to read, then up to the sky to absorb the information--rapidly mumbling formulas or poetry with fierce intensity. Walking seemed to facilitate the memorization of one’s subject matter, while the quiet sidewalks provided the space that a yard or house lacked.
The Baagh-e Safa I’d remembered as a child, had yielded its breadth and riches to the surrounding area. The garden’s moderate, metal entrance gate was located in a now-asphalted alley that ran west and east--parallel to the Dry River--and was named Baagh-e Safa Alley. That was before every single street, avenue, square and back alley was renamed to honor the revolution’s martyrs and other presumed glories and accomplishments--Azadi (freedom), Esteghlaal (independence) and, of course, numerous Imam Khomeinis.
The alley itself was long, narrow and treeless; lined on one side with about ten cottages whose adjoining front-yard walls withheld hundreds of pine trees, with tall trunks and lofty branches, which chattered in the wind and peek over the garden’s walls. While I never saw the interior of those houses, I knew that besides sharing the pine trees with Baagh-e Safa, many had also preserved the garden’s original graveled roads that now coiled through their compounds. I was fascinated by those old cottages because they had once been part and parcel of the captivating transformation of flowers and herbs into aromatic, potable liquids.
The evocative fragrance of flowers that saturated the air, like moisture on a rainy day, was the first thing one noticed about Baagh-e Safa. Plastic buckets lined the gravel entry road, signaling visitors that this was a working garden. On the right side of the road, where the main distillery operation took place, mounds of pink sweetbrier petals, blue chicory petals and occasionally white sour orange blossoms sat next to more shapeless stacks of brown and dark-green palm leaves, pussy willow branches and a dozen other species of leaves and roots. Most if not all had travelled in pick-up trucks from different flower and fruit gardens all over the city to Baagh-e Safa for processing. The flowers were picked each day at dawn, when the petals were still heavy with dew and rich with fragrance.
Further ahead in the open workshop area, several gigantic metal pots sat slightly off the ground above gas burners. Baagh-e Safa has not submitted to any major technological changes in its operation--no industrial distillation towers or spirit-producing stills--the pots are coarsely welded and tightly covered with cast-iron caps that look like warriors’ helmets. Each pot is first filled with water and one type of flower petal or herb, and then brought to a boil. Once the water starts to vaporize, the heat is kept at a constant low temperature that allows for the accumulation of steam, which is the next step in the distillation process.
About two meters down from the level of the boiling pots is a three-by-five meter pool surrounded by knee-high fences where cold water is piped in by a dozen of in-going and out-coming tubes and pipes and hoses, like a gravely ill patient in the Intensive Care Unit. The steam produced in the boiling pots is directed to another set of vessels submerged in this pool in order to cool it down enough to revert to its liquid form. Upon cooling, this new liquid is led through a third set of tubes to its final destination in labelled containers.
Tall, plastic buckets with stop valves installed in the bottom are lined up on a long platform with the number and name of their occupant araghs—the plastic just transparent enough to showcase a range of hues, from the yellow of sour orange and mild orange of citron to the pale green of mint.
In those days, I paid little attention to the science of the operation; being more preoccupied by its aroma and charm. Little did I know that my distillery knowledge would dramatically increase in a couple of years when many families I knew would employ the same basic methods but replace flower petals with raisins and add some fermentation material in order to operate fatally illegal, home distilleries under the reign of the Islamic Republic.