Donia Bijan’s recipes open window to family legacy
Donia Bijan believes that every dish tells a story.
Her saffron yogurt rice with chicken and eggplant, a fragrant casserole tinted yellow from delicate threads of the costly spice, was the meal her mother made on the night Bijan turned 16. It was also one of the last dishes Bijan ate before being exiled from her native Iran.
More than 30 years later, the former chef-owner of the long-closed L’Amie Donia in Palo Alto tells the bittersweet tale of her life – her family’s sudden, unwanted departure from Tehran during the Islamic revolution, the life they built in the United States, and her mother’s untimely death – through the lens of food. Her just-released memoir, “Maman’s Homesick Pie,” tries to answer some of the nagging questions of her family history – ones that, until recently, she’d repressed.
“When my mom died, it unleashed memories that had been buried for so long. It was like a submarine rising to the surface,” Bijan says, sitting at the dining room table in her tidy Menlo Park house. “I started writing things down, documenting what came to me.”
Rail-thin, with one bare foot tucked underneath her, Bijan still looks every bit the young, impressionable girl – only a couple of faint patches of gray at her temples reveal the years. She’s set out a porcelain pot of steaming cardamom tea; a bowl of soft, sticky dates; and a wedge of banana bread – something maman had taught her to do for houseguests and had routinely done herself for decades before she was hit by a car eight years ago.
Linking to mother’s legacy
Although every daughter mourns the loss of her mother in her own way, Bijan doesn’t hide how deeply this derailed her, and recalls how she began to look forward to those writing hours – the small stretches of time when son Luca was in preschool – as a way to spend more time with her mother.
“She became a character,” Bijan says, “someone who had her own life and wasn’t just there to take care of me.”
With no subjects to interview – her father had died several years before – Bijan relied on thumbing through the old recipes she found while packing her mother’s house as a window to her past.
“I knew I had stumbled upon something far more revealing than an avid cook’s recipe file or even an old box of letters,” Bijan writes in the book. “In my lap, I held her story.”
At one point, she recalls, “I thought, ‘How many recipes for banana bread do you really need?’ But she was researching, tuning into her new country through its food.”
Of course, long before there was banana bread, there were cardamom cookies, quince marmalade, adas polo – made with chicken, lentils and dates – and fava bean omelets in Iran.
The youngest of three daughters in an upper-middle-class family, Bijan remembers her childhood fondly. Her mother, a registered nurse and midwife, and her father, a great “doktor,” ran a hospital in which the Bijan family also resided.
“I spent most summer afternoons perched on the branches of the tall sour cherry trees that grew along the garden fence, with my feet dangling, my lips stained red, and a mess of cherry pits below,” she writes.
Other summers were passed vacationing with friends on the Caspian Sea, lazy afternoons were spent poring over old Seventeen magazines – her vision of America a glamorous Disneyland – and until that summer of 1978, she had not a care in the world.
The Bijans were vacationing in Majorca when the revolution came, and they feared returning to Iran – which meant that, aside from clothes, they had nothing from their home.
Creating home in U.S.
From Spain, the family came to the United States. Bijan came first, following her two sisters, who were already enrolled in U.S. colleges. Her parents joined almost two years later as she was beginning school at UC Santa Cruz, making their home in Fresno.
Donia Bijan’s recipes open window to family legacy
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