Persian Comfort Food: A Foodways Exploration
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Abstract
Most Persians consider tahdig a comfort food. Tahdig is that delicious, buttery, golden, crunchy, round layer formed at the bottom of the Persian-style rice pot. Throughout 2020—the first year of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic—I noticed an increased interest in Persian communities, in both Iran and the Iranian diaspora, in making and consuming tahdig. One could hypothesize that the Persian communities were finding some level of comfort through their increased interest in and consumption of tahdig-centric dishes as a coping mechanism for COVID-19 challenges. This paper deals with characterizations of what the Persian communities around the world consider to be their comfort foods, the reason for turning to their favorite comfort foods, and the associated COVID-19 lockdown impacts. In addition, for the first time in the study of comfort foods, we introduce the concept of diasporic categorization of comfort foods.
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