Abgoosht (dizi) Period BOrigin theory CVerified

The dish and how it is eaten

Abgoosht is an Iranian home dish in which lamb, beans, and vegetables are packed into a small earthenware pot (dizi) and simmered for hours beside a charcoal fire. To eat it, you first ladle out the clear broth alone and soak dried bread in it, then mash the remaining solids into a paste with a dedicated pestle. Broth and mash, savored in two stages, is what sets abgoosht apart from other stews.

An old broth, then new arrivals

At its base lie lamb and chickpeas, materials long native to this land. Sheep were raised on the dry uplands, and the chickpea is among the earliest pulses cultivated in West Asia; both had been at hand for a very long time. Simmered soft in salt and water, this made the broth that is abgoosht's original form. In the fourteenth century the Shiraz poet Boshaq At'ameh already used the word abgoosht for a restorative broth given to the sick. A 1652 dictionary, the Borhan-e Qate, still glosses the word as shurba (broth, a clear soup).

The substantial dizi of today took its shape when new materials were laid over that base. Potatoes were being grown and eaten by 1783 at the latest in Bushire, the port on the Persian Gulf, where the British resident had planted them in an old Dutch garden and pressed the town's merchants to take them up. The tomato came much later, spreading from around 1882 out of plantings that a nobleman back from France made in the capital's Ferdows Garden. Once these had come across the sea and joined the pot, the clear broth turned into a stew dense with solids. The earthenware pot and the mashing at the table are old, but the dizi in its present form had no way of appearing until potato and tomato were both in hand. In this way the current abgoosht drew its outline in the Qajar nineteenth century.

The potato, so the story runs, was brought to Persia by Sir John Malcolm, the British envoy whose mission reached the country around 1800, and the people of Bushire took to calling the new tuber alou-el-Malcolm, "Malcolm's plum." The arrival of the potato in Iran has been told this way for a long time, and the tale still turns up in accounts of the dish.

The man who brushed it aside had been in the country in those same years. Harford Jones Brydges led the British mission to the Persian court in 1807-11 and published his account of it in London in 1834; in the notes appended to that book, having had the naming story passed on to him at second hand, he called it "a fine cock and a bull story." What he set down instead was his own experience. In 1783 he ate potatoes at Bushire, at the table of Mr. Galley, then the British resident there, who had planted them in the old Dutch garden and had strongly recommended them to the merchants. Long before Sir John Malcolm visited Persia, Jones added, he had himself given roots of the plant to several Persians.

So potatoes were growing and being eaten on the Persian Gulf coast by 1783 at the latest, well before Malcolm's mission. That is not the same as saying they had entered Iranian cooking. In the same notes Jones remarked that a plain boiled potato, which the English considered excellent, was thought an abomination by every Persian he offered it to. Between a tuber in a garden at the port and a tuber in pots across the country there was still a distance to cross.

Abgoosht's own pedigree carries a similar slippage. The dish is often introduced as an "old dish born in the Safavid period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries)," but the name is older than that. The word abgoosht already appears in the fourteenth-century poetry of Boshaq At'ameh, so placing the naming of the dish in the Safavid period does not fit. The first appearance of a name is not necessarily the birth of the dish.

The form eaten today, on the other hand, is younger than that. The potato shows up in the gardens of the Gulf coast in the late eighteenth century, and the tomato spreads from a garden in the capital around 1882, both after the Safavid period had ended. The clear broth without these two and the current dizi with them dissolved in are better treated as dishes of different stages. As a plain broth of meat and beans, its origin is old enough that the sources will not fix it to a single point; the dizi that carries potato and tomato is a young dish that took shape in the nineteenth century. Not letting the old name pull the whole thing back into antiquity is the key to reading it.