Ash reshteh Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Ash-e Reshteh is a home dish of Iran: a heavy pottage (ash) of chickpeas, lentils and generous herbs, into which hand-pulled flat noodles called reshteh are dropped, the whole finished with a spoonful of kashk, a dried fermented whey. It is cooked for the turning points of the year, above all for Nowruz, the Persian new year.

Every part of the bowl comes from the Old World and had long been at hand. The wheat, the pulses, the herbs and the dairy were all long-established local ingredients, and the herb-and-bean ash itself was an old everyday food, on the table from early on.

The dish takes its familiar shape once the hand-pulled noodle joins that pottage. Medieval Islamic cookery writing lets the noodle be traced: the word for fresh noodle shifts from lakhsha toward rishta, and by the thirteenth century rishta had settled in. The tenth-century Baghdadi cookbook of Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, Kitab al-Tabikh, already carries one of the earliest noodle recipes, noodles simmered in chicken broth, and Ibn Sina (d. 1037) glosses rishta as the Persian name for itriyya, the noodle. Along that line, an ash carrying noodles can be followed back through the written record into the medieval period.

What about the compound name itself? It turns up, unchanged, in Persian verse of the early seventeenth century. Salim Tehrani (d. 1647), a poet who crossed to India in the reign of Shah Jahan and served the Mughal vizier Islam Khan, wrote a masnavi satirising the banquet of a glutton, and in it the spoon and the ash-e reshteh raise an uproar. Around that line stand the dish names of his day: do piyaza, khushka, qaliya, ash-e tatmaj, mahicha, pilav, biryan. The name sits among them as one item on a menu, with no gloss and no explanation, which is to say it was a dish his readers knew.

The age of the genre and the age of the name are therefore worth counting separately. Noodle-bearing ash has a line running back through the medieval cookbooks; the name Ash-e Reshteh was current by 1647 at the latest. That year marks the point by which the dish existed under this name, not the year it began.

A lovely tale travels with this dish. The reshteh noodle, long and drawn out by hand, is read as the "thread of destiny": eat it before Nowruz or before a journey and fortune comes, tangled affairs come loose. Blog posts and travel pieces sometimes attach a firm date to it, saying noodles joined the pottage around the year 500.

But this is folk symbolism read into the bowl, not an account of where and when the dish took shape. Reading fate into a thread is a modern piece of folklore, and it gives no purchase on the dish's own age. No primary source or scholarly study has been put forward for that date of "around 500," and it cannot be taken as a date of origin.

The lines that can be dated are of another kind. One is the history of the noodle: the run of rishta noodles through medieval cookbooks pushes the noodle-in-ash genre back into the medieval period, and Charles Perry, tracing the noodles of medieval Arab cookery, found the word had crossed from lakhsha to rishta by the thirteenth century. The other is the use of the compound name. How far back Ash-e Reshteh was said as a name went unanswered for a long time, until it surfaced in Salim Tehrani's masnavi of the early seventeenth century, sitting among the dishes of a banquet. The poet died in 1647, so the name was already plain to Persian readers of his time.

The footing for dating this dish lies in those two places: the genre in the medieval cookbooks, the named bowl by the early seventeenth century at the latest. The thread of destiny can be read for what it is, a meaning laid over the dish, and kept apart from the question of its age.