For this Iranian-American baker, celebrating Nowruz in wartime is bittersweet

It’s hard for me to square the slow, meticulous care with which Southern California baker Paris Rezaie packages a box of cookies with the fact that several thousand of these boxes must be shipped in time to make it to their destination — all over the U.S. and Canada — in time for Nowruz.

Nowruz, the Persian New Year, literally “new day,” starts Friday, an ancient celebration that marks the beginning of spring, new life, and the triumph of light over darkness.

Maison de la Fork Nowruz cookies

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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When I visited Rezaie’s professional kitchen in Lake Forest earlier this week, she methodically packed the small, elegant boxes of cookies, securing each order with a wax seal imprinted with the letter “M” for her bakery and catering company, Maison de la Fork.

For Rezaie, Nowruz is a time to share Persian culture, and deliver a taste of home to her fellow Iranians in the diaspora through delicate, beautifully decorated cookies flavored with saffron, cardamom and rose water.

 ”These are all very old recipes,” she said. “ When you eat them, it tastes very familiar. …  I just redesign or redefine them and I have my own twist to the way that I present them.”

Rezaie offers a dozen different cookies and takes special orders like this one, for cookies painted with objects typically laid out for Nowruz in a symbolic arrangement called haftseen.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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Cookies are a key ingredient in the Nowruz holiday, which stretches for two weeks beyond the actual day. In Iran, businesses shut down and families are usually on vacation. Gathering with friends and family to make and eat cookies is part of the tradition, Rezaie said.

Rezaie and her assistants prepare boxes of cookies for shipping out of Maison de la Fork's kitchen in Lake Forest.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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This year, though, the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has severely curbed the celebratory nature of the holiday, especially in Iran, but also among Iranian-Americans like Razaie.

“It was very hard baking and happily baking with all the war and the death that is going on,” she said.

After shipping 3,000-4,000 boxes of cookies last year, Rezaie even thought about sitting this year out.

“Should we even consider selling the cookies this year as a part of a celebratory program?” she wondered. “Because we do not want to celebrate this time. But then we all decided, ‘No, we want to keep Nowruz going.’ It's a duty that we just keep it going,” she said.

Beauty in a bite

Achieving a cookie that is, at once, delicious, not overly sweet, and gorgeous is a rare feat and one that Rezaie has mastered. Opening a box of her Nowruz cookies is like opening an elegant gift. A hint of cardamom hits the nose while the colors and patterns exude Spring.

Among Rezaie’s specialties are sugar cookies topped with pressed, edible pansies in purple and yellow hues. Pansies are a common feature of Norwuz, and for Rezaie they have a special significance, a tribute to her late father.

“Every time the spring comes around, Nowruz, he used to buy boxes of pansies and he used to plant them in our backyard,” she said.

Now Rezaie grows most of the pansies for her cookies in a garden behind the kitchen, and she supplements with local growers when needed.

Rezaie’s version of walnut cookies, which are typical during Nowruz, are molded to look like actual walnuts and filled with salted caramel and walnut chunks. Other specialties include toot, an Iranian treat similar to marzipan, which she rolls into multicolored balls and stacks into impossible-looking towers topped with a bow.

Most impressive to me are her rice cookies, noon berenji (sometimes written as naan berenji or nan-e berenji), which she tops with a thin layer of white icing as a canvas for tiny, hand-painted flowers.

“Normally it's only me that does all the painting,” Rezaie said. “So many people are telling me I should get a stamp, I'm like, ‘No, I want to just suffer through and do the hand painting."

It’s important to Rezaie that everything in her kitchen is done by hand — her way of keeping up the Nowruz tradition of homemade cookies.

Wartime Nowruz

Rezaie moved to the U.S. in 2005 and has visited Iran nearly every year since. But now, for the time being, she is forced to worry about friends and family from thousands of miles away, with little concrete information as Iranian officials maintain a near total internet blackout.  

”We don't know exactly what's going on, which is horrible,” Rezaie said.

She especially worries about a cousin who she said was arrested by the regime during the ongoing crackdown on dissent.

“We  are just hoping that he's safe and sound,” she said.

As a way of tempering the celebratory nature of her Nowruz sweets, this year Rezaie is also offering Persian halva, a dessert typically served at funerals.  

”We all feel the pain and sorrow,” she said, “we have lost so many good people, so many family members, all of us.”

More than 1,300 people have been killed in Iran since Israel and the U.S. launched their joint offensive last month, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, a humanitarian relief group. Like many in the diaspora, Rezaie hopes the bloodshed will lead to the downfall of the current regime.

“ I hope for a free Iran, I hope that people can live the way they deserve,” she said.

Until she can visit, Rezaie will be baking cookies and other sweets, sending a bit of spring hope to what she considers a vast extended family in the Persian diaspora.