A plentiful New Year
On Sunday, 71-year-old Shamsi Katebi will be in her West Los Angeles kitchen, bossing around one of the best chefs in the city. She’s the mother-in-law of Tony Esnault, chef-owner of the downtown restaurants Spring and Church and State. Her daughter is Esnault’s wife and business partner, Yassmin Sarmadi. Katebi is also the matriarch of an Iranian American family, tasked with preparing a traditional meal for Nowruz, the Persian and Zoroastrian New Year.
For Iranians, the 13-day festivities — Nowruz, also spelled Nerwoz or Noroz, which translates to “new day” in Farsi — begin at the exact moment that spring starts. This year, it’s at precisely 3:28 a.m. on Monday. The holiday, also considered a holy time for Zoroastrians, is celebrated by Kurds, Tajiks and Afghans, among other cultures. And the exact time and date of the New Year can vary based on who is celebrating, and where.
A few weeks before the holiday, Katebi is in Esnault and Sarmadi’s downtown loft kitchen, preparing three dishes that she and Esnault plan to make together at Spring — Esnault and Sarmadi’s year-old French restaurant — for a special Nowruz tasting menu. A slow cooker full of turmeric-spiced lamb steams on the stovetop, an herb-heavy dish called kuku-ye-sabzi bakes in the oven.
Katebi moved to the U.S. from Tehran with her husband and two children more than four decades ago. She holds two degrees from schools in Iran, and received two more, including a PhD, from the Claremont Colleges. She spent most of her career in the U.S. working as a librarian, but says that since the day she married, at 21, she has always cooked for her family. Although Katebi has never been a professional chef like her son-in-law, she’s been cooking the new year dinner for her family for the last 42 years.
This year, as she has the years before, she’ll be making sabzi polow ba mahi, fried and smoked white fish with crispy rice layered with herbs. It’s a dish traditional to Nowruz, and one Katebi learned to make from her mother more than a half-century ago, when she started cooking in Tehran.
“My mother was an excellent cook,” says Katebi. “She made everything from scratch, making all her own pickles, jams, everything.”
Katebi is also making a toasted noodle and rice dish with lamb, dates and raisins called reshteh polow , and a baked herb, walnut and barberry dish called kuku-yesabzi.
“Put a little more color on the fish,” Katebi tells Esnault, happy to have one of the best chefs in the country help with her family meal. Esnault worked with Alain Ducasse in New York and Monte Carlo before moving to Los Angeles to become executive chef at Patina, then at Church and State and most recently opening Spring.
“At the beginning, I was measuring everything, asking my mother, looking at her recipes,” says Katebi. “But after 50 years of cooking, I don’t need to measure. I do everything with my eyes.”
On the long wooden counter, which spans the length of Sarmadi and Esnault’s kitchen, are bunches of dill, cilantro, parsley, fenugreek, green onion and a head of romaine lettuce. All of the herbs in the sabzi polow ba mahi and the kuku celebrate spring and signify the change in the season, but Sarmadi says the main reason for these specific dishes is “as simple as tradition.” It’s what her mother, her mother’s mother and her mother’s grandmother have been making in the family for years.
“My mom has always been very good at preserving tradition, so regardless of where we were, any time of day or night, we would wake up for the New Year,” says Sarmadi.
Part of that tradition includes the sofreh-ye-haft sin, also known as the “seven S spread,” a ceremonial setting on a table or floor that includes seven sacred Iranian dishes and items meant to represent rebirth, fertility, joy, health, beauty and nature.
As the table is set, Katebi ladles the reshteh polow onto a serving platter, the rice the color of gold, then motions for Esnault to help her arrange the lamb around it. Then she turns her attention to the sabzi polow ba mahi, scooping the rice with herbs onto a platter, placing the crispy shards on top, while Esnault spoons a mixture of saffron and hot water onto the pieces of fried fish, giving each of them a splash of liquid the color of burnt orange.
Since retiring three years ago from her job as a librarian at a school in Brentwood, she hasn’t slowed down a bit. And when the New Year comes, even at 3:28 a.m., after a full day of cooking for the family, she says she’ll be up, ready to celebrate.
“We will recite poetry. Then hugs and kisses. Then eat lots of sweets,” she says with a laugh. “Because it’s in the middle of the night.”
jenn.harris@latimes.com Twitter: @Jenn_Harris_