The Table Beneath the Cloth. Jewish Foodways of Iranian Kurdistan, c. 1800–1840
The cloth survived. Dinner did not.
Sometimes an investigation begins with a recipe.
Sometimes it begins with a cookbook, a market list, a merchant’s account, or a handwritten note tucked between old pages. This one began with a piece of cloth.
Among the objects selected for Beauty and Ritual: Judaica from the Jewish Museum, New York, opening October 30, 2026, at The Frist Art Museum in Nashville, is an embroidered ceremonial tray cover from Kurdistan, Persia, dating to the early nineteenth century. The exhibition brings together more than 130 Jewish ceremonial objects from the collection of the Jewish Museum in New York and explores how Jewish communities in different places and periods adapted ritual objects through local materials, styles, and traditions.
The tray cover itself is made of unbleached cotton embroidered with silk thread, finished with a silk and wool border and beaded appliqué, and it measures nearly three feet across.
Beautiful as it is, its importance to this investigation is not merely decorative. The Jewish Museum explains that round embroidered textiles such as this one were used by Jews of Iranian Kurdistan to cover the large trays that served as dining tables during ceremonial and festive meals. This cover bears an inscription indicating that it was made by a woman “for her beloved,” Ephraim son of Aaron.
The museum suggests it was probably associated with the exchange of gifts and food between an engaged couple, and such covers could later be used for holidays and other special occasions.
Suddenly I was no longer looking only at embroidery.
I was looking at a table, and I wanted to know what might have been beneath the cloth.
A Table Without a Menu
There is an important line we cannot cross. The tray cover does not tell us what Ephraim ate.
No menu survives with it, and no recipe is stitched into the embroidery. Nothing about the object allows us to declare that a particular rice dish, soup, meatball, bread, or spice mixture sat beneath it. What the object gives us is something different. It gives us a community, a region, a period, a ceremonial setting, and a reason for food to have been present.
That is enough to begin an investigation.
The early nineteenth century places our object in Qajar-era Persia, in a region that was neither culturally isolated nor culinarily static. People, ingredients, livestock, textiles, household goods, and ideas moved through Kurdistan and between neighboring regions.
The cloth has given us our coordinates.
Now we can begin looking for the food.
The Persian Table Around Them
Rice and wheat were the two staple grains of Persian food. Bread was a regular part of the table. Rice could appear plain, combined with other ingredients, or as part of thick soups and other preparations. By the later Qajar period, as a royal cook’s manual written in 1883 records, Persian rice cookery had developed elaborate methods of washing, soaking, boiling, and finishing the grain.
The way the meal was presented is equally interesting. In documented Qajar practice, the sofra, a cloth spread on the floor, defined the eating space. People gathered around it, and the foods were arranged on it together rather than served in a modern Western sequence of courses. Bread, cheese, yogurt, relishes, and fresh herbs might already be waiting when platters of rice, stews, soups, egg dishes, and other foods arrived.
We should not make the mistake of saying that the Jewish ceremonial tray cover and the Persian sofra were the same thing. They were not. They belonged to different cultural and ritual contexts. But placed beside one another, they help us see something important.
A table did not necessarily have legs.
A textile could help define the place where people ate. A large tray could serve as the table itself. Bowls and platters could be shared. Food, cloth, family, hospitality, and ritual could occupy the same circle, and that brings us a little closer to the world of our embroidered cover.
There is another distinction we need to make here. The broader Persian table gives us the culinary environment surrounding these Jewish communities, but it should not be mistaken for a specifically Jewish table. Jewish dietary law, or kashrut, includes rules governing which foods may be eaten and how they are prepared. Among its best-known principles is the separation of meat and dairy. Meat and poultry belong to the meat category, while butter, yogurt, and cheese are dairy. Foods such as grains, vegetables, fruits, and eggs are generally pareve in their natural state, meaning they are neither meat nor dairy.
That distinction matters to our investigation. Jewish families could live within the larger food culture of Persia while preparing and combining foods according to Jewish religious practice. A Persian ingredient, dish, or cooking technique therefore gives us valuable context, but it does not automatically tell us how it would have appeared on a Jewish table.
What Was in the Pantry?
This is where the investigation becomes particularly tempting, because the broader Persian pantry is rich. It is also where restraint becomes important.
Qajar cuisine included rice, wheat, breads, meats, yogurt, cheeses, vegetables, fruits, nuts, herbs, and sour elements. Herbs were an important presence both at the table and in cooked dishes. Dill, for example, has a long place in Persian cookery and appears with rice, meatballs, beans, and other preparations. Persian cooking also made extensive use of fruits and nuts in savory dishes.
Nigella offered another trail. In modern Iran, nān-e sangak, the bread traditionally baked on hot pebbles, is often sprinkled with poppy seeds or with Nigella sativa. Those tiny black seeds provide an interesting connection between bread and the aromatic pantry of the region, although the evidence for them comes from a much later period than our cloth.
Then there were meatballs. Persian kufta traditions include versions made from ground meat combined with rice and chopped herbs such as parsley and dill. Some were cooked gently with dried plums and fried onions. Larger meatballs might themselves be stuffed with dried fruit, nuts, egg, or other ingredients.
None of this proves what was served beneath Ephraim’s tray cover.
That sentence is worth repeating.
None of this proves what was served beneath Ephraim’s tray cover.
What it does is begin to reveal the culinary landscape surrounding the object.
When Family Memory Enters the Story
Historical food research sometimes gives us another kind of evidence, and that evidence is memory.
The Jewish Food Society has documented the food traditions of Persian Jewish families whose recipes traveled with them across generations and continents. One particularly interesting example comes from the family of Orly Elyashar, whose grandmother Simin came from Hamadan.
According to the family history documented by the Jewish Food Society, Simin made her Hamadani gondi berenji for Friday-night Shabbat dinners. These were substantial beef-and-rice meatballs with prunes, served in a soup. The family’s food traditions traveled from Hamadan to Tehran, Jerusalem, and eventually the United States. The documented recipe itself uses oil rather than dairy with the meat.
That is wonderful evidence of Persian Jewish culinary memory.
It is not evidence that Jewish families in Iranian Kurdistan were making precisely the same meatballs in 1820, and that distinction matters enormously to me.
Later family recipes can preserve combinations of ingredients, techniques, tastes, and traditions. They can help us understand continuity and migration, and they can show us what people carried when they left one home and made another. But memory cannot simply be pushed backward through a century and presented as proof.
The cloth tells us where to look. Historical sources help reconstruct the culinary landscape. Later family traditions sometimes show us what endured.
Between those things lies the work of the food historian.
From the Pantry to The Persian Table
Eventually the research had to leave the desk and enter my kitchen, and the question changed.
I was no longer asking, “Can I reconstruct what was beneath this cloth?”
I could not.
Instead I asked, “Can I create a modern seasoning informed by the culinary world this object led me into?”
That became The Persian Table.
I began with nigella seed, dried onion, turmeric, parsley, black pepper, and dill, and each brought something different to the bowl. Nigella gave me an earthy foundation and a visual connection to the breads of the broader Persian culinary tradition. Turmeric brought warmth and gold.
Onion provided the savory base, parsley and dill brought the green notes, and black pepper added warmth without turning the seasoning hot.
Then I tested coriander.
On paper, coriander made sense. It belonged within the broader culinary landscape, and fresh coriander is among the herbs documented on the Qajar sofra.
In the bowl, it did not work.
It took over, so I removed it.
That experiment became one of my favorite parts of the entire project because it illustrated something fundamental about the way I approach historical flavor.
History establishes the pantry. The cook still has to make dinner.
An ingredient does not earn a permanent place in a seasoning simply because I can document it. The food still has to taste good.
I added a restrained amount of salt and returned to the stove. First came scrambled eggs. The blend was earthy and green, with enough turmeric to make them beautifully golden. The dill remained restrained, the parsley and onion stayed in balance, and nigella and coarse black pepper provided texture.
Then came rice, and that was the moment.
The seasoning bloomed in butter, the rice toasted briefly in the seasoned fat, and the finished grains emerged golden and fragrant, dotted with nigella and herbs.
Then I made meatballs, and then soup.
Everything worked, so I stopped changing the blend.
Sometimes a seasoning tells you when it is finished.
From Their Kitchen to Ours
The recipes that follow are modern Oak City Spice Blends recipes developed through this investigation. They are not reconstructions of foods served beneath the ceremonial tray cover.
They are what happens when historical research is allowed to inspire today’s dinner without pretending that today’s dinner is history.
I also want to be clear about what these recipes are not. I am not presenting The Persian Table or the recipes below as kosher-certified. Kashrut involves much more than avoiding a particular ingredient. The status of ingredients, meat and poultry, processed foods, cooking equipment, and the separation of meat and dairy can all matter. Readers who observe kashrut should use ingredients, cookware, and preparation methods appropriate to their own practice.
What I can do here is make sure that the recipes themselves do not casually combine meat and dairy, and explain why a dairy preparation and a meat preparation are treated differently.
Golden Butter Rice
This was the recipe that made me stop tinkering with The Persian Table. The turmeric turns the rice a beautiful warm gold, while the nigella remains visible among the grains. Butter carries the herbs and aromatics without overwhelming the rice, and best of all, it takes very little seasoning to transform the pot.
Makes about 2 servings
Bloom Classification: Gentle | Butter
Ingredients
½ cup basmati rice (90 g)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter (14 g)
¼ teaspoon The Persian Table seasoning (about 0.6 g)
1 cup water (236 g)
Method
Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium-low heat. Add The Persian Table and bloom gently for 20 to 30 seconds, just until fragrant.
Add the rice and stir gently so the grains are coated in the seasoned butter. Keep cooking briefly until the rice is lightly toasted.
Add the water and bring to a gentle simmer.
Cover, reduce the heat to low, and cook for 18 minutes. Remove from the heat and fluff gently before serving.
I did not need additional salt when I tested this recipe.
Why the Bloom Works
Butter gives the turmeric, pepper, onion, dill, and parsley somewhere to go before water enters the pot. Toasting the rice briefly in that seasoned butter coats the grains and carries the aromatics throughout the finished dish. The nigella keeps enough of its own character to remain visible and occasionally announce itself in a bite.
Best With
Golden Butter Rice is wonderful with eggs, roasted vegetables, fresh herbs, cucumber, or plain yogurt. Because this version contains butter, it is a dairy preparation and should not be paired with meat or poultry by readers observing kashrut. For a meat meal, the same technique can be used with an appropriate pareve cooking oil in place of the butter.
From the Spicekeeper’s Notebook
This recipe reminded me that more seasoning does not necessarily mean more flavor. A quarter teaspoon was enough for half a cup of dry rice.
I tasted it and left it alone, and that may be one of the hardest things for a spice blender to do.
The butter version recorded here is the version I originally tested. The important lesson I learned while developing this article was that changing butter to a pareve oil is not merely a matter of culinary preference when the rice will accompany a meat meal. Context matters at the table too.
Persian-Seasoned Rice Meatballs with Prunes
The trail leading to these meatballs came from two directions. Persian kufta traditions provide examples of meatballs combining ground meat, rice, parsley, dill, and sometimes dried plums. Much later, a Persian Jewish family from Hamadan preserved its own gondi berenji, substantial beef-and-rice meatballs filled with prunes and served in soup.
My recipe is inspired by that culinary landscape. It is not intended as a reproduction of the Hamadani family recipe.
Because this is a meat preparation, I have kept dairy out of the published version.
Makes 6 large meatballs
Bloom Classification: Gentle | Olive Oil
For the Meatballs
1 pound 85 percent lean ground beef (454 g)
⅓ cup basmati rice, rinsed and drained (60 g)
1½ teaspoons The Persian Table seasoning (about 3.5 g)
1 tablespoon olive oil (14 g)
¼ teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt (about 0.7 g)
3 pitted prunes, halved (about 30 g)
2 tablespoons cold water (30 g)
For the Broth
5 cups chicken broth (1,180 g)
½ small yellow onion, thinly sliced (about 70 g)
½ teaspoon The Persian Table seasoning (about 1.2 g)
1 teaspoon olive oil (5 g)
Method
Warm the tablespoon of olive oil over low heat. Add The Persian Table and bloom gently for about 20 seconds. Remove from the heat and let the seasoned oil cool.
Combine the ground beef, rice, cooled seasoned oil, salt, and cold water, mixing only enough to distribute the ingredients evenly. Divide the mixture into six portions. Flatten one portion gently, place half a prune in the center, and completely enclose it with the meat mixture. Repeat with the remaining portions, then chill the meatballs for about 30 minutes.
Warm the teaspoon of olive oil in a wide saucepan. Add the remaining seasoning and bloom for about 20 seconds, then add the sliced onion and cook gently until it begins to soften.
Pour in the chicken broth and bring it to a gentle simmer before carefully lowering the chilled meatballs into the broth. Partially cover the pan and keep it at a very gentle simmer for 45 to 55 minutes. Avoid a hard boil, which can cause the meatballs to break apart. Cook until the rice is tender and the centers of the meatballs reach 160°F.
Serve the meatballs with some of their broth.
Why the Bloom Works
Blooming the seasoning in oil before it enters the beef distributes the turmeric, black pepper, onion, and herbs through the meat rather than leaving pockets of dry seasoning. The long, gentle cooking allows those flavors to move into the surrounding broth. The prune provides a concentrated fruit note against the savory beef and earthy seasoning. Fruit with meat is well established in the broader Persian culinary tradition, where dishes combined meat with fruits, nuts, vegetables, and herbs.
Best With
Serve these meatballs with rice prepared with olive oil, warm flatbread, fresh herbs, or simply in their broth.
From the Spicekeeper’s Notebook
The prune makes more sense when you taste everything together. Take a little beef, rice, prune, and broth in the same bite.
The sweetness is not there to turn the meatball into a sweet dish. It creates contrast, and that is when the recipe comes together.
There was another lesson here for me. My first kitchen test used butter because blooming spices in butter is a technique I use frequently.
Researching the Jewish table more carefully made me reconsider that choice. Butter and beef do not belong together in a meal that follows kashrut, so the published version uses oil instead.
The change does not make this recipe a historical reconstruction or a kosher-certified recipe. It simply respects an important distinction that should not be ignored when writing about Jewish foodways.
Golden Chicken and Rice Soup
This recipe was not planned.
I had leftover seasoned rice, a store-bought rotisserie chicken, a carrot, and chicken broth, and that was dinner.
There is a tendency to think that a historically inspired seasoning requires an elaborate, historically inspired recipe every time we use it. I disagree. If the research has produced a useful seasoning, it should also work on an ordinary day when dinner needs to happen.
My first kitchen test used leftover Golden Butter Rice. For the version presented here, however, I prepare the rice with olive oil rather than butter so that the recipe does not combine dairy with poultry. Readers observing kashrut would also need to use appropriately kosher-certified chicken, broth, seasoning, and other processed ingredients and prepare the dish according to their own kitchen practice.
Makes about 2 generous servings
Ingredients
3 cups chicken broth (about 710 g)
1 cup shredded cooked rotisserie chicken (about 140 g)
½ cup prepared The Persian Table rice, made with olive oil rather than butter (about 100 g)
1 medium carrot, shredded (about 60 g)
1 teaspoon The Persian Table seasoning (about 2.4 g)
Method
Pour the chicken broth into a saucepan, add The Persian Table and the shredded carrot, and bring everything to a gentle simmer. Cook until the carrot begins to soften.
Add the shredded chicken and seasoned rice and continue cooking gently until everything is heated through and the flavors have come together.
Taste before adding salt. Prepared broth and rotisserie chicken can both contribute considerable salt, so the soup may not need anything more.
Why the Flavor Works
The rice already carries a first layer of The Persian Table, so the teaspoon added to the broth creates a second. The carrot brings gentle sweetness against the earthy nigella and turmeric. The rice gives the broth body without turning a simple soup into an all-day project.
Best With
Serve it exactly as it is, or add warm flatbread or fresh herbs alongside. If you want a little brightness, a squeeze of lemon at the table works beautifully.
From the Spicekeeper’s Notebook
I called using the leftover rice “cheating” when I first made this.
It wasn’t.
It was cooking.
The rice had already done its job at one meal, and half a cup of it went into a pot with chicken, broth, carrot, and seasoning and became something entirely different.
The research also made me look again at my original leftovers. Because my first rice had been made with butter, it would not be appropriate to combine that rice with chicken in a meal observing kashrut. The solution was wonderfully simple. Make the rice with olive oil when it is destined for the soup.
A useful seasoning should not require an elaborate recipe built around it. Sometimes its job is simply to help yesterday’s rice and tonight’s chicken become dinner.
A Simple Butter Egg Test
Before the rice, the meatballs, and the soup, there were scrambled eggs.
Eggs are one of my favorite ways to test a new seasoning because there is very little for an unbalanced flavor to hide behind. I lightly bloomed The Persian Table in butter, added beaten eggs, and cooked them gently.
That little test told me a surprising amount.
The turmeric was earthy and golden, the dill did not dominate, the parsley and onion were balanced, and nigella and black pepper provided texture and contrast. The seasoning still needed a little salt at that stage, but the flavor itself was where I wanted it.
Eggs themselves are considered pareve under kashrut, although adding butter makes this particular preparation dairy.
Sometimes the simplest test is the most revealing.
What the Cloth Cannot Tell Us
At the end of an investigation like this, there is a temptation to wrap everything neatly together.
I would rather leave a few edges visible.
We know that the embroidered tray cover was made in Kurdistan, Persia, in the early nineteenth century. We know that round embroidered textiles like it were used by Jews of Iranian Kurdistan to cover trays that served as dining tables during ceremonial and festive meals. We know that this particular cover bears an inscription connecting it to Ephraim son of Aaron, and that the Jewish Museum associates it with the exchange of food and gifts between engaged couples.
We know that rice, wheat, bread, meat, fruits, yogurt, herbs, soups, rice dishes, and meatballs belonged to the broader Persian culinary world, and that the sofra placed textiles, food, and communal eating in physical relationship with one another.
We also know that Jewish dietary practice introduces another layer that a study of Persian cuisine alone cannot show us. The ingredients available in a place and the ways those ingredients could be combined on a Jewish table are not necessarily the same question.
Later Persian Jewish families preserved their own distinctive food traditions, including combinations of rice, meat, herbs, fruit, and broth. Those memories help us see continuity, but they still cannot tell us what was served at this particular table in the early nineteenth century.
What we do not know is what Ephraim ate, and that is where I am comfortable leaving the historical record.
The Persian Table is not a reconstruction of a lost Jewish seasoning.
It is a modern seasoning created after following the culinary world surrounding an extraordinary surviving object.
The distinction matters.
The scholarship is what makes Oak City Spice Blends different, but scholarship also requires knowing when the evidence has stopped talking.
Best With
The Persian Table works especially well with rice, chicken, beef, lamb, eggs, meatballs, soups, lentils, root vegetables, and flatbreads.
How it is used matters. Bloom it in butter for a dairy preparation such as Golden Butter Rice or buttered eggs. For a meat or poultry preparation, olive oil provides an excellent blooming medium without introducing dairy.
For rice, begin with ¼ teaspoon of seasoning for ½ cup of dry rice and adjust only after tasting.
This is a blend that rewards restraint.
Readers who observe kashrut should choose ingredients and cooking equipment appropriate to their practice. The Persian Table and the recipes in this article are not being represented as kosher-certified.
From the Spicekeeper’s Notebook
I keep thinking about the coriander.
It would have been very easy to leave it in. I had historical justification for considering it, since it belonged in the wider Persian culinary world and fresh coriander appears among the herbs documented on the Qajar sofra.
But when I put coriander into my test blend, it overwhelmed everything else, so out it came.
That small decision may explain my approach to historical seasoning better than anything else in this article.
Documentation is a starting point, not permission to throw every historically plausible ingredient into the same bowl.
This investigation taught me something else too. Historical food research is not only about identifying ingredients. It is also about understanding the people using them. Learning more about kashrut made me reconsider how I had paired some of my modern recipes. That did not require abandoning the dishes. It required understanding their context more carefully.
That is exactly what research should do.
Sometimes it confirms an idea. Sometimes it sends you back to the stove.
A seasoning has two responsibilities in my kitchen. It should respect the research that inspired it, and it should make you want another bite.
History establishes the pantry. The cook still has to make dinner.
Further Reading
The object at the center of this investigation can be explored through The Jewish Museum’s Ceremonial Tray Cover collection record. It provides the object’s date, materials, dimensions, provenance information, inscription, and the museum’s interpretation of how such textiles were used by Jews of Iranian Kurdistan.
For the broader exhibition, The Frist Art Museum’s Beauty and Ritual exhibition page provides the dates, themes, and institutional context. Beauty and Ritual: Judaica from the Jewish Museum, New York will be on view from October 30, 2026, through February 7, 2027.
For the broader Persian culinary setting, Encyclopaedia Iranica: Qajar Cuisine is particularly useful for understanding rice, bread, the sofra, herbs, meal structure, and the development of Persian cuisine during the Qajar period.
For a later example of Persian Jewish culinary memory, Jewish Food Society: Hamadani Gondi Berenji (Meatballs With Rice and Prunes) and the accompanying family story shared by Orly Elyashar document a Hamadani Jewish family’s beef-and-rice meatballs filled with prunes and the larger family food tradition in which the dish survived.
For readers interested in understanding why the cooking fats and pairings in these modern recipes matter, Chabad: Separating Meat, Dairy and Pareve provides a useful introduction to the basic distinctions of kashrut, including the separation of meat and dairy and the meaning of pareve foods.
Through the Kitchen Window
I keep coming back to the woman who embroidered the cloth.
We do not know what she cooked. We do not know what Ephraim’s favorite food was. We do not know whether she stood over a pot of rice while her embroidery waited in another room, whether someone else prepared the family’s meals, or what aromas filled the house on the day food and gifts were exchanged.
The object cannot answer those questions.
But we know that someone made something beautiful for a table.
Food would be carried to that table. People would gather around it. The cloth would be lifted. Hands would reach. Someone would eat, and someone would remember.
Then the meal disappeared, as meals do.
The cloth did not.
Nearly two centuries later, we can follow what remains. We can study the textile. We can follow the region’s grains, herbs, fruits, breads, cooking techniques, and trade. We can learn how Jewish religious practice shaped what could come together at the table. We can listen carefully to later family recipes while resisting the temptation to make them older than they are. We can cook, taste, question, change our minds, and cook again.
That last part matters.
Research should be allowed to change the recipe.
We cannot recover every dinner, and we should not pretend that we can. But sometimes an object leaves us just enough of a trail to find the kitchen again.
And if we follow that trail carefully, their table can inspire something entirely new on ours.
Taste is how memory travels.
From the Spicekeeper
The Table Beneath the Cloth grew from my research surrounding a ceremonial tray cover included in Beauty and Ritual: Judaica from the Jewish Museum, New York, presented at The Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, from October 30, 2026, through February 7, 2027.
The Persian Table is a modern Oak City Spice Blends seasoning inspired by that research and developed for today’s kitchen. It is not presented as a reconstruction of a nineteenth-century Jewish recipe or as a kosher-certified product.
Oak City Spice Blends
Spice Blends Inspired by the Past, Perfected for Today
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