Food of Life, written in 1986 by Najmieh Batmanglij, is a thick classic English-language Persian/Iranian cookbook. One of her more recent cookbooks, Cooking in Iran: Regional Recipes & Kitchen Secrets, is a large tome with many pictures broken down into 17 different regions of historical Persia. It is not quite as popular as Food of Life (based on the number of reviews) but I still opted for this book because I like the regional focus.

Fish-Head Soup is from Rasht and featured in the Caspian section of the book. It required me to order some ingredients I hadn’t used before: grape molasses and golpar (dried Persian hogweed). I was lucky enough to get 4 salmon heads from my local Asian market.

Cooking Notes: the heads stick! Try getting pan hotter. Stir and simmer the salmon heads very gently so that they don’t disintegrate. Go light on the saffron; throwing a whole pinch directly into the pot was a bit too much!

Tasting Notes: Yummy fish soup with a strong saffron flavor. I wish the saffron were a bit lighter so I could taste the Persian specialty ingredients. Nonetheless, the saffron flavor is good. The one thing that I didn’t like was picking out the various plate bones that fell out of the fish head. I need to cook the heads more gently in the future. Also, the eyeball (seen in the image) fell out of the eye socket and was very unappetizing – it was surprisingly big; about the size of a quail egg!

Joe’s Rating: 6
Difficulty: 5