Marsha Mehran: Pomegranate Soup

Even with all the great Christmas foods and treats reading this book made my mouth fill with saliva for all the foods which the book centres around.

The idea of the book is quite original – each chapter starts with a recipe for a Persian dish and evolves around cooking it by the three Iranian sisters who just opened a restaurant in a Ballinacroagh, little village in Ireland. The sisters escaped Iran during the 1979 revolution and moved to London first but their doomed past has found them there and made them move to the Country Mayo.

I was only born when the Iranian revolution started but it is interesting and indeed shocking to hear how Marsha describes it through the eyes of three young girls living there, having to look after one another in the absence of their parents.

I like the way Marsha describes a small Irish village and creates a number of unique and easily recognisable characters – an old Italian matron Estelle, Dervla – the town’s gossip guru, a priest with a comedian past and the town bully, Thomas McGuire. They all seem very real and you can almost see them while reading the book. As the book is set in the 80s, the acclimatisation of the three Iranian sisters to the local society is an interesting one to watch.

And the saying comes to mind – the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. And it not only applies to the Ballinacroagh residents but also to those reading this book. The only thing that I was unsure about in this book is the puffiness of the language – the book is full of words that are not commonly used in the day-to-day language and, I have to admit, often don’t exist in my English vocabulary. It annoyed me a little in the beginning but as the story went I learnt to accept it.

Tasty and uplifting story, definitely worth a read, especially to those food lovers amongst you or those who love the Irish countryside.

My rating: YYYYY