In my grandmother’s apartment in Tehran as a 12-year-old, I sat on the living room floor surrounded by dried apricots. The coffee table had been pushed against the wall, the rugs had been covered with sheets, and laid across them in neat rows were little orange moons, staring up at me. These vivid orange dots would soon transform, their flesh slowly withering into burnt, tawny circles that would be packed into containers and given to me to take back to Sydney.
I watched my grandmother’s hands, knobbly veined things, deftly slice apricots in half, scoop out the stones and toss them into a plastic tub beside her. I measured time by the sharp sound of the stones clicking as they landed. She would reach across to me, gently coaxing me to take the fresh slice of apricot from her fingers.
"Esi ger." Eat this.
The velvet skin would pass my lips and I’d bite down on the sweet flesh, enamoured by the contrasting textures in this palm-sized fruit. Later I’d taste the dried apricots, their sweetness having turned into a lip-puckering tartness, and my teeth would grip hard at the autumnally orange discs to tear them into chewable pieces.
Sitting by my grandmother – with the television playing Persian pop songs via an illegal satellite as I chewed on apricots – is when I felt the most Armenian. At times I fear that I am a cultural imposter, an Armenian whose mouth is more accustomed to the tastes of saffron and dried limes than the wheat barley and barbecued meats of her ethnic forebears. My tongue still carries the language of those who came before me, that long-descending line of Armenians who first migrated to Iran hundreds of years before my birth, but I often speak sentences speckled with Farsi.
Armenian apricots are dried and offered as a souvenir to take back to Sydney. Source: Getty Images
It was only in Iran, in my family members’ homes, that these incongruous traits would become ordinary. We would slip casually between languages in the kitchen, as we’d prepare feasts of Persian foods whose recipes were all word-of-mouth; broad bean and dill rice , lamb and herbs bubbling in a hearty stew, the traditional Persian New Year’s herb frittata fried then sliced into perfect triangles.
The dinner table would heave with bread, pickles and salads, and the conversation would flow late into the night. After dinner, there’d be bitter cups of Armenian coffee, followed by glasses of amber local tea, and the table would be decorated with heavy crystal bowls, laden with sweets, fruits and nuts, that would stay out until the morning. There would always be a bowl dedicated to the dried apricots alone.
Kuku sabzi symbolises starting afresh for Persian New Year. Source: Adam Liaw
Prunus armeniaca – the apricot – is Armenia’s national fruit. It’s said that Alexander The Great took apricots from Armenia to Greece, introducing them to another part of the world. Other scholars have suggested the apricot’s origins truly lie in China or India. Wherever the first seeds may have been sown, Armenia has apricots quilted into the very fabric of its culture. The Armenian apricot’s unique skin – a blend of yellow, orange and pinkish hues – has turned the fruit’s name 'tsirani' into a colour of its own. My full pinkish cheeks were tsirani to my family, as they were pinched between their fingers, blushing apricot.
The same blush tinted the faces of my family members when they drank apricot liqueur, served at those night-long dinners. The bottles of homemade booze would be passed around among the adults, filling shot glasses time and again, until they would demand the children to stand and sing. Armenian songs laden with longing for the homeland, with lyrics of loss and hope, would fill their ears as they picked at their plates of nuts and fruits.
Persian broad bean and dill rice is a word-of-mouth recipe in this household. Source: Nicolas Petit
The wood of the apricot tree is used to make the duduk, a wind instrument that produces a yearning, melancholic sound. It can drift into the valleys of a landlocked country, and seep back into the roots of the trees that birthed and nourished them. The duduk plays at weddings and funerals, in dirges and hymns. The music of the apricot soundtracks the Armenian existence.
The apricots my grandmother dried in that third-floor apartment in Tehran were picked from trees my family had cultivated. Wherever they had moved in Iran, the apricot trees had travelled with them. The whole family would spend days picking the fruit when it became ripe, eating it fresh, making pots of jam, and drying them into fruit leather, what Persians call lavashak and what Armenians call pestil.
The music of the apricot soundtracks the Armenian existence.
No one in the family can recall where the first seeds came from for those trees. Were they carried in the pockets of my ancestors as they were made mercenaries for the Persian Empire? Were the trees simply bought and planted in place by my great-great-great grandparents? There hadn’t been a time without the apricot trees, which stood hardy in the winter and survived the hot summers, sucking on the chill to blossom from a flower into fruit and basking in the heat to ripen.
Every time I returned from Tehran, I would unpack suitcases filled with the spoils of a visit with family. Tins of sohan, a saffron brittle toffee; gaz, a pistachio-spotted soft nougat; pashmak, a stringy sweet cotton candy. But the dried apricots were what lingered in my mind from the moment I took them out of my luggage and put them in the kitchen cupboard. I resisted the urge to eat them too quickly and have none left, to lose the taste of home and not know when I would experience it again.
In Sydney, the apricots never taste the same. There’s the occasional appearance of supermarket-bought apricot jam at the breakfast table, but slathered onto white bread instead of fresh lavash, the taste feels incomplete. When I bite into the absurdly round, sealed-for-freshness dried apricots that are common here, disappointment coats my tongue along with the sickly sweet pulpy innards.
Occasionally in a specialty grocer, I will find a small box of Persian apricots with an absurd price tag. There’s a temptation to buy them, to sate my curiosity about a taste that has become more memory than sensory. Would biting into one reveal a repressed childhood memory? Or if the taste is disparate from what I recall, would it only emphasise my longing?
"In Sydney, the apricots never taste the same." Source: Benito Martin
It’s been 17 years since I last visited Tehran. My grandparents have died, the apartment sold, and the trees are no longer ours. There was no one left to care for them, as we continued the Armenian diasporic tradition of spreading far and wide across the world – or for those remaining, trying to survive the devastations of war. Even with no one to pick the spoils of those staunchly standing trees that fed us their sweetness, they would have survived. Much like us. Of that I’m certain.
This piece was originally submitted for , a project dedicated to promoting diverse voices on food.
