Before you scroll down to the bottom for the recipe, I’ve added it in the images above and linked the original here.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with the connection of taste or smell with nostalgia. In my podcast, White Adjacent, I asked my guests about what brought them waves of nostalgia—a certain scent, taste, street corner, time of year, whatever. As one could imagine, all of the answers were things they had experienced. So, it came as a bit of a surprise that a soup I’d never made before, much less consumed would elicit strong and surprising waves of nostalgia.

I found myself transported back to a feeling, moments hidden away. There was a flavor—taste or smell—fused from the combination of the various ingredients or something specific that reminded me so vividly of nearly every Iranian home I’ve stepped into, it feeling was so vivid, so tangible I felt I could nearly touch it. After a few more bites, I realized it was the fenugreek. The other flavors and ingredients I had tasted before. And while I’ve had fenugreek before too, usually in gormeh sabzi, it was the first time it was riding solo, as it does in this recipe. Over the last few days, as I go back into my spice cupboard, the strong aroma of dried fenugreek remains, each time hitting me with brief moments of nostalgia.

For the uninitiated, the scent from fenugreek, along with steamed basmati rice, fuse to form something just above the ether of nearly every Iranian home. They’re there, constants, working in tandem, at time infused with other things that come and go. Flowers, cologne, dryer sheets, other culinary experiments, whatever you can think of, while temporarily they may be able to overtake the constants, they always dissipate leaving the basmati and fenugreek to once again stake their claim.

And maybe Iranian folks immersed in it don’t notice it. And maybe my background, having grown up in rural Kentucky with an Iranian father, afforded me the distance to be able to pick out those two different scents. And maybe it’s something other Iranians only notice once they’re away from it for a period of time, recognizing it only once they’ve returned to the friendly confines of any other Iranian home.

That’s what made the whole experience of making this soup for the first time so fascinating. And honestly, that’s what makes nostalgia such a captivating idea to ponder. You just never know how it’s going to hit you. Or what experience, however mundane, will evoke such an emotive response.

The recipe was a part of a weekly newsletter from the New York Times Cooking section. It’s from Naz Deravian, an exceptional writer, actor, and cook. Her book Bottom of the Pot, should form the backbone of anyone’s cookbook library. I’ve linked the recipe above and included an image of it in the gallery.