Sabrina Ghayour has gone from running a supper club to inspiring them. Her first cookbook, Persiana, a selection of recipes “from the Middle East and beyond”, was based in part on what she cooked at her gatherings in west London, but the reaction since it was published in May has floored her: “On any given weekend I get up to 200 tweets, Facebook messages and emails from people around the world picturing whole feasts of Persiana dishes,” she says. “When it first happened it was overwhelming. I was like, ‘OK, I think I need to lie down.’”
Persiana was on the bestseller lists for nine weeks, with Ghayour putting its success down to the recipes being rooted in “what I’d been doing at home – making Middle Eastern food accessible to me. I didn’t want to write the traditional Middle Eastern book. It’s been written a million times before by more authentic people, with experience that I can’t match.”
Ghayour’s heritage is Iranian. Her family fled the revolution shortly after she was born so she grew up cooking and eating in London. “Bangers and mash are as real to me as Persian food,” she says. So it makes sense that her take on Middle Eastern cooking mixes it up a bit and includes turmeric and cumin roast potatoes and pomegranate-glazed pork as well as pistachio and lemon shortbread.
“My rule of thumb is, if I like it, it’s probably good,” says Ghayour of her relaxed and instinctive approach to ingredients and tradition. “I made a conscious decision to not send people around the houses searching for stuff. The toughest thing to find is date molasses – I thought I’d put one obscure thing in there – but it’s fine to substitute it with balsamic. I wanted people to know that what’s already in their spice cupboards will do a lot more than they imagine.”
To order Persiana for£18.75 (RRP £25), go to bookshop.theguardian.com.
