Brilliant recipes from Persiana, Sabrina Ghayour's debut cookbook
The walls of Sabrina Ghayour's Earl's Court flat are lined with family photographs and Persian poetry. Ghayour and her mother have lived here for 36 years and it's where she began hosting supper clubs two years ago. "I was worried my diners would think the poems were terrorist scriptures," she says. "I fretted too much about what people would think of me back then."
When we meet, Ghayour, 38, is preparing a family feast to celebrate the Persian New Year, an occasion that coincides with her publisher sending over the first copy of her debut cookbook Persiana. Filled with 100 recipes she's refined over the years, it also draws on a childhood spent in the kitchen: "I was precocious," she says. "My mum and grandmother couldn't cook for toffee so at 11 years old, I became the cook." There's a photo in Persiana of Ghayour, aged six, stirring a pot with a wooden spoon as long as her arm: "That was the first time I ever cooked boil-in-the-bag cod mornay."
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