Kalam Polo
Kalam polo:
Did you know cabbage could make you cry? No? You didn’t? Well, I didn’t either. Not until the other day, a few weeks back, when cabbage made me cry. It was toward the end of a rambling, thought-provoking, mouth-watering and totally emotional conversation with Jenny Lau, aka Miss @celestialpeach_uk herself. As Jenny and I talked about cabbage, about food, identity, memory, taste, politics, history and family — I found myself with tears in my eyes, as memories of dear departed Great Auntie Khalejan and memories of dear departed Great Grandma Alice coalesced. I had made Kalam Polo on two days prior— an Iranian beef and cabbage and rice dish— and as I cooked, as I sweated the cabbage, browned the beef and eventually combined the two, these women, these long gone relatives, were there with me— in my heart, in my memory and in my kitchen.
There she was— Khalejan, visiting us in the US from Iran in the late 1990s, making kalam polo in a newly-renovated suburban Michigan kitchen, sneaking cigarettes late at night in the garage when she thought no one would find out, always sitting on the floor, cross-legged, even in her old age. And there too was Great Grandma— frying cabbage and ground beef with a Stanley Home Products pan, in a rural Michigan kitchen straight out of the 1960s, in the home where she’d birthed my grandmother, raised my mother, and fed, babysat and loved me.
Cabbage and beef. Frying in a pan. That’s all it took to bring them back to me. And then telling Jenny about it today was all it took for emotion to take over. And now again the tears well as I write this. Tears of sadness but also of joy. And of gratitude. Sadness because they are gone. But joy and gratitude because they are not really gone, can never be gone— because I carry them with me in my heart, memory and kitchen. And because even the simplest things, the simplest ingredients, the simplest dishes have the power to connect, transport and move us.
Ingredients—
3 cups of basmati rice
1 tbsp and 2 tsp fine sea salt, divided
½ cup +2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, thinly sliced
5 cloves garlic, minced
500g cabbage, thinly sliced
4 medium tomatoes, diced
2 tsp salt
¼ tsp cayenne
1 tbsp lime powder
350g beef
Fresh cracked pepper
2 tsp advieh
1 tsp turmeric
Place your rice in a large bowl and rinse 3-4 times with cold water. Some will tell you to rinse until the water runs clear, but that is lunacy and will take ages. Alternatively, you may feel inclined to skip this step. I didn’t rinse my rice for years out of laziness, and then I ended up with a 5kg bag of basmati during the first lockdown that I HATED, until I started rinsing the rice and the funny taste away. Lesson learned. I implore you: rinse your rice. And let your nicely rinsed rice soak in the bowl with 1 tbsp fine sea salt while you get on with the rest of the recipe.
Over medium high, heat 1 tbsp of oil in a large pan for which you have a lid. Turn the temperature down to medium, add the onions and cook for approximately 10 minutes, stirring frequently to brown them but making sure you don’t burn them. Add the minced garlic and cook for another 3 minutes, and then add in the cabbage. Stir everything together gently. Add in the tomatoes, 1 tsp of sea salt, the cayenne and the lime powder. Stir to mix as evenly as you can. Then add 2-3 tbsp of water, cover your pan and cook to soften the cabbage for 20 minutes over medium heat.
In another pan, heat 1 tbsp of oil over medium heat. Add the ground beef, 1 tsp of salt and a few cracks of freshly ground black pepper. Break up the meat with a wooden spoon and stir. You are just wanting to get most of the pink in the mince gone. This will take about 5 minutes. Maximum. Don’t worry if some pink remains—there’s more cooking to come.
Add the beef to the cabbage, along with the advieh and turmeric. Stir everything together and leave it cooking, uncovered, on low heat while you attend to the rice.
Drain the water out from your rinsed and soaked rice in a colander over the sink. Once again, rinse the rice with cold water to remove most of the salt it’s been soaking in.
Fill your pot with 6 cups of water, add the rice and place the pot, covered, on the stove over high heat. Bring the water to a boil and stand at attention. You want to parboil your rice here—and it won’t take very long. Check the doneness of the rice by taking a grain and feeling it between your fingers. You want a mostly soft outside but the inside to be hard. Note that since you are going to be steaming the rice shortly, it’s better at this stage for your rice to be undercooked and al dente than overcooked and mushy. Once the rice is parboiled, take it off the heat and drain in a colander over the sink. Rinse the rice in cold water to halt the cooking process.
In a small bowl, mix together three spoonfuls of rice, ½ cup olive oil and ¼ cup of water. Spread that over the bottom of your pot. This is going to give you something magical—gazmakh (or tahdig, in Farsi)—the crispy, golden, coveted bottom-of-the-pot rice layer. I’m hungry just thinking about it.
After your initial rice/oil/water layer, start to add in your cabbage and beef mixture, alternating with spoonfuls of the parboiled rice, and mounding your layers into a pyramid.
Use the end of a wooden spoon to poke three holes in the top of the rice. Then, wrap the lid of the pan in a clean tea towel, making sure to secure it on top of the pan so that it doesn’t catch fire if you are using a gas burner (I often use a rubber band tied around the gathered corners of the towel), and put the toweled lid back on the pan. Cook the rice for 7-10 minutes on medium high (this is when the magic of the gazmakh happens.) Turn the head down to the lowest setting possible, and cook the rice for another 45-50 minutes.
Boom.
Turn it out and eat it up.
