Photographs by Kareh Moraba

2018 | Issue 102

 

The Silkiness of Buffalo Milk

The Best Possible Rice Pudding and Other Gifts
from the Marshes of Khuzestan

By Kareh Moraba

On a typical day in Dezful, the dairy chef Haj Nabi makes 100 kilos of shir berenj and 80 kilos of ferni, variations on rice pudding. During Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, these amounts are tripled. Like other chefs in the city, he cooks in the front yard of his home. Twice a day, in the early morning and late afternoon, he sells his day’s labor at a stand at his front door. He offers milk, cream, pudding, yogurt, and cheese, all made with fresh water buffalo milk from neighboring villages.

Hot, arid Dezful is in Khuzestan in southwestern Iran. The Marsh Arabs of Khuzestan, who live in villages around the wetlands at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in southeastern Iraq and extending into Iran, have long herded water buffalo and sold the milk in cities across the province. The 14th-century explorer Ibn Battuta recounts the marshes “overshadowed by palm groves, with traders sitting in the shade of the trees, selling bread, fish, dates, milk, and fruit.” As climate change and manmade pollution increasingly put pressure on freshwater sources in the region, herding has become impossible, relegating it to an occupation of the past. But a small number of older villagers still tend to the animals out of attachment to the calling rather than for its profitability.

The water buffalo in Khuzestan are riverine, wallowing in deep waters for most of the day to cool off. They graze herbs and wetland plants. A water-buffalo herder named Qassem says that in his youth there were wildflowers, such as golnaz (trailing iceplant), all over the hills around his village, as well as wild herbs, such as chiti, on which animals would graze. “The milk would smell of flowers,” he recalls. Today, facing increasingly dry wetlands, the water buffalo are fed straw, alfalfa, and wheat bran. Only in spring do the wetlands provide food again, as the rains temporarily bring a thirsty, barren earth back to life.

Water buffalo milk has a much higher calcium content than cow’s milk does and is given to infants as a substitute for breast milk. It also has double the fat content of cow’s milk, making it ideal for cream, although that changes with the season and type of feed, as well as when the animal is nursing. Year-round, however, the milk is known for its velvety, soft texture — even in liquid form it is somewhere between milk and dessert. People who taste it for the first time sometimes ask whether sugar has been added.

For fresh water buffalo milk, Haj Nabi travels each day in his truck to a number of nearby villages. He brings back milk in large cylindrical copper vessels. His entire craft revolves around simple recipes defined by the care he puts into them. To make qeymaqh (cream), he heats the milk slowly. As he is doing this, a long wooden ladle in hand, he recalls “the taste of food in the old days,” when his father cooked over a fire. He draws a cotton handkerchief from his pocket to wipe the sweat from his red mustache, colored with henna, a custom of men his age. It is early summer, and temperatures rise by the hour. Once the milk reaches boiling, he turns off the heat and lets the pot cool “on its own, slowly.” He places it on a crisscross wooden stool, so that “air can travel freely from top and bottom.” He stresses that speeding the cooling in a fridge drastically diminishes the quality of the cream. Once the pots have reached room temperature, he puts them in large refrigerators and lets them sit until early next morning, when the cream has fully risen.

Qeymaqh is eaten with fresh homemade bread and honey or jam, the kind depending on the season. A favorite jam with cream is albaloo, sour cherry, available during summer. The sweet-tartness complements the rich cream. Another popular addition to qeymaqh is halva zardak, yellow carrot jam, which is made in Shushtar, a city 60 kilometers southeast of Dezful. Qeymaqh is regarded as an ideal meal for Ramadan sehoor (eaten before the morning prayer, prior to the fast) for its high fat concentration. Cream is also a topping for haleem, a popular meal made by at-home chefs and sold in the afternoon at their front doors. Haleem is a dish of wheat, lamb (preferably loin), and, in this area, water buffalo milk. These are cooked slowly together, and if the meat was on the bone, the bones are removed. Then the combination is mashed finely either by hand or with an electric mixer. The wheat and lamb come together as a thick paste, one no longer distinguishable from the other. Sugar and cinnamon are generously added to the bowl before eating, as well as a dollop of qeymaqh, making each bite smooth and slippery as it goes down. The tastes are subtle, not infused with the myriad of spices Iranian cuisine is known for.

Haj Nabi’s most sought-after dish is his shir berenj, literally “milk rice,” one of those two rice puddings he makes. Popular opinion will tell you that any old kind of rice, especially of lower quality, can be used to make it. “That is so wrong,” says the chef. “It is in fact the opposite, your shir berenj will only be as good as your milk and rice.” The rice grains should be dense and hold up well under temperature. The ideal grains are white, whole (not mixed with broken bits), and long. Again alluding to a bygone era, Haj Nabi recalls using a special grain of rice grown around Dezful, “chubby but tall,” he remarks, but that rice is no longer grown here — its grains were perfect for shir berenj.

These days, he orders Tarom rice from Iran’s rice capital in the north, the province of Mazandaran on the Caspian Sea. For every kilo of rice, he uses 15 kilos of milk. When he gets up in the morning, he puts the rice in large copper pots to soak in water for at least five hours. When he is ready to make a batch of shir berenj, he brings the milk to boil, stirring occasionally, and then adds the rice. Over low to medium heat, he continues to stir until the liquid is fully smooth and the rice is cooked. At the end, he adds some cold milk, just before turning off the stove. This cold milk helps form a thicker texture, he says. Like qeymaqh, shir berenj is also eaten with a sweet jam or honey on top. Because it contains rice and milk, it is considered both a morning and dinner meal.

Haj Nabi’s other variation on rice pudding, ferni, is Khuzestan’s quintessential comfort food. Ferni is in between pudding and ice cream, enjoyed both hot and cold. Though it is made throughout Iran and central Asia, the pudding prepared in Dezful is richer in texture because of the water buffalo milk. Haj Nabi first finely grinds the same rice that goes into the shir berenj. The ratio he uses is nine kilos of milk to one kilo of rice flour. Cold milk is poured on the flour and blended slowly over medium heat until fully smooth. The same amount of sugar as rice flour is added. The liquid is mixed continuously until just when it begins to thicken. At that point Haj Nabi adds liquid cardamom essence. Using cardamom pods would double the price and he leaves that for special orders.

Mothers in Khuzestan often remark that the dairy chefs must have a trick up their sleeves that creates the thickness and elasticity of their ferni. The best, when warm, is soft and gooey, and stretches out from the spoon. At home, made with store-bought rice flour, that fails to happen. I can confirm, however, after having watched Haj Nabi in his kitchen numerous times, that there is no secret ingredient but the time he puts into making the flour and mixing the ferni until it is fully done. Home cooks crank up the heat to make a quick pot of ferni.

Ferni is popular during Ramadan as well as at celebrations and in times of mourning, served at weddings and Ashura, the rituals marking the death of Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of Prophet Muhammad. Ground almonds or pistachio bits can be added to the mix, and spices, such as ground rose petals. Large trays holding tiny bowls of ferni are passed around on the streets during those nights well into the morning.

To know of dairy chefs like Haj Nabi who still cook in their homes, one must be a local. But the real pride of the city, known to tourists and natives alike, is water buffalo ice cream. Only three ingredients go into it: milk, sugar, and “in the good old days” local salep, which is now traded in for what locals call “salep powder,” a commercial stabilizer guar gum, imported from Japan or China. It makes the ice cream stretch, like gooey cheese. Salep, the tuber of flowers from the orchid genus, has long been used across Turkey and Iran in a variety of sweets. Salep ice cream is a specialty of Turkey and Azerbaijan, but in Khuzestan, it has morphed and been combined with water buffalo milk. Real salep these days is almost impossible to find, and “if you find it,” Haj Nabi tells me, “you will have to pay in gold.”

The most popular ice cream store in Dezful is Fathol Mobin (“Undeniable Victory”), named for a successful offensive during the Iran-Iraq War in 1981. One might forget, walking these streets today, that starting in 1980 this city witnessed an eight-year war. The only reminders are portraits of lost sons, still in their frames, hanging above the front doors of the homes of their parents. At Fathol Mobin, water buffalo ice cream is offered in a variety of flavors, including chocolate and saffron, and with added bits of cream, the size of chocolate chips. But I refuse to eat it with any flavor or addition. No amount of sugar, flavoring, or cream can compete with the natural sweetness in the water buffalo milk. Long after the coldness of ice cream melts in the throat, the smooth sugary aftertaste of the milk remains, like wisps of scent from a fragrant flower.

On a typical summer day, Fathol Mobin goes through 500 kilos of milk, making ice cream throughout the day in electric ice cream makers. You can order it in a waffle cone or plastic dish. The other popular variation is in a cup with carrot juice (available all year) and pomegranate juice (only during autumn). The juice is made fresh right in the store, with each order, and poured on the soft-serve ice cream. The monotony of the carrot juice is a perfect canvas for the subtle sweetness of the cream. Each gulp is joyfully cool and bold.

Grandparents remember going to Seyed Abdoli’s ice cream shop in the town square, where he served ice cream in tiny china bowls adorned with prints of red rose flowers. “If you think this tastes good,” says Haj Nazari, a local ice cream chef, “what would you have said if you could taste it with real salep, and a very different quality of milk?” Elders remind children of what it was like to eat food in a nonindustrial society, bragging endlessly. The water buffalo have left the city, and the pastures closest to the city have been overtaken by cultivated fields or factories. The areas here, and all around the Persian Gulf, according to an MIT study, will be unlivable in the next 100 years, due to increasing temperatures and disappearing water reservoirs. We are experiencing those upheavals as they unfold. But so far at least, ice cream, shir berenj and qeymaqh have survived war, displacement, and climate change. No one knows how long they will live, but that they continue to do so is, in itself, a miracle.

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