How to Make Shirin Polo
Winner, The Anne C. Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction (2021)
Gather your ingredients, Mom says. Basmati, of course. Then the jewels: Almonds, apricots, barberries. Candy the orange peel, julienne the carrot, crush the cardamom. Pluck a rose.
Smell the saffron before you buy. It should remind you of home, of your father, brothers, me. For this only, pay what they ask. You need the real thing.
___
The rice I ate in childhood was not my father’s chelo in Iran, where I wasn’t born but grew up feeling I was from. My rice came in the orange box with blue letters that said it was “original” yet “converted,” “natural” yet “vitamin-permeated,” a rice that was “The Greatest Thing That Had Ever Happened to Rice.” My rice was Uncle Ben’s.
Uncle Ben looked like the grandfather I never met on my Dad’s side, with glowing skin and a wide smile. He wore a bow tie, a step up from Aunt Jemima’s red-checkered headscarf.
Uncle Ben disappeared from the logo in 1971 but returned 12 years later, after I’d finished college. By then my rice was wild. I’d learned that “uncle” was a way to avoid saying Mister. I saw that no matter who bought the food, chances were faces of color would sell it: Mrs. Butterworth with her wide hips, Chiquita Banana and her dimples, the Land O’ Lakes girl, the Frito Bandito, the Eskimo and his cold Pie.
Even so, when I want the taste of childhood, I buy Uncle Ben’s.
My mother taught me how to make it: Sautè the grains in butter. Add water, less than directed. Throw in an onion. Most importantly, never stir the pot.
Made this way, Uncle Ben’s was a polo, not the watery mush alongside “ethnic” dishes that daring 1960s housewives made: I remember Rice-a-Roni Chop Suey, Rice ‘N Spam Creole. Yet even Mom’s rice was a taste of something lost.
My father’s chelo was a long-grain rice called “black end,” or domesiah. It comes from Mazandaran province, where he was born. The box his mother stored it in could hide a child.
As soon as Basmati was available, we stopped eating Uncle Ben’s. But how could we forget him? His story of assimilation was a lot like ours.
Around the time a camera snapped Dad graduating from a pre-med program in southern France, black hair foaming into a Persian Afro, arms folded over his first lab coat, the Ladies Home Journal touted Uncle Ben’s as “the sunny-colored rice that cooks white.”
During the 1950s, while Dad was dating Mom, and my grandmother Mimi grudgingly accepted him because he made her laugh, ads noted that Uncle Ben’s was now “approved” by Ebony.
The 1960s brought brown rice to America, and us as well. By 1971, when my 7th grade classmate told me my skin reminded him of the Black track star enshrined in our school’s trophy case, Ed McMahon was promoting rice with shish kebabs.
We had arrived.
