Food of Life: 40th Anniversary Edition

Najmieh Batmanglij is an acclaimed American chef, cooking instructor, best-selling cookbook author, and co-founder and executive chef of the award-winning Persian restaurant Joon, in Vienna, Virginia. She was hailed as “one of seven immigrant women who changed the way Americans eat” by The New York Times, and “The Grande Dame of Iranian Cooking” by Mayukh Sen in The Washington Post. Her latest book, Cooking in Iran: Regional Recipes & Kitchen Secrets, was the culmination of tens of thousands of miles of travel through Iran and was chosen as one of the best cookbooks of 2018, and called “magisterial” by The New York Times.

Batmanglij views preparing a meal not only as a culinary experience but also as a means to bring family and friends together. She encourages her readers to use her books as she was taught in Iran: to cook, to laugh, to tell jokes and stories, to recite poetry, and to enjoy the meal. Over the past 40 years, Batmanglij’s books have acted as both a beacon and a bible to Iranian-American and mixed-ethnicity families in the English-speaking world. Her life and her work meet at the vortex of feminism, tradition, ceremony, and the nourishment of body and mind, proving that none of these concepts need be foreign to one another.