What is Mirza Ghasemi?

Mirza ghasemi comes from Gilan, the lush, rain-soaked province along the Caspian Sea, and it tastes like nowhere else in Persian cooking. Whole eggplants are charred directly over flame until the skins blister and collapse and the flesh inside turns silky and deeply smoky. That smoke is the whole personality of the dish — you cannot fake it with an oven. The peeled eggplant is then cooked down with a genuinely alarming quantity of garlic, ripe tomato, turmeric, and oil until it becomes a soft, jammy tangle, and eggs are stirred through at the end so the whole thing sets just slightly, somewhere between a dip and a scramble.

It is served warm or at room temperature, scooped up with bread — usually nan-e sangak — as a starter or a light meal, and it is not going to win any beauty contests, which the people who love it will tell you is completely beside the point. It often shares the table with kateh, the sticky, soft northern style of rice the Caspian region prefers over the fluffy separate-grain rice of Tehran, and with the region's other garlicky, sour vegetable plates. Gilaki cuisine in general leans garlicky, sour, and vegetable-forward in ways that surprise people who think Persian food is all saffron and rosewater, and mirza ghasemi is its ambassador. The purists insist on charring the eggplant over live fire and mashing rather than blending it, so it keeps a little texture; the shortcut of an oven-roasted, food-processor-smoothed version is tolerated but noted. There's a small national in-joke about the name (which translates roughly to 'Mister Ghasem') and the various tall tales about which Mirza Ghasem invented it; nobody agrees, and everybody has an aunt from Rasht who makes the definitive version and a strong opinion about everyone else's.