In January of 1979, during the Iranian Revolution, food writer Tannaz Sassooni’s family traveled from their home in Shiraz in the southwest of the country to Tehran for what was supposed to be a weekend trip. Tannaz wasn’t even two-years-old at the time, but she knows from stories that there was violence in the streets and that her family’s plans changed quickly. Her father Saeed bought plane tickets to Tel Aviv for Tannaz, her mother Violet, and sister Torreh with the hope that they would return to Iran when things calmed down. But they never did. 

“The next day my mom took her weekend bag that she had brought to Tehran, her baby, and her seven year old, said goodbye to my dad, and we flew,” Tannaz explains. “And that's kind of how it all started.” For a few weeks, they lived with relatives in Israel, sleeping on their couches until they decided to move to Los Angeles and stay with Tannaz’s auntie Parvin. 

When her grandmother Hanom arrived, they moved in with her. For three years, Tannaz’s father remained in Iran and worked. Her parents talked on the phone and Saeed would mail his family bootleg cassettes of Iranian music and Violet would send back recordings of Tannaz talking and singing. 

As they settled into their new home, family was their respite. They clung to one another, the Jewish community, and their Iranian culture. “The outside world didn’t feel safe to them,” Tannaz explains. There was a divide, a feeling that their neighbors didn’t have the same sense of family. “We didn't have a ton of American friends. [There] was a weird culture clash — they didn't really know what to do with us either,” she says. 

But “mangled American traditions,” as Tannaz calls them, became part of their lives. She remembers a year at her grandmother’s home when they hung socks on a mantel that were filled with gum or candy bars around Christmas and Hanukkah. That didn’t become a family tradition, but other things did. 

Tannaz starts to laugh as she talks about holidays during their first years in the U.S. and explains, “I laugh because we did a kind of proto Thanksgiving.” Her family didn’t know about the origins of the holiday yet and foods like canned yams with marshmallows and cranberry sauce were foreign to them. “They knew that this was a holiday where you ate turkey and apparently, they only got that far,” she says. So her mom and auntie Parvin made haleem, a hearty Persian breakfast porridge with wheat and shredded turkey. “It was almost like, we don't really know what we're doing, but we are marking this as a holiday,” Tannaz explains.

As the family grew and settled deeper into life in Los Angeles, their Thanksgiving menu evolved, becoming a blend of American and Persian cooking traditions. Stuffing made an appearance on the table as did Tannaz’s pumpkin pecan pie, and her mom swapped out haleem for a whole roasted turkey with quince and saffron. It’s served alongside Persian stews and rice with a tahdig that’s topped with dried cranberries and slivered almonds. And today, her cousin often starts the meal with a cocktail like a pomegranate-lime tequila spritzer.   

“It's a blend of traditions and filling in gaps with preferences where we don't have traditions — and that's kind of the fun of it. We didn't grow up with these things, so we don’t have a roadmap that we have to stick to. We do things how we want to do them,” Tannaz explains. “It’s definitely an evolution that I don't think is over.”