Herbs and Spices in Persian: 28 Names for Your Kitchen

Short answer: Turmeric in Farsi is zardchube, cinnamon is dârchin, dill is shevid and saffron is za'ferân. Persian splits the kitchen in two: sabzi, fresh herbs bought by the bunch, and advie, dried spices. Below are 28 names in script and transliteration, with the dish each one usually ends up in.

If you cook from Iranian recipes, or shop in an Iranian grocery, these are the words on the labels. I've grouped them the way an Iranian kitchen does. The green stuff that gets washed, chopped and fried by the kilo goes in one table. The jars go in the other.

For the rest of the kitchen (rice, stews, bread, sweets) there's the 100+ word Persian food vocabulary. This post zooms in on the shelf that gives Persian food its smell.

Fresh herbs: sabzi

Sabzi is one of those words worth learning early, because it shows up inside other words. قورمه سبزی (ghormeh sabzi) is the herb stew often called the national dish, and fenugreek is the herb that makes it smell like itself. Sabzi polo is herb rice. A greengrocer is a sabzi-forush, and the shop is a sabzi-forushi.

The سبزی خوردن plate deserves a note of its own. It's a plate of raw herbs (mint, basil, tarragon, often radishes and spring onions) that sits on the table and gets eaten with bread and cheese, or alongside the main dish. Nobody announces it. It's just there.

Spices and dried flavours: advie

ادویه (advie) comes from Arabic and originally meant medicines: spices were sold by apothecaries before grocers. So when someone says their advie is special, it's half a cooking tip and half a prescription.

Iranian cooking uses fewer spices than many neighbouring cuisines, and each has a job. Saffron goes in the rice. Turmeric goes into the onions at the start of almost every stew. A dried lime, pierced or cracked, goes into the pot for sourness. You can see all three working together in the gheimeh recipe, which lists its ingredients in Persian and English.

Words that travel with the spice jar

• فلفل (felfel), pepper: این غذا فلفلش زیاده (in ghazâ felfelesh ziyâde), "this food has too much pepper."
• نمک (namak), salt: نمک کم داره (namak kam dâre), "it needs more salt."
• سیر (sir), garlic: دو حبه سیر بزن (do habbe sir bezan), "add two cloves of garlic."
• دم کردن (dam kardan), to steam or steep. You'll see it with saffron: زعفران دم کرده (za'ferân-e dam karde), brewed saffron, which is how saffron goes into a dish.

Three that confuse learners

1. Geshniz is both cilantro and coriander. The fresh leaf and the plant share the word. For the dried seeds, say تخم گشنیز (tokhm-e geshniz), "coriander seed".
2. Golpar is not angelica. Older word lists translate it that way. It's Persian hogweed, and the ground seeds go on pomegranate and boiled fava beans.
3. Tare is not the leek in your supermarket. It's a thinner herb, closer to garlic chives, and in Persian cooking it's treated as a sabzi, chopped with the others.

Which to learn first

If you only learn five, take za'ferân, zardchube, dârchin, sabzi and advie. They cover most recipes you'll read and most questions you'll ask at a shop. Then add the herbs of ghormeh sabzi, because sooner or later someone will ask if you like it. To practise them in a real setting, try ordering food in Farsi.

Get it wrong and the worst that happens is a warm laugh and a story they’ll tell for years. Get it right — refuse the tea twice, accept on the third — and you’ll watch a face open up. You didn’t just speak Persian. You played the game.