Recipes from an Iranian prison: ‘If there is one book that shows the power of words, it’s this one’
Sepideh Gholian’s The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club is a memoir-cum-cookbook from the Iranian activist held in the country’s notorious jail
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“Women are second-class citizens in Iran and in prison they are oppressed even more,” Maziar Bahari says.
The Iranian journalist and film-maker is calling from his London home, recounting the tangle of events that led him to help edit and publish The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club, a remarkable prison memoir-cum-cookbook written by Sepideh Gholian, the 30-year-old political activist who has been in and out of Iranian jails since her first arrest in 2018.
“It’s a dark and tragic experience, but Sepideh Gholian has done something brilliant by bringing food into her prison story,” Bahari says. “She bears witness to tragic circumstances and she also finds hope, which is miraculous.”
Bahari first became aware of Gholian during the 2018 labour strike at the Haft Tappeh sugar factory in the city of Shush. “Here was this young woman with blue hair defending the rights of others and I thought she was brilliant. She represented hope for the future of Iran,” he says.
Following her arrest by the authoritarian regime, Gholian defied attempts to silence her by writing. Bahari had spent time in Iranian jail himself — 109 days in solitary confinement in 2009 — and upon his release founded the website IranWire with the mission of training citizen journalists in the country to hold power to account.
In 2019, one of his trainees put him in touch with Gholian to help publish the prison diary she was working on, Tilapia Sucks the Blood of Hur al-Azim, which recounted the regular torture, humiliation and fear she was subjected to as an inmate.
Bahari was immediately taken by the power of her voice.
“When I read the first 40 pages that we managed to get hold of from the prison, it was mesmerising and I couldn’t believe how powerful her story is,” he says. “As a writer, she is brilliant and I have felt ever since that it is an honour and privilege to be a conduit for her voice to reach the rest of Iran and the wider world.”
Gholian was released in 2019 and almost immediately rearrested and held in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison for more than four years. Only hours after her release in 2023, a video of Gholian denouncing the Ayatollah Khamenei and his regime went viral on social media. She was sent back to Evin where she currently remains in detention. It is there that Gholian decided to begin writing The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club.
In powerfully concise prose, Gholian bears witness to the female inmates she has befriended and lost over the years through a series of vignettes, each ending with a recipe she has made in prison dedicated to their memory. There is a tres leches cake for Mahin Boland Karami, who is made to clean the prison toilets with a broken mop, an elephant ears pastry for a woman who underwent a harrowing secret abortion while incarcerated, and an apple pie for Maryam Akbari Monfared, who has been imprisoned for the past 16 years without once being allowed to see her family or other visitors.
“Food is universal, it’s something all readers can identify with. By telling the stories of these women and associating them with acts of care and kindness, Gholian is humanising their experience beyond just their pain,” Bahari says. “She’s made this book about her community of prisoners and readers can join her by making the recipes as an act of solidarity too.”
It might seem strange that amid these horrifying moments of torture and humiliation something as domesticated as an apple pie can be made, but Bahari explains that although Iranian prisons are dark and authoritarian, there are cracks in the system. “Some of the prisoners come from very well-connected backgrounds of wealth or political power and they can bring their own cooking materials into prison with them,” he says.
“That is shared among the other prisoners or left behind when they leave and in taking advantage of these holes, prisoners can find small measures of freedom.”
Bahari has tried out several recipes from the book at home — a lemon meringue pie, Swiss roll and peanut butter cookies — and can attest to their deliciousness. “They all turned out really well,” he laughs. “It’s the sugar and sweetness that’s needed to help you survive and feel human again when you’re in there. I know Sepideh would love to hear from other people who end up making these recipes at home too.”
While Bahari cannot go into the details of how he managed to get Gholian’s writing and recipes out of prison, he manages to speak to her relatively regularly via her family, most recently checking in the night before we speak.
“She’s nervous about her release, since there is no detail yet of when she is going to be allowed out again,” he says. “She wants to be a lawyer and is studying to pass the bar exam in prison. She is also very artistic and interested in French film-makers like Robert Bresson, which is very mature and worldly for her age. I just want to encourage her to continue writing and to find some joy in her life too, as she deserves to be free.”
Bahari hopes that Gholian might be released as part of the general amnesty that takes place annually during the Persian new year at the end of March, but at the time of writing, she remains incarcerated.
While he awaits news of her future, Bahari hopes her writing will inspire others to take a stand.
“If there is one book that shows the power of words, it’s this one,” he says. “This is a woman who has freed her mind through reading and writing, and reclaimed her identity from a regime that has tried its best to take it away from her.”
Bahari adds: “Readers should cherish their freedom and feel inspired to do something meaningful with it, to follow in the footsteps of this extraordinary young woman who has made her voice heard when so many others have tried to silence it.”
That “something meaningful” can be as simple as making a cookie. As Gholian writes in the book: “While you’re making [these recipes], remember the women from Kurdistan, Khuzestan and all over Iran who created them … One day, when our people are victorious, I’ll bake you a cake in the streets of Ahvaz. That day isn’t far off now. I hope we can bring it about together.”
The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club, published by Oneworld, is out on 10 April.
Finger-twist halva
An extract from Sepideh Gholian’s book.
Finger-twist halva comes from the Persian Gulf city of Bushehr, and is so called because you can stretch it, wrap it around your finger, then pop it straight into your adorable mouth. It’s comforting, soft and smooth. Play a folk song from that region. All the ingredients are combined in equal amounts, so it’s easy to remember.
Ingredients
1 glass of sugar
1 glass of water
1 glass of rosewater
1 glass of saffron … No, just kidding, we’re not trying to bankrupt you. Just a bit of ground saffron will be fine.
1 glass of flour
1 glass of cooking oil
Directions
Mix the sugar, water, rosewater and saffron together, and heat on the stove until the sugar is completely dissolved. That’s your syrup. Now, in a separate pan, toast the flour and slowly add the oil, then cook that paste until it turns a gorgeous brown. Then add the syrup, little by little. Mix thoroughly and flip it about until all the oil’s been emulsified. It is delicious.
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