My husband-to-be stood over the stove top holding a miniature paring knife, like a nervous surgeon looming over an operating table. Wearing shorts and an oversized basketball jersey, he was about to begin the process of carving the browned twelve-pound turkey and he wasn’t sure where to make the first incision.

This was going to take awhile, but I thought better of complaining. This was our first turkey together, after all, something we decided to embark on before the real turkey with our families, so we had to make do. For starters, we didn’t have the right tools. We didn’t have a roasting pan or anything close to a carving knife.

I watched with hungry eyes as he cut scraps of meat, but I wasn’t going to take the lead.

I’ve never carved a turkey before. As in many families, carving the turkey is a ritual reserved for my dad.  At dinner, he ceremoniously carves the turkey in thick, juicy slices and places them on our plates. But round two of the carving lasts well into the night, after most of us succumb to a post-Thanksgiving dinner haze. My dad is alert in his apron, tie tucked behind his neck, working like a gold-digger in the kitchen. He has one mission: get every last remaining bit of meat from the bird and place it in a plastic container for later eating. He loves his food and his leftovers.

I thought of my family traditions and new beginnings with my fiancé as I read Donia Bijan’s beautiful memoir, Maman’s Homesick Pie: A Persian Heart in an American Kitchen (Algonquin, $19.95), about her Iranian family and her mother, who taught her how to cook.

As in most memoirs, there are sad parts and happy times, vivid descriptions of childhood memories and heartfelt grown-up reflections, but this memoir stands out for the way Bijan ties food and cooking to the story of her displaced family. Even as the family was forced to start again in a new country, cooking was done with care and skill; eating was a time to be together. Bijan also wrote the memoir as a tribute to her mother, the woman who encouraged Bijan from a young age to follow her passion for cooking.

Bijan grew up to become a chef and had her own restaurant in Palo Alto, California for ten years. She was born in Tehran when the city was cosmopolitan and multicultural. Her mother loved to cook.  Bijan describes watching her mother in the kitchen, as she moved from pantry to sink to stove. Her mother would give her daughter a task, washing the fruit she had bought at the market, peeling, or chopping. “My mother never waved me away to go play outside, but rather expected me to keep in step, giving me patient instructions with the confidence that I would carry them through,” writes Bijan.

In the summer months, the family would begin their meals with a chilled, minty cucumber and yogurt soup. When she turned eight, Bijan’s mother put her in charge of the soup—an invitation to innovation. Bijan describes the little variations she loved to make, “substituting torn rose petals for mint, adding raisins and crushed walnuts, or ice cubes with mint leaves frozen inside on particularly hot, dusty Tehran days.”

Fortunately, Bijan includes recipes for several of the meals she mentions in the book, along with other mouth-watering favorites, like  Orange Cardamom Cookies or Braised Chicken with Persian Plums.

In the summer of 1978, on the cusp of the Islamic Revolution, Bijan and her family were vacationing on the Spanish island of Majorca, enjoying the local flavors and markets; eating ensaimadas, a special Majorcan breakfast pastry; and sipping their café con leche. When news broke of the revolution, her parents decided it was too risky to return to Iran. Her mother’s feminist politics made her a target—family and friends in Iran warned them not to return.

Bijan was fifteen at the time. She could think of nothing but going to the United States, where her two older sisters were attending university. After a few months, she received a student visa and was allowed to finish high school living with family friends in Michigan. Her parents were left stranded in Majorca, unable to return to their native home. Meanwhile, Bijan was awed by all things American: thirty-six flavors of ice cream, sundaes and milk shakes, Halloween candy, cereals, and McDonald’s hot apple pies. After two years of life in the Midwest, Bijan was finally reunited with her parents in Fresno, California.

While her father struggled with English, and was never able to pass the medical boards, Bijan’s mother flourished in America. Fifty-one at the time, she soaked up California’s rich ingredients, and prepared her Persian dishes as she had before. Half a world away from Iran, their house began to smell like home again. But her mother also took the time to master American dishes: coleslaw, banana bread, carrot cake, macaroni and cheese.

This came to an end when Bijan’s mother died tragically and suddenly in 2004, Bijan  stumbled upon a recipe box in her mother’s kitchen. The recipes were an eclectic mix: chow mein with water chestnuts, microwave sweet-and-sour shrimp, newspaper clippings dedicated to holiday cooking from when her parents settled in Fresno. The recipes, mostly handwritten, brought her closer to her mother than ever before, and told her more about her mother than a drawer full of letters ever could. The recipes were her mother’s legacy.

“Why had a woman so well versed in Persian cuisine, who had weathered a revolution, exile, and threats to her life and had built her family a new home through sheer will, felt pushed to the other side of belonging? Not one to be left out, she had seen the vital connection between food and belonging.”

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My fiancé did manage to carve the turkey cut by tiny cut.  As I ate turkey and stuffing in our first apartment together, on a table that also functions as his workspace, I thought of Bijan, describing her mother and father on their first Thanksgiving in America. Instead of turkey—instead, even, of the Persian delicacies this book brings so delectably to life—her mother prepared medium rare cheeseburgers on toasted sesame buns. This is the wisdom that Bijan, and her mother, share with us—there are many ways to give thanks, many Americas to celebrate, and many places to begin building traditions (and homes).

Buy it here: Amazon • Indiebound • Barnes & Noble • Algonquin