Cooking was introduced to me not at home but in school, when one of our teachers, Mrs Mohammady took it upon herself to start cooking classes for girls. For this, she first had to convince the school headmistress that there would be no danger, since the girls would not be operating the stoves themselves. Then, she sought permission from the other teachers to let her use the staff room, as it was the place that had a makeshift stove to prepare tea.

Being a mother of daughters, Mrs Mohammady felt strongly about teaching them kitchen skills, which she considered a life skill. She wanted the same for boys but, unlike the girls, it was not so simple to get them to sacrifice one of their two sports or games periods to learn cooking. She started with girls in the sixth grade, who were older and responsible enough to be trusted in a kitchen, and who were also quite excited about taking cooking classes. I was one of them.

Mrs Mohammady encouraged us to put together and maintain our own cookbooks. We decorated them with pictures of cakes and pies, or whatever else in foreign magazines looked scrumptious enough for us to cut out and paste in. This went alongside recipes we penned of the cuisines we had learned to prepare. When we could not find pictures in magazines, we........

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