One thing life has taught me is that things mostly taste better after a little mild discomfort: at the top of Scafell Pike, for instance, even Sandwich Spread on sliced white is purest nectar. The Barcelona restaurant it took you an hour and half to find on foot in bad sandals and 90 degree heat is – unless they dished up tinned Russian salad and a few gently perspiring cubes of manchego – almost bound to linger in your memory as the home of the best tapas of your life in spite of the row its unfathomable location provoked en route, just as fish and chips only truly hits the spot when devoured on a damp bench in a howling gale with a fake broken heart, numb fingers and a blurry view of the North Sea.
I ate the best ice-cream I ever tasted in Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan, Iran. It was flavoured with saffron and served with pale rice vermicelli in a sweet and semi-frozen rosewater syrup. I don't suppose it was particularly remarkable in itself, but it came my way like a blessing at the end of 10 days in the country, during which I'd spent every waking moment with strangers and put up with a fair amount of harassment on the streets (that very morning, I'd been ticked off by a religious man for the inch-wide gap that had somehow appeared between my hijab and the shoulder of my tunic).
Persian food is famously good, but in the restaurants our guide favoured – I could only get a visa if I travelled with a guide – we were served the same thing over and over: a dry fillet of what we were told was sturgeon with flavourless rice and, to drink, a bottle of Zam Zam Cola (there is a boycott of Coke and Pepsi in Iran). No wonder, then, that I think now of this ice-cream, primrose-coloured and so fragrant, with such fondness. Lolling on the grass with the dozens of families who were also enjoying it, I took in the square's gleaming vastness – at 89,600 square metres, it is one of the biggest in the world – and felt content for the first time in a week. I was about to fly home, but only now did it feel like my trip had really begun.
Persian ice-cream is called bastani and the vermicelli dish that came with it is known as faloodeh. Like Arab ice-creams, bastani is made with the starch of a root called saalab and mastic, a resin which gives it an amazingly dense and elastic texture. It's straightforward to make, especially if you have an ice-cream machine: the dondurma kaymakli ice-cream in Claudia Roden's Middle Eastern Food is similar (substitute saffron for her orange blossom water, and cornflour for the saalab); mastic may be bought online (try souschef.co.uk). But somehow, it's never quite the same at home. It's not only that I'm unlikely to hear the sound of the muezzin dancing on the breeze in my London kitchen. It's that I lack the requisite sense of quest: the sense of achievement that I feel should come with such a treat. I'm never quite hot, dusty or fed up enough for it to work its magic.
Ah, well. The great thing about living in London is that this, too, isn't difficult to sort. It's easy to play hooky from my desk for an hour or so, and at the far end of the Holloway Road there is a Persian restaurant called Gilak that serves bastani. If I walk there, or even catch the bus, by the time I arrive my temper will be helpfully frayed, and my chest tight with fumes (this is so very Tehran).
Better still is Damas Rose in the Edgware Road which has, as you may know, a reputation for being the best source of pistachio and mastic ice-cream (booza al-haleb) this side of Damascus. Reaching its tiny, unprepossessing premises – it looks at first glance like your bog-standard Arab pastry shop – can certainly be turned into an odyssey of sorts, since the journey involves, from my house, a bus and two tubes, followed by a charm-free walk down one of the most polluted streets in the city.
In fact, it's all rather perfect. The jolting, too-hot bus. The ponderous, rattling Circle Line. The greasy litter that gusts about your feet as you reach the street. The smell of coriander, garlic and petrol. The owners even serve their ice-cream in authentically nasty plastic cups, just like the ones I remember from Isfahan. And then, at the end of it all, the reward. One mouthful. That does it. The journey home, though just as unpleasant, isn't half so much fun.
rachel.cooke@observer.co.uk
