Evin is one of the world’s most notorious prisons, the kind of place that makes your skin crawl when you drive past it. Behind its drab walls in northwest Tehran, at the foot of the Alborz Mountains, Evin House of Detention is a place of beatings, tortures, executions and brutal interrogations, a “Hell on Earth”. Among its 15,000 inmates, including murderers and rapists, are political prisoners, journalists, intellectuals and activists, many of whom took part in the Woman, Life, Freedom protests. Evin is where the British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was held for five years.
And, according to this astonishing book written from inside by Sepideh Gholian, one of Iran’s best-known female political prisoners, it is also a place where those female prisoners are baking up a storm, producing cream puffs, custard doughnuts, scones and lemon meringue pie. As she writes: “You might well ask Isn’t prison prison? How the hell could you be making confectionery in there?”
Exactly my thought as I started reading it and perusing the recipes, which involve double cream, eggs, vanilla essence, cinnamon … But then I remembered reading an interview with Zaghari-Ratcliffe where she spoke about her time inside making clothes using fabrics from Liberty in London and baking. It turns out the women’s political wing not only has a sewing machine but also a small kitchen with two gas rings and they managed to acquire an oven, culinary utensils and, crucially, a baking tin.
In fact this book is a remarkable testimony to women’s bravery, compassion and solidarity in the harshest of conditions, an account of irrepressible women refusing to be worn down amid torture, sexual abuse and repeated interrogations, showing defiance through a joy in baking — think Nigella crossed with Nelson Mandela.
Indeed, it reminded me of interviewing Mandela’s former fellow inmates in Robben Island, the notorious South African jail that became known as Robben Island University as Mandela and others refused to be crushed and instead used the breaks between forced labour to teach and increase their knowledge.
Let’s start with the author, Sepideh Gholian, 30 years old and known for her bright blue hair, who has spent much of the past six and a half years in jail. She was first arrested in November 2018 for organising support for a strike at the Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Complex and tortured, after which the state broadcaster aired a “confession” in which she “admitted” to being a “communist”. On her release, instead of going quietly, she told the world about the horrors she had endured and published a prison diary, so was arrested again. And again.
The last time she was free, in 2023, she posted a video removing her hijab and denouncing Iran’s supreme leader, shouting: “Khamenei, you tyrant, we’re going to put you in a grave!” A day later she was back in jail, where she has been since.
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Yet Gholian’s spirit was clearly not broken. “I saw I wasn’t much more than a toy,” she writes. “I’d been beaten, humiliated and shamed … Ultimately I came to realise that there are a lot of things you can’t do in an endemically repressive patriarchal system.” Apart from baking.
As Zaghari-Ratcliffe said after her release in 2022, one of the main challenges for the female political prisoners in Evin is finding ways to pass the time. “The solidarity among women in Evin Prison was bigger and stronger than anything I had ever witnessed in my life,” she said in the Longford Lecture last November. “In Evin, inmates had come up with ways to bring more meaning to their lives. For them, prison life was something more significant than simply walls, bars, locks and the clang of gates. They had found threads to connect them to their life outside the walls. They had found hope.”
In this book, which was smuggled out and put together by the exiled activist Maziar Bahari, this is expressed through a series of recipes — each one for a particular female prisoner. The first is a tres leches (three milks) cake for Mahin Boland Karami, a Kurdish woman who loved dancing but froze to death in jail.
There’s a pumpkin pie for Narges Mohammadi, a women’s rights campaigner who won the Nobel peace prize in 2023 while inside Evin, where she is serving a 13-year sentence, that Gholian suggests serving with a bunch of daffodils in honour of her name, which means narcissi.
Gholian also befriended Zaghari-Ratcliffe, describing her as “master of at least 200 skills including being a fine baker”. She writes of her in “a brownish apron” baking ginger cookies for Gabriella, the daughter she so missed, and how the smell of ginger and cinnamon always reminds her of Nazanin. For her she offers a recipe for scones “using date syrup instead of sugar, especially if you are on a diet”.
Most of the recipes involve suggestions for songs to sing while cooking as well as baking tips for “those in prison” such as how to grind walnuts using a sieve. We get a recipe for what Gholian describes as “the best cheesecake in the world” for Maryam Haji-Hosseini, a distinguished scientist who fits her cooking in between a strict schedule of reading and calisthenics, and whenever a prison official appears asks when they are going to execute her.
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Woven into all this are the horrors of one of the most repressive systems on Earth, a regime that executed at least 901 people last year, according to the UN, including 40 in just one week in December.
Sexual violence is common in detention and Gholian writes of how the female prisoners “know by heart the sounds of the laughter of men who leave bruises on their bodies in the corner of cells. They know the smell of them, even the pace of their footsteps.”
There is a searing description of a young female prisoner whose three sisters have been killed. She is blindfolded and taken for interrogation, where she can “see only the chair legs and two human feet in plastic slippers peeking out from the ends of two grey trouser legs”. Vomiting on her interrogator, she discovers she is pregnant. Terrified of what would happen to a baby in such a place, she carries out a horrific DIY abortion and when the foetus won’t go down the drain has to crush it with a lavatory brush.
For her the women make traditional Persian kachi pudding infused with saffron and rosewater, known as a pick-me-up during menstruation or after birth.
My favourite is the recipe for madeleines for Marzieh Amiri, a rap-loving journalist arrested in the Women, Life, Freedom protests. “Bake it the night before, stick it in your pocket, stride down the pavement, let your hijab hang lopsided so you’ll feel some wind in the hair and take a bite out of madeleine with rap playing,” Gholian writes. “Carry out a tiny act of feminism.”
I don’t think I will ever again eat a madeleine without remembering that. I haven’t tried making any of the recipes so cannot vouch for this as a cookbook. But if you want a sense of its humour and bravery in the face of adversity, just read this line: “If you encounter problems with the recipes in this book and I’m not in prison at the time, please notify me on Instagram or X.”
Christina Lamb is chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times
The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran’s Most Notorious Prison in 16 Recipes by Sepideh Gholian, translated by Hessam Ashrafi (Oneworld £12.99 pp183). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
