Walk through any Kurdish village at breakfast time and the smell hits you before you see the source: flatbread cooking on the inner wall of a clay tandoor oven, blistering and puffing in the intense dry heat. This bread — called nan in Kurdish, as it is across much of the region — is one of the oldest foods in the world, essentially unchanged for thousands of years. The technique requires practice: slapping the shaped dough onto the hot clay surface without burning your arm, pulling it off at exactly the right moment.

Kurdish bread culture extends well beyond the tandoor. Lavash, a very thin unleavened flatbread, is used at every meal — as a utensil, as a wrapper, as a base for toppings of cheese and herbs. Samoon, the diamond-shaped leavened bread popular in Iraqi Kurdish cooking, is baked in stone ovens and has a specific chewy crust that no home oven quite replicates. Kuler is a thicker round bread, more like a cushion, eaten especially at Newroz.

In the diaspora, bread is one of the foods that people miss most acutely and try hardest to recreate. Kurdish Americans who do not have access to a tandoor have developed techniques using pizza stones, cast iron skillets, and very hot ovens to approximate the result. It is never exactly the same, but the attempt itself is a form of cultural continuity.