Kurdish food is mountain food and valley food and steppe food all at once. Because the Kurdish homeland spans different climates and geographies, the cuisine is more varied than outsiders often expect. The dishes of northern Iraq, with their access to river fish and pomegranate groves, differ from the dishes of southeastern Turkey, where lamb and wheat dominate, which differ again from the food of western Iran, where Persian influence is strong.

A few things run through all of it. Lamb is the prestige meat — it is what you serve at celebrations, what you sacrifice at Eid, what you bring out when a guest arrives. Rice is prepared in a specific way: fluffy, fragrant, often cooked with a crispy bottom crust called kesk that gets broken up and mixed back in at the table. Yogurt appears in some form at almost every meal — drunk as a cold drink mixed with water and salt, served as a condiment, or cooked into soups and stews.

Herbs and spices are used with restraint compared to some neighboring cuisines, but the quality of the ingredients matters enormously. Kurdish home cooks have strong opinions about dried herbs from specific regions, about which pomegranate molasses is worth buying, and about the proper ratio of rice to water. These opinions are passed down with the same seriousness as the recipes.