In a Persian town there is a curious arrangement of the shops. All the shops where one kind of article is sold are generally grouped together in one street or bazar. To buy shoes we go to the shoe bazaar, for cooking pots to the copper bazaar.

The copper or brass bazaar is almost always worth a visit in a Persian town. It is a long roofed-in street with a continuous row of small shops on either side. The “shop” consists of a lock-up room with a small mud platform in front of it, raised a foot or two above the street. On this platform are two or three stumps on which the pots are placed for hammering, for after being heated over a charcoal brazier they are hammered and beaten into the required shape, thickness and pattern. On nearly every platform is a man, sometimes two or three men and boys, hammering each on his copper pot and the noise produced by a hundred or more men hammering vigorously on copper vessels, which give different notes according to size, shape and thickness, is deafening, but not wholly disagreeable.[B]

But there is another bazaar well worth a visit in Yezd at any rate. The shops here have counters rising in tiers, so as to display the very tempting goods to advantage. The goods themselves are chiefly laid out on huge round copper trays, about a yard across and very heavy, made in the bazaar we have just left, but whitened over, as all copper vessels are.

Surely we are in Fairyland at last. Shop after shop shows tier upon tier of the most delicious sweets in the most tempting profusion. Here is pashmak, looking like cotton wool and tasting something like butter creams. There are two or three kinds of almond toffee, or son—some with green pistachio nuts in it. Huge fondants, or loz, in diamond-shaped cakes, nearly as large as the ordinary penny fancy cakes in England, alternate with similar cakes of green pari-ta’us (peacock’s feathers), and brown baghalava, richer and stickier than either.

Those white nuqls are delicious burnt almonds, which seem to melt away in your mouth, the long ones have strips of cocoa-nut instead of almonds, and the little round ones burnt peas. Here are little flat round cakes of gaz, a kind of nougat only made in Isfahan, but sent to all the towns in Persia. One variety of gaz contains little sticks of a gum which is supposed to cure rheumatism, a very pleasant remedy.

There is a great bowl a foot across, and over an inch thick made wholly of sugar candy, which has taken the shape of the basin in which it crystallised, and in the middle of which three long sticks of sugar candy stand up high above the top. Such a bowl a kind Persian friend sent to a missionary’s little boy, when he was a few days old, to provide him with “sugar-candy water,” which is considered particularly good for young babies. These are only a few of the sweets, there are too many to mention all. Some kinds are only made in the fast month of Ramazan, and others only at the New Year. The sweets are delicious but they are as a rule very simple and very sweet. So the Persians do not hand them round in little paper bags, nor even in pretty little boxes; they pile them on plates and dishes, as we do cakes; and, as you have seen, many of them are as large as cakes. When you go to visit a Persian, you have not tea and cakes, but tea and sweets. For a quiet call on quiet people, two or three plates of sweets are enough, but at a regular sweet-eating at a big house, one or two great trays will be set on the ground before the guests, each with five dishes of sweets on it, each dish holding about a pound and a half to two pounds of sweets. The Persian women are often very pressing with their sweets, even to the point of putting them into their visitors’ mouths, and in their hospitality they sometimes over-estimate the size of the mouth. Often too, the guests are made to carry home what is left, or a part of it, tied up in a handkerchief. This is so common that where the European is shy of pressing the custom, the Persian ladies will sometimes carry home the remains of European dishes out of courtesy, to show that they have appreciated them. This custom probably exists and has existed in many Eastern countries, and may very likely be the reason why Joseph gave Benjamin five times as much as his other brothers. Benjamin was probably intended to take what was over away with him.

I was visiting some Persian women one day, and they asked for my handkerchief to wrap up the remainder of the sweets in. I apologised for being unable to take them as I had not a clean handkerchief, on which they all eagerly assured me that it did not matter in the least, they would be quite content with the one I had. The Persian dastmal or handkerchief serves every purpose except the one we connect it with. Your Persian servant, always carries a large coloured one in his pocket. He dusts the rooms with it, puts his purchases from the bazar into it, polishes your boots with it before you enter a Persian house, and carries home sweets or nuts in it.

At the New Year, there are twenty-one days set apart for holiday making and visiting, and in every house tea and sweets and sherbet are ready for all comers. In those twenty-one days people are expected to visit all their friends, and even with strict moderation the most sweet-loving schoolboy of your acquaintance would probably be glad of a rest by the end of the three weeks.

All this sounds delightful, doesn’t it? But unfortunately it is more for the grown-ups than for the children. The children like sweets well enough and get a good many, but they have not the same opportunities as the grown-ups.

But sweets have their serious uses among the Persians. We have seen that rheumatism may be cured with nougat, and we find that sweets in general are very strengthening. It is not at all uncommon, after a small operation or the extraction of a tooth, to see the friends pressing sugar or sweets into the patient’s mouth, to restore her strength after the shock, and in the same way after a fright a few sweets make you feel much better.

Bread and sweets are not an uncommon dinner, and a child who was ordered by the doctor to take plenty of milk because it was good strengthening food, was given three-quarters of a pound of sweets for her dinner instead. “So much more strengthening than milk,” the mother said.

Persian sweets are very soft and in the dry climate quickly get hard and lose their first freshness, and to offer a Persian stale sweets is like offering you stale cakes. They are at their best only on the day they are made, and the servant sent to buy sweets will sit down with his tray of plates at the shop-door and wait till the new sweets are ready, when they can be put quite fresh and new on the plates on which they are to be served. In Yezd, where the best sweets are made, our servants seemed to regard the moving of sweets to a fresh plate much as we should the removal of a pie to a fresh pie-dish, and many sorts are certainly the worse for being shifted after they have got cold. All better-class Persians make their own sweets at home and consider “shop sweets” very inferior.

The fame of Persian sherbet has spread far, and nearly every visitor to Persia looks forward to a treat when he tastes it. But it by no means comes up to expectation. It is often made fresh in the presence of the guests, so the recipe is no secret. A sugar loaf is put in a basin, by preference a pot pourri bowl, and cold water is poured over it, and it is allowed to melt with an occasional stir. A little rosewater is then added to flavour it, and it is handed round in glasses, with ice if possible. At meals, however, the bowl is placed on the tablecloth,—there is no table,—and a large carved wooden spoon is passed to each in turn from which to drink it.

Sometimes lime or orange juice is offered as an alternative flavour to rosewater, which makes it much more palatable to Europeans. But insipid as the ordinary sherbet is, it seems the most delicious compound imaginable when it is taken, well-iced, after a long walk with the thermometer at 100° in the shade. Perhaps that is why it has been so much praised.

Another favourite beverage is sekunjibin, which is like raspberry vinegar with mint instead of raspberry.

Sherbet and good things to eat figure largely in Muhammad’s description of the joys of Heaven. His ideals were ideals that did not need much growing up to. He expected his followers to have childish ideas and childish desires even in heaven.