I recently came across The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club: Surviving Iran’s Most Notorious Prisons in 16 Recipes while reading an article in The New Yorker. I paused. Then I reread the title. It felt too human for a prison memoir. But that is exactly what makes it unforgettable.
Written by Sepideh Gholian, a journalist and activist who has been imprisoned in Iran multiple times for speaking out, the book is not just about confinement it is about resistance. Not in a dramatic, militant sense, but in the tender act of baking together. Of surviving with dignity, of softening trauma with the smell of flour and cardamom in a cell.
Each recipe in the book is connected to a woman Sepideh met in Evin Prison. Women with different fates, different charges, and different reasons for being caged but bound together through shared humanity. In the quietest corners of a prison known for torture, these women found a way to care, to comfort, to make joy out of scraps.
Reading the article in The New Yorker, I felt something shift inside me. I have always been drawn to stories of women who endure. And this book didn’t sensationalize it simply laid the truth bare. Gholian does not beg for pity. She writes with clarity, with courage, and with a gentle, haunting voice that stays with you. In the middle of a place designed to break people, she found crumbs of freedom in companionship, in laughter, in dough.
Sometimes the most political thing a woman can do is to bake. To nurture. To remember. To write.
This book has made me reflect deeply on the ways women support each other under systems that try to erase them. And it reminded me that storytelling itself especially when done with this kind of raw, honest love is an act of defiance.
If you find a copy, hold it close. It’s not just a cookbook. It’s a record of survival. A call to remember those whose voices are still silenced. And a reminder that even in places without windows, light can still pour in through the scent of something baking.
