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 _dastmāl_ 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 _bāzār_ 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.