Persian Rose

Persian Rose
Does any one know how to make ghand (Persian sugar cubes)?

My cousin’s grand mother makes these sugar cubes that take forever to melt in you’re mouth. I guess she heats up sugar, water, and some spices maby rose watter, but im not shure of the measurements, spices, or heating time.

No, dude (Tiracs). Ghand is farsi for ‘sugar cube’ (obviously it has a different meaning in Hindi)

Give me a moment and I’m gonna try and find a recipe. If I do, I’ll edit it in.

[Later: Still tryin' but here's some info:]

The style of drinking tea dishlameh, which in Persian is called (ghand pahlou = sugar on the side), however, must be viewed to have been around for much longer. The proof is in the morphology of what preceded the modern sugar bit. According to Dehkhoda, in Persian, another word for ghand is nabat. The item known as nabat to most Iranians is the grape-like bunch of translucent lumps crystallized around a twine, having the look and feel of hard-candy. The nabat is hard to the teeth and takes a considerable amount of time to dissolve in water. If the nabat were placed in tea and twirled in order to dissolve it, the process would have cooled the tea itself, which to most Iranians it is a useless liquid if not hot. My guess is that long before the European sugar loaf appeared in Iran that Iranians drank their tea dishlameh or ghand pahlou by necessity.

[Later: Boy, this is turning out to be a challenge!
Making Ghand is basically like making rock candy - but I still havent found the flavorings. Here is one basic method:]

Chay and the natural inclination to drink it is a part of Persian culture. We’ve had chay everywhere: in homes, in restaurants, on the minibus, in lobbies. It’s sociable. And since we trekkers are such sociable individuals, we find ourselves drinking it often.

In the bazaar in Khoy, Maryam, a young friend, shows me down a side alley to the ghand store where her friend works. Ghand is the sugar lump that people drink with their tea; usually, we find sugar cubes that dissolve very quickly, but ghand is more like rock candy. I had always wanted to see how they make it, and Maryam gives me that chance.

Inside it’s slightly hot: a fire burns and inside a big pot Maryam’s friend and a helper are heating up water and sugar together. They pour it out into rectangular pans, where it starts to harden into sheets about a quarter-inch thick.

Then, they cut it up into squares, while it’s still malleable. They fold over each square a few times, so it’s like layers of sugar, and then run the sheet through a tool that cuts each sheet into sugar lumps, kind of football-shaped, the size of regular sugar cubes.

Finally, they break off the ghand into pieces and sell it in bulk.

[Okay - I'm gonna see if I can find anything on flavorings. Again - any rock candy making method would work for making hard lumps of sugar.]

[Nawp - looked all over Google, and can't find the flavorings. I found one site that looked like it made 'Kaleh Ghand' which are larger loaves of sugar, sometimes sculpted for weddings. This mentioned that it made mint, lavendar and vanilla flavored sugar sculptures (like we have ice sculptures - but their's get eaten). So I think, just experiment with any recipe for plain rock candy and experiment with flavorings such as rose, lavendar, vanilla or mint (or cinnamon for that matter). I think if it is any flavor that existed in Persia (like the above suggestions) it would be fine as far as authenticity.]

.
(P.S. Coming back a few days later, and keeping in mind that I am not Persian, this answer is proof-positive that Yahoo answers makes otherwise normal people crazy….particularly late at nite…. ;-p )
.