pomegranate
Cultural layer
Punica granatum L. (Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, accessed 2026-10-04)
Food of Life, 25th anniversary edition (Najmieh Batmanglij, 2011)
The Oxford Companion to Food (Alan Davidson, 1999)
Deuteronomy 8:7 to 8, in the King James Version (Project Gutenberg eBook 10)
Nar Bayrami, traditional pomegranate festivity and culture (Azerbaijan; UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, 2020)
Food of Life (Najmieh Batmanglij, 1986)
Route
PendingThe routes are written. They are not yet mapped.
This entry's cultural layer already names where it came from and how it moved. What it does not yet carry is that movement as structure: ordered waypoints with real coordinates, and a mechanism on each leg. Until it does, the layer stays an empty slot rather than a drawn line, because a map built from prose would be a guess with a projection under it.
1 of 409 entries carries a mapped route · nutmeg is the prototype
- Waypoints
Ordered places, each with its kind
- Coordinates
Real positions, with the gazetteer they came from
- Segments
From, to, and the mechanism that moved it
- Confidence
Documented, attributed or contested
- Summary
What the route argues, in a sentence
Rite
The pomegranate is a fruit for counting and for the underworld. Persephone's six seeds bind her to Hades and give Greece its winter; at Yalda, the Persian solstice night, its red is the dawn to come; at Rosh Hashanah its seeds stand for the commandments; and it appears on the robes of the temple priesthood in Exodus. A fruit that opens to hundreds of separate seeds became the standard image for abundance across every tradition that met it.
Food of Life (Najmieh Batmanglij, 1986)
Names · co-equal, marked by how each one travelled
FoodwayPresent as a living food culture.
No names recorded.
Connections
9 bonds · 7 sourcedFesenjan, the Persian walnut and pomegranate stew.
Searched in Food of Life, 2011 edition, page 318, khoresh-e fesenjan ba jujeh: walnuts sautéed and ground to a paste with pomegranate juice and pomegranate molasses.
Fesenjan, walnut and pomegranate.
Searched in Food of Life, 2011 edition, page 318, pomegranate khoresh with roasted duck, the fesenjan made without the chicken and served with a whole roast duck; page 319 has it with duck breast.
Javaher polo, where pomegranate seeds sit among the jewels on saffron rice.
Ash-e anar, the pomegranate soup, and its lamb meatballs.
Ash-e anar, where mint goes in with the herbs and again as fried mint oil over the top.
Searched in Food of Life, 2011 edition, page 94, the pomegranate soup: two cups of fresh mint go in with the parsley, cilantro and spring onions, with pomegranate juice. The fried mint garnish is not in the text the search returns.
Sharbat-e anar, the pomegranate syrup scented with golab.
Bonds are drawn from culinary literature and origin-tradition references, tiered by source. Origin means a reference from the place. Witness means the pairing is the place's own and the reference documenting it was written from outside.
The score is cultural weight: how central a pairing is in the tradition that documents it. It is not a prediction of how two materials behave in a formulation and not a measure of chemical affinity. The scale is ordinal, because centrality is a judgement rather than a measurement: 1.0 where the pair is the dish, 0.9 a fixed named form, 0.8 a canonical dish, 0.7 recurrent across many dishes, 0.6 common, 0.5 attested, 0.4 marginal or compound-led.
Each score is set against a named dish and carries that dish in its note. Where a score has not been examined it says so, because an inherited figure and a researched one should not look alike.
The dish is named by a reader who knows the cuisine and cites a source appropriate to it. It has not yet been confirmed inside that source page by page, so a note records what supports a score rather than what has been checked in the book.
Studio Culinar-E, "pomegranate", Pantry Archive, Studio Monk-E, 2026. https://studioculinar-e.com/archive/pomegranate
/archive/pomegranate
Bonds are tiered by source, origin-tradition references first.