A tres leches cake, baked to cheer up a woman who has spent the morning scrubbing prison toilets with a broken mop. That is the image Sepideh Gholian leads with, and it is the one that stays.
Gholian has been imprisoned in Iran since 2018. The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club is structured around sixteen recipes — scones, pumpkin pies, madeleines, traditional Iranian sweets — each one produced under conditions that make a cramped home kitchen look like a palace. The women in Evin are beaten, interrogated, punished for whispering to one another. And yet they bake.
This belongs on the shelf near Alia Malek’s The Home That Was Our Country — books where the kitchen is not a retreat from politics but the place where politics is most nakedly felt.
What Gholian has done — from inside a prison, under surveillance, at considerable personal risk — is write a book that refuses to let its readers see the women of Evin as victims alone. They are bakers. They are friends. A madeleine made under impossible conditions is not a small thing but an act of defiance so ordinary it cannot be confiscated.
If you have ever made something in a kitchen not because you were hungry but because you needed proof that you could still make something — this book will find you where you are.
Sixteen recipes from behind walls that were built to silence precisely this kind of voice.
