I started working on this recipe a few years ago in the dreary depths of winter. Flooded with grief and struggling with a bout of severe depression, I wasn’t particularly inspired to cook. But something kept drawing me to the idea of a chicken in a pot. So back I went. Let me be clear—it wasn’t nostalgia calling. Chicken soup doesn’t warmly transport me to my childhood. Simply put, it wasn’t an arrow in my mom’s vast quiver of cold remedies. And on the rare occasion when she did make a soup with chicken, it was so dense with barley and tart with lemon that I found it more of a burden than a comfort to eat. As I tinkered with the soup, I kept returning to saffron, lemon, turmeric, and black pepper. At some point, I spooned a little cooked rice into my bowl and drizzled it with warm cardamom ghee. Sitting and sipping, childhood memories of my mom’s poached chicken with saffron and lemon flooded into my head. My brothers and I always fought over the broth, which we used to douse our tahdig so that it’d soften a bit. So while my childhood chicken soup may not have inspired this one, a warm memory found its way into the pot.