Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato

A selection of From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Book Club.

Shortlisted for the Nach Waxman Prize for Food & Beverage Scholarship.

The tomato is native to the Americas, yet by the end of the twentieth century it had become Egypt's most important horticultural crop and a fixture of the national cuisine. How that happened, and what it reveals about Egyptian identity, modernization, and domestic life, is the subject of Anny Gaul's carefully researched history.

Gaul draws on cookbooks, archival materials, and oral histories to follow the tomato from field to kitchen, with particular attention to the women who cooked with it. Egypt's home cooks, she argues, were not passive recipients of a changing food system. Through the recipes they wrote and the meals they prepared, they actively shaped a shared culinary culture that helped define what it meant to be Egyptian.

The book is attentive to the ways that culture both crossed and reinforced divisions of class, region, gender, and ethnicity. The tomato turns out to be a surprisingly precise instrument for examining how national identity is constructed through everyday acts, and how modernization reshapes the most intimate aspects of domestic life.

Gaul is Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Maryland and co-editor of Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean. For readers drawn to food history that takes its social and political dimensions seriously, this is a richly rewarding study.

Paperback. Color photographs throughout.