Egypt: Recipes And Stories From An Ancient Land

Suzanne Zeidy and Rawah Badrawi spent three years traveling across Egypt to document the cooking of communities whose food rarely appears in cookbooks. They sought out matriarchs, monks, Bedouins, Nubians, farmers, and home cooks, sometimes returning several times to earn their trust, gathering oral histories and recipes that in some cases are in danger of disappearing. 

Rather than divide Egypt conventionally by course or even region, Zeidy and Badrawi organize more than 140 recipes around the country’s defining landscapes: Sea, Desert, River, and Mountain. Grouper freekeh from Port Said and fishermen’s soup from Alexandria give way to lamb and pumpkin tagine from Siwa, fava puree with frizzled onions from Minya, cumin-braised beef from Luxor, and the foods of the Bedouin communities around Mount Sinai. 

Each place is introduced through its history and the authors’ travels there, showing how geography, trade, religion, and migration have shaped what people eat. Their research took them from the orchards of Saint Catherine’s Monastery to the Nile and the oases of the Western Desert, following introductions from one cook to another and testing and retesting what they learned for the home kitchen. 

Cairo comes last, treated not as the source of a single cuisine but as a city that has absorbed foods and people from throughout Egypt and beyond. For this section, Zeidy and Badrawi persuaded Cairene families to share treasured heirloom recipes, some published here for the first time. 

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.