Egypt: Recipes and Stories from an Ancient Land is part cookbook, part cultural argument

📖🇪🇬 Ask an Egyptian to describe our national cuisine, and you will most likely get a passionate narrative driven by personal experience and family background. It’s the type of discussion that usually ends up fueling endless debates about whether or not shrimp belongs in molokheya, the “right” way to make shakshuka, or if moussaka needs to be topped with bechamel.

Does this mean that Egyptian cuisine suffers from an identity crisis? On the contrary. According to Suzanne Zeidy and Rawah Badrawi, the authors of the new book, Egypt: Recipes and Stories from an Ancient Land, it simply means that Om El Donia’s diverse cultural influences have created a rich culinary mosaic that is difficult to explain in just a sentence or two. The two women set out to capture that multifaceted Egyptian food identity in a three-year project that culminated in 420 pages of fascinating written and visual narrative, 150 recipes, stunning illustrations, dramatic photos, and countless stories that remind us that there is a vast culinary world out there that deserves to be explored, remembered, and celebrated.

Egypt: Recipes and Stories from an Ancient Land officially launched in Egypt last Friday, 25 September, at the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). Zeidy tells EnterpriseAM that it’s difficult to put into words just how honored they felt to be launching their book next to Ramses and Tutankhamun. “Bringing in our team from London to see and experience this with us was just magnificent,” she says. “Books don’t always get the celebrity and love that they deserve, especially books about culture, history, and food,” Badrawi tells us. “But this was one time where we felt celebrated. There’s something about our book, its message and content, that just pairs beautifully with the GEM.”

The launch coincided with the fourth edition of Cairo Food Week. A special exhibit was created as part of Cairo Food Week’s Tables of Cairo that included installations by architect Shahira Fahmy, designer Emma James, artist Louis Barthelemy (who illustrated the book), and photographer Mohamed Mahdy, all inspired by the book’s chapters: sea, desert, river, mountain, and Cairo.

Calling it a cookbook is a disservice. It’s more of a cultural manifesto

One of the motivating factors that led to the creation of the book is the misconception that Egypt is not known for its food. “For someone to make such an ignorant statement about a culinary heritage so rich and layered fueled our passion to prove everyone wrong,” says Zeidy. “This view comes not just from Westerners, but also from non-Egyptian Arabs,” says Badrawi. “The Levant tends to think that their cuisine is superior, and we wanted to address that and end this argument once and for all,” she adds.

But good Egyptian food is more often than not served at home, which presents a challenge. Egyptian food has not traveled as well as Moroccan and Lebanese fare. You would struggle to find an authentic Egyptian restaurant beyond the casual street food and koshari stands, not only in the European capitals and North America but even right here in Om El Donia.

That didn’t stop Zeidy and Badrawi. They decided to join forces, travel the country, and go directly into people’s homes in search of authentic Egyptian recipes. The two women, who are lifelong friends, were both published authors. Badrawi, who studied economics and history at Georgetown, had written a travelogue about Siwa in 2011. Zeidy, a trained chef and restaurateur who founded the iconic Cairene F&B outlets, including Cilantro, La Bodega, and Cairo Kitchen, in the early 2000s, wrote a cookbook called Cairo Kitchen in 2014.

They began working on the book three years ago while living in different cities, Badrawi in London and Zeidy in Berlin. They bounced ideas off one another on Zoom and visited each other frequently until the initial legwork was done. “We knew that we wanted to cover the entirety of Egypt and we wanted to make it a journey,” says Zeidy. “Organizing the book into the typical appetizers, mains, and desserts would have been boring, and it doesn't give you the travel and history angle that we are both so passionate about,” she adds.

They decided to drive cross-country in a Land Rover to experience the food, learn the recipes, and listen to the stories that brought them to life. “Breaking down the book by geography enabled us to tell all kinds of stories: historical, anthropological, and culinary. It also allowed us to bring the country to life visually with photography and illustrations,” Zeidy tells us. “We wanted to send a clear message: Egypt is not a flat terrain with a unified, singular cuisine. It is dominated by its staggering nature and topography, so there’s no way the food is going to be anything except very rich and layered,” explains Badrawi.

The recipes

Part of the book’s mission is to document what’s slipping away. “Recipes in Egypt are generally handed down orally, and people can start to forget,” Zeidy says. Their process began with a lot of research, which included reading academic papers and talking with experts in the cultures and regions they were planning to visit.

Almost every recipe opens with what Badrawi calls “mini nuggets of history,” and they are delightful. Who knew that the name basbousa, an Egyptian national dessert, comes from the Arabic words “just a kiss.” “Wherever we went, we would connect ourselves to a local family or person who’s working in a specific craft. If there was a wedding we would attend, we ate their food, and hung out with their families in order to absorb as much of the local culture as we could,” explains Badrawi.

Zeidy would then go home, test the recipes, and rewrite each one, making sure that they were accessible enough for home cooks. “I’m a home cook, so many of those recipes were tested out on me,” says Badrawi. Only two recipes are genuinely difficult, according to Zeidy, feteer meshaltet (Egyptian layered pie) from Kafr El Sheikh and malban kheit (stringed walnut jelly delight) from Damietta. “But they are so iconic, I needed to include them.”

In Fayoum, the pair spent half a day hunting for the black-and-white chicken breed called Bigawi that the region was once famous for, and found none. That section of the book is titled “Where’s the Chicken?” The sycamore fig, ancient Egypt’s tree of life, no longer has the insect that pollinates it. “We tell these stories to point out that in some of these places, this thing they’re famous for is slipping away,” Badrawi says.

When asked what one dish from the book that every reader should cook as a start, Zeidy’s choice was the slow-roasted goat or lamb leg recipe from Marsa Matrouh. “It’s adapted from the traditional Bedouin ‘Mandi’ where an entire goat is covered in spices, wrapped and slowly roasted under the ground until the meat melts off the bone,” explains Zeidy, who claims not to be a lamb eater but will gladly eat this one. “We’ve adapted the recipe to a six-hour slow roast in an oven, but it’s still just as delicious and tender.” Badrawi’s pick is kolkas (taro and chard stew) from Minya. “Kolkas has always played second fiddle to molokhia, and it’s time that it had its moment. It’s traditionally eaten on Eid El Ghetas (the Epiphany) by Egypt’s Coptic community,” she explains.

The business of an ambitious book

Travel photography made the book expensive, and that initially scared publishers off. Finding one took about six months, Zeidy says. Nourish, the food imprint of London’s Watkins Media, won them over with creative control: dishes were shot on Egyptian tableware instead of “a casserole bought in Walmart,” Zeidy says. The first print run was 5k copies in early September, but by the first week, the publisher had already agreed to a reprint.

Penguin Random House handles distribution in the US, Canada, and Australia, according to Badrawi. The book is stocked by Amazon, Waterstones, and Barnes & Noble and by Diwan in Egypt, and it’s sold in the GEM gift shop and in San Francisco’s de Young Museum shop. A UK book tour runs through December, followed by what Badrawi calls “a monster US tour” in April and May. An Arabic edition is the hoped-for next step, followed by French.

Zeidy admits that the food scene in Egypt has changed a lot since the days of Cairo Kitchen, an eatery that served traditional Egyptian dishes. “It has become a lot more ambitious and a lot more high-budget than it was back in our day,” Zeidy tells us. “I love the hospitality industry, but it’s all-encompassing, and I’m not sure that I would go back. I started when I was 26. In those days, I could work in my family’s food manufacturing business until 3pm or 4pm, then be at my restaurant until 2am. I don’t think I’m willing to put that kind of pressure on myself now. I would like to get involved in something food-related; I’m not sure what, but it’s not going to be a traditional restaurant.”

“I think this book is a living, breathing thing,” says Badrawi. “I really feel it has its own energy, and I think it will naturally take us to different places in its own organic way. I feel that many different ideas, creative concepts, and stage two projects could come from this. It’s a springboard.”

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