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My book Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato is now available to preorder. For each book ordered and each library request reported here between now and the book s publication date (10/28/25), I will donate $2 each to the Sudan Solidarity Collective and the Gaza Soup Kitchen. As of 9/20, I’ve donated $80 [ ]
Much of the history of the tomato in Egypt — the subject of Nile Nightshade, my forthcoming book — is oriented north and east. The tomato linked Turkey and Egypt through Ottoman cuisine’s embrace of tomatoes as a stewing medium; and it connected Egypt and Italy too, as Egypt s nascent tomato processing industry looked to [ ]
Blog posts have been few and far between over the past year or two as I’ve devoted most of my spare time to writing a book on the history of the tomato in Egypt (which is on schedule to be published sometime in 2025!). As I wrap up work on the manuscript, I’m reflecting on [ ]
Three recipes, a short film, and a dose of history: Gazan cuisine in context.
Ghraybeh aka "Little Wondrous Thing": What does a perfect shortbread cookie have to do with women's history in the Arabic-speaking world?
The persistent prestige of French cuisine in today s food cultures is hard to ignore. Even as the range of what food critics and gourmands deem good food expands, the dominance of French techniques and aesthetics remains baked into the system. French methods and principles still dominate most of the world s culinary schools and organize labor in the kitchens [ ]
At the end of 2021 I had the privilege of interviewing Anas Atassi, author of Sumac: Recipes and Stories from Syria, for Radical Books Collective event titled Gastropolitics, Gastropoetics. The event featured a range of speakers and books asking what it means to take cookbooks and recipes seriously as political texts, with authors speaking to Somali, [ ]
A new book on Levantine food –– complete with recipes
I ate my first bowl of koshari in 2013, and ever since I ve been collecting bits and pieces of its eclectic history. Earlier this year, with Cairo standby Zooba opening a branch in New York and as my dissertation-to-book research began to inch forward, I decided it was time to write up what I d learned [ ]
I have been baking a lot lately (original, I know). Usually this means I m making either a run-of-the-mill sourdough loaf (following this excellent primer from the Kitchn) or this evergreen Smitten Kitchen buckle, swapping in whatever fruits are in season –– it is a particularly great way to use up the sad apples at the [ ]
Since graduating from college I ve moved, on average, more than once a year. Often this means unpacking my bags and walking into a kitchen with nothing in it except a cup of olive oil and some salt. So I ve gotten pretty practiced at stocking a pantry and developing a rotation of easy, reliable meals that [ ]
The latest edition of Rawi, Egypt s glossy, impeccably designed heritage review, just came out––and it was all about food. It features articles about everything you ve ever wanted to know about Egyptian food, from a rare glimpse into the cuisine of rural Egypt to a deep dive into millennia of Egyptian bread history. My own contribution, [ ]
For me, this was the drink of 2019: I made this sweet-and sour mocktail throughout the year for friends in Rabat, Cairo, Washington, and Charlotte. Developed from and inspired by several different recipes from Scents Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook (recently translated by Charles Perry published by NYU, and from which I have cooked several [ ]
In which I outline a historical grammar of hummus that explains why dessert hummus is so bad and why it matters. #foodhistory #historicalrecipes #hummus
Earlier this year I wrote an essay for The Recipes Project about the forerunners to today s hummus, based on a group of recipes in a fourteenth-century Egyptian cookbook – recently brilliantly edited and translated by Nawal Nasrallah. As I worked on that essay, I tried my hand at a handful of those recipes and at [ ]