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Anny Gaul, "Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato" (U California Press, 2025)
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Marshall Poe
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Annie Gaul about her book titled Nile Nightshade An Egyptian Culinary History of The Tomato, published by the University of California Press in 2025, helping us understand how we got to a point where in Egyptian cuisine today the tomato is like a big part of a whole bunch of things. But it both kind of has and hasn't always been that way. I mean, we're going to go back to, I think, different points in time and different parts of sort of conceptions of Egyptian cuisine, of identity. We're going to talk about gender roles, class. It turns out by looking at the tomato in Egypt, kind of a whole world opens up. So this is going to be an interesting, potentially hunger inducing conversation. We shall see. But Annie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Annie Gaul
Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Annie Gaul
I am an assistant professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Maryland in the United States, and I'm a cultural historian. So I look at gender and food in the Arabic speaking world. I'm also a food blogger. So before I was writing about food in an academic way, I was cooking my way through recipes and writing about it in a much less formal way. And so I really approach food as something that's very tactile and experiential.
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And I would say there are kind of two sets of reasons that I wrote this book. One of them is practical. I had done for my PhD dissertation research in both Egypt and Morocco, looking at the emergence of the home kitchen, the emergence of cookbooks written for women in the 20th century. So a kind of transnational comparative project. And I ended up with a lot of great material. But I wanted to, for a book, something that was a little more focused with a clear storyline. And as I looked back through my material, tomatoes just kept leaping off of the page. They just kept coming up again and again, particularly in the Egypt content. And I thought, why not write a book that's all about tomatoes? And what they allowed me to do is to write a different kind of food history, which was something I'd been wanting to do. So an advantage of building the narrative around a single item like the tomato is that you're focusing on something that's not just an ingredient, it's also a commodity, it's a plant. It becomes, in Egypt, a political icon. It's a source of flavor, not just of calories or vitamins. And so I was able to write a culinary story that was grounded in political economy and I think really often we look at, maybe we might look at the material realities of food systems, like the politics of them, the economics that make them work or not. And then we look at maybe cuisine and gastronomy in a completely separate way. And I think it's really important to tie both of them together so that we understand whose land, whose resources, whose knowledge, whose labor underpins the cuisines that we're studying or enjoying. So, of course, Sidney Mintz really set the standard for that kind of work with his book Sweetness and Power, which looks at both sugar production and the plantation economy of the Caribbean. And then he connects it to cultures of consumption in the Metropole. But I think we could do more of connecting those pieces, and it's something I wished I could have done more in some of my earlier work. So I thought the tomato could help me do that. And as I said, it was sort of like calling out from all my sources, almost asking me to. And so, for example, there's a chapter of the book that traces how the tomato became increasingly common in early print cookbooks in Egypt in, like, the late 19th, early 20th centuries. And that's really reflecting cookbooks written in Cairo in elite northern spaces in Egypt. But then, at the same time, I track the rise of tomato cultivation, and that's only made possible through the construction of a series of dams in the south of Egypt. So you have this food culture emerging in the north in which tomatoes are increasingly prominent. But I argue that we can't understand those independently of understanding how water resources were transformed in the south. And there was an enormous human cost to that. So by the end of the 20th century, an estimated 135,000 Egyptian Nubians were displaced because of the dams that provided the water that allowed for the expansion of tomato cultivation. So this one item kind of ties all these stories together that we would otherwise study separately. So that's something that the tomato can do, and that's one of the things I was trying to do with this book.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
See, listeners, this is why I was so excited when, Annie, you said yes to my invitation to come onto the podcast, because there's so many things for us to talk about. But before we get into any of those threads you've just laid out or their entanglements with each other, we should probably start with kind of the obvious question of when and how tomatoes got to Egypt in the first place.
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Dr. Annie Gaul
Absolutely. So we know that they arrived at some point in the Ottoman period, which is a pretty wide period. I don't have an exact arrival date, but the Ottoman period in Egypt starts in 1517. And the first European encounter with tomatoes happens in 1519 with the Spanish conquest of what' now Mexico. And so the tomato by that point had been known and cultivated for thousands of years in Mesoamerica and what's now Mexico. They had multiple varieties. They used them for a range of culinary purposes. But the tomato's global history outside the Americas doesn't really start until the 16th century.
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Now, the first definitive, the earliest, I should say, definitive evidence I found placing a tomato is in Egypt is not until 1798. So Napoleon invades Egypt in 1798. He brings, in addition to a ton of troops for the invasion, a number of scholars, including botanists, and they record all the plants that they find, and that includes the tomato. So it's listed by local Arabic names as well as the Latin classification. So we know that the tomato is there by 1798. Of course, it was likely known and cultivated widely enough for these scholars to notice it. So in all likelihood, the tomato had been known for some time in Egypt before Napoleon arrived, but it probably arrived sometime 17th or 18th century. It's also kind of tricky to figure out exactly how the tomato might have gotten there. When I started first researching this, I thought, oh, I'll sort of look into historians who have studied how different American foods, you know, traveled around the world and got to different places and make some educated guesses, and I'll write a couple of paragraphs about how the tomato might have traveled to Egypt. I went down a series of rabbit holes and ended up devoting an entire chapter to this question, which is still quite speculative. There's no kind of smoking gun explaining tomatoes were here, then here, then here. But there are a couple of possible routes that I explore about how they might have made their way to Egypt. So first I looked at possible routes across the Atlantic and through the Mediterranean, which, as somebody who grew up in the United States, very familiar with Italian food. This is like the most obvious method to explore, right? Because, you know, tomatoes got introduced to Italian food and other Mediterranean food and become very fundamental. There's so, you know, that's kind of my initial assumptions led me to look at that, and there are a lot of possibilities. 16th, 17th, 18th century Mediterranean was characterized by a lot of different connections. So people going on pilgrimage from Europe to the Holy Land, Muslims going on pilgrimage, doing the Hajj, traveling from west to east across North Africa. Often many of those journeys were partly by boat, and there is a ton of trade connections. So there are a lot of different Ways that tomatoes and different foods might have been passed around the Mediterranean. And particularly prominent, I found some compelling, again, circumstantial evidence that the tomato likely. So the Spanish were the first Europeans to encounter it. It ends up back in Spain. And because of the proximity and connections between Spain and Morocco, it likely was introduced to Morocco pretty quickly. So there is a Traveler' account from 1671 placing tomatoes in Morocco. That's before the first European recipes for tomatoes are even written. There is an early 18th century account reporting tomatoes in Tunisia and Algeria. And this is a time when there's a ton of hajj traffic. So Muslims performing the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, passing across North Africa. And there's some evidence that, I mean, we certainly know there's a lot of evidence that they brought commercial goods for trading. A lot of trade happened along this pilgrimage route. You can imagine it took months to complete back in the early modern period. So it's plausible that tomatoes or seeds or plants or knowledge of tomatoes might have passed east to Egypt along these routes. But the more I read about how different foods like chili peppers traveled from the Americas out into the world, the more I realized how many foods also traveled across the Pacific to Asia during this period. So, in a way, I had to check my own assumptions about, you know, how I thought the sort of global diffusion of these foods worked. There's a lot of scholarship that suggests that chili peppers traveled from Mexico to East and Southeast asia by the 16th century. So Brian Dot has a great book about chili peppers in China that sort of documents all the different places and ways that chili peppers might have made their way to China. And this happens remarkably early. So by 1658, there's an attestation of the Portuguese in Java using the word tomatoes, and Egypt was deeply connected to Indian Ocean trade during this time. So, again, there's no definitive account, but it stands to reason that tomatoes, or knowledge of tomatoes are quite likely to have traveled through Indian Ocean trade routes and, again, pilgrimage routes into the Red Sea. Egypt, of course, has ports on the Red Sea which were deeply connected to Indian Ocean trade for centuries or millennia, really. And so once the tomato is in those circuits, it also plausibly could have traveled to Egypt from the other direction. I think, most likely. I think it's very likely that the tomato arrived to Egypt from both east and west, which just underscores the point of the tomato has this global history that I think is very often narrated just in one way of sort of a transatlantic history and a history associated with the Mediterranean. When in fact, it points to the way that Egypt is connected, not just through the tomato, but through so many other trade routes and pilgrimage routes to many other parts of the world. And I'm sure that there's more evidence out there about exactly when the tomato showed up. And I'm hoping that that chapter kind of lays a blueprint for future scholars to look at exact how chili peppers and tomatoes first made their way into Egypt and other parts of the Ottoman Empire.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, all of those journeys sound really interesting.
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Dr. Annie Gaul
Yeah, you could see how I got stuck for a couple of months just putting them together.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Stuck or enjoying yourself in the archive? You know, we could call it either one, but it definitely sounds like there's lots of cool, intriguing ways for it to have gotten to Egypt. And of course, the fact that there's multiple options as well speaks to the popularity of the tomato. Right? Like, there wouldn't. If only one person liked it, then there'd only be one possible way of getting it in. Right. But lots of different cultures and cuisines are like, oh, we like this. And that kind of obviously makes it harder to track in the archive. But was that the case when it does get to Egypt? Were tomatoes kind of immediately popular, or was there a bit of a process for them to become so ubiquitous?
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Dr. Annie Gaul
So I couldn't find a whole lot of information about tomato early popularity. And this is probably due. This is actually not unique to Egypt. A lot of scholars who have looked at the global history of tomatoes have remarked that we have enough sort of fragmentary evidence to know that, for example, there were tomatoes grown and used in Spain by the early 17th century, but they don't seem to have been popular enough to appear very much in the archive as much as chili peppers or potatoes or a lot of other American foods until much later. And this people have speculated, I mean, the same is true for Egypt, that, as I said, it's very likely that sometime in the early modern period, tomatoes make their way to Egypt. They were definitely known by the end of the 18th century, but there's not a whole lot of information about how popular they were or how they were used before then, really before the 19th century. And other scholars who have looked at this in other parts of the world have speculated that the tomatoes might have been quite popular early on among ordinary people, but not so much in the high elite cuisines that tend to get documented. And so it's this question of there's an absence of a ton of evidence, but that's not necessarily evidence of tomatoes absence when tomatoes do start to show up in the historical record that's in the mid-1800s in Egypt. And the first mentions of tomatoes in 19th century Egypt are in memoirs, cookbooks, some menus that have survived from that era. And they're all in the context of Ottoman cuisine, which would have been the elite cuisine of the era, Sort of underscoring this point that, like, once tomatoes become popular among elites, you know, they must have been known before then, but we just don't have so much documentation of it. But once they're popular among elites, then we can start to sort of trace where and to what extent they were eaten and how they were used. So Ottoman cuisine in Egypt in the 19th century would have been one of the elite cuisines.
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So Egypt was slowly kind of breaking off from the Ottoman Empire. At this point, the ruler of Egypt was technically a viceroy. But over the course of the 20th century. Sorry, the 19th century. Over the course of the 19th century, Egypt became increasingly sort of autonomous. That said, even as French influence, European influences were coming into Egypt in various ways, Ottoman culture was still quite influential. And we can definitely see that in cuisine. And so as tomatoes became, you know, taken up in Ottoman cuisine, I think that partly explains how they became popular. Right. Ottoman cuisine had a. A certain cultural cachet. And it's also worth pointing out that I say Ottoman cuisine, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, was in Istanbul. So part of that cuisine was developed in the capital and spread throughout the empire. But it was a huge empire, and a lot of ingredients and cooking techniques were absorbed from the provinces, from the periphery, and then incorporated back into the center in Istanbul. So it's kind of like a dynamic culinary culture, but still very much would have been associated with elites in Egypt. And so, for example, in cookbooks that translate a lot of Ottoman recipes into Arabic in Egypt, tomatoes over the decades become more and more common. So that's kind of one piece of how they became popular. But as I mentioned briefly earlier, there are also these material or economic reasons that tomatoes become widely cultivated enough to the point where they're widely available in all parts of Egypt, and they can be eaten throughout the year and so forth. And that really picks up in the late 19th and early 20th century. So it seems from sources from, like, the mid 19th century that tomatoes were known and they were just a vegetable like other vegetables. And then by the middle of the 20th century, so over about a hundred years, tomatoes are the vegetable in Egypt. They are the most cultivated vegetable. They are used to as a stewing medium to cook other vegetables. They work their way into all kinds of different foods.
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And a lot of this is enabled by the construction of the dams that I mentioned earlier. There's an initial dam constructed by the British between 1899 and 1902. It's raised again, and it's raised in 1907. It's raised again in 1929. And this is all before the construction of the high dam of the 1960s. So it's kind of a gradual expansion of irrigation. And ironically, the dams are built to store water in the south of Egypt. But perennial irrigation year round irrigation is first extended to the far north and then slowly expanded southward. So you can see how it's sort of tied up in the marginalization of these southern provinces to serve the agriculture and economy of the north. And the reason that was done was not to grow tomatoes in the north, but to grow cotton, which was the major cash crop and export crop. And so water resources were initially diverted to the delta. And so around the turn of the 20th century, tomatoes show up as a really important export out of the port of Alexandria. And that was probably driven by the fact that tomatoes were becoming popular all around the Mediterranean in a lot of different cuisines and in a lot of different places that Egypt was trading with. And as irrigation expanded throughout the country, tomatoes also became increasingly grown in all of the provinces accessible to more Egyptians year round. So by 1929, tomatoes were grown in every governorate in Egypt along the Nile river, north to south. And as far as I can tell, by 1929, they were the only crop in the agricultural census data that was grown year round in all of Egypt's growing seasons.
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And so for kind of both of these reasons, sort of like the cultural reasons and the importance of Ottoman cuisine, and then later the importance of Italian cuisine, which became influential in Egypt as well. And the expansion of an agricultural system that could support the production of so many tomatoes, they became an absolute staple by the 1940s. 1950s.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So it's in fact this status as a staple that I want to talk more about, because what you've described there kind of gives a whole bunch of reasons why it would be such an important staple by this point. And yet the government doesn't seem to agree even with what you were telling us earlier about kind of back further in time, we've got the Ottoman elite also being super into tomatoes. By the time we get to this point where it's kind of a staple for everyone else, why isn't it considered an actual staple food by the government? Like there is a category of staple foods, why aren't tomatoes in it?
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Dr. Annie Gaul
Yeah, great question. So Egypt's state subsidy system for subsidizing food and other items was really built to prioritize calories and protein. So the initial subsidies began in the 1940s focused on wheat and bread, ensuring.
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That wheat is produced and bread is supplied to the population at affordable prices. And that system expanded over the decades and it incorporated other staples that also provided a lot of calories, like bread. So it started including rice, for example, as well as cooking oil and subsidized poultry and fish. So although bread really remained at the heart of the food security system, so it kind of waxes and wanes, but bread remains this, like, cornerstone. Now, bread does carry enormous symbolic and cultural weight, but it's also just such an important means of subsistence in terms of calories to the population. So when the state threatened to cut bread subsidies in 1977, it actually provoked an intifada, an uprising among the people, really widespread, and the state had to walk it back. So food security policy in Egypt generally has focused largely on starches and carbohydrates and cheap sources of protein, which isn't. That's not uncommon. Right. And foods like tomatoes don't quite make the cut for that kind of policy. They play a much larger role in providing flavors. And I would say they have a cultural and a culinary significance, but they don't have that subsistence importance that bread does. And while there is a large culture of complaint and discussion about the price of tomatoes, which I'm sure we'll talk about, people don't necessarily stage an uprising. It doesn't have quite the same political consequences. So I argue that tomatoes are popular cultural staples. And it's really important that we think about and understand what people are saying when they're talking about tomatoes. But they're not staples on that policy level that underpin basic subsistence. So they just haven't been prioritized by the state to the same degree as, say, wheat and bread have.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
What impact does that have? Like, are there consequences of this gap between sort of what the government is prioritizing versus what people are kind of going about in their daily lives? You mentioned there sort of complaints. Tell us more about what's happening.
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Dr. Annie Gaul
Yeah, the. The primary consequence, the primary result from this is that the price of tomatoes in Egypt is notoriously volatile. It's. And it's always going up. And it has been that way.
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At least since, I think, the 1920s, maybe before. I mean, you know, sort of. Since tomatoes were popular.
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To a great extent and cultivated throughout Egypt, their prices have been difficult to control. So whereas Starting in the 1940s, the state invests a lot of energy in constructing all kinds of mechanisms to control the production of wheat as well as the production of bread and the distribution of bread at cheap prices. There are no production controls of any kind of equivalent measure for vegetables, including tomatoes. And so there's just less regulation on the production end. And there are a lot of reasons that tomato prices get volatile. One is that tomatoes are simply very delicate fruits. And because of the transportation infrastructure in Egypt, and the fact that, for example, winter tomatoes tend to be produced in the south, and summer tomatoes tend to be produced in the north. And so, in many instances, you're transporting tomatoes over long distances. They have to be transported at particular humidity levels, it's estimated. A couple of different estimates from studies from the late 20th century suggested that as many as 50% of the tomato crop spoils between farm and market. And then you have blights, you have diseases, you have different seasonal or disease impacts that sort of change the price of tomatoes. So whereas you have bread prices that are relatively stable over the course of the 20th century, if the state wants to change the price of bread, they have to do so very, very gradually. But then you have tomato prices like. Like fluctuating wildly from day to day, from season to season, from year to year. And another major factor that affected a lack of control over tomato prices was the fact that for much of the 20th century, tomato prices were controlled by a group of vegetable merchants at Cairo's main wholesale market. So the government did attempt to institute price ceilings for tomatoes, but they could never quite control this, like, group of colluding vegetable merchants. And the earliest accounts of those merchants that I found were from the 1920s, and that persisted until the 1990s, when that wholesale vegetable market was actually broken up and relocated into three different places. And so this, in turn, this question of the volatile price of tomatoes shows up in popular culture in all kinds of ways. So one example is that the street cry that vendors use to advertise tomatoes is magnuna ya Utah, which means crazy tomatoes. And that's a reference to the price. So that's kind of like everybody. You say that in Egypt, and people know what you're talking about. It's almost a refrain. But it's also, I argue, the refrain that's used to sell tomatoes actually embeds a complaint about the price. And then I also talk in the book about a great 1957 film whose hero, you know, moves to Cairo from the countryside, sees the. These merchants colluding to drive up the prices of tomatoes, and he tries to defeat the monopoly, and he fails. And it's partly because there are state officials in the film that enable the collusion of the merchants. And the film was so realistic that one tomato merchant actually tried to sue the filmmaker for defamation. And what was interesting, and that's a film from 1957. And reading through the policy literature in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s, I saw basically a repetition of the same story, the same situation. Everybody sort of knew it was happening, but nobody, certainly not the state, was taking measures to actually control the prices and protect either producers or consumers from these, from these merchants. And so that, yeah, that really persisted. The situation of the market persisted to the 90s, but still today people complain about the price of tomatoes.
- [31:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Very persistent indeed. Another thread I'd love to pick up from all the things you were mentioning at the beginning of our conversation that's intriguing about tomatoes in Egypt is cookbooks. So if we're in the sort of mid century moment, mid 20th century moment, what is notable about Egyptian cookbooks at this point? And why are tomatoes such a big part of it?
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Dr. Annie Gaul
So the mid 20th century is such an interesting time for Egyptian cookbooks. The earliest printed cookbooks in Egypt emerge in the late 1870s. There's another major one in 1890.
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Those are primarily the first cookbooks are primarily written by men and for men. And then you start to see some sort of domestic manuals written for women cooking in the home cook. A lot of those are also in the first Decades of the 20th Century, written by men. What's so interesting about the cookbooks, this genre of cookbooks that emerges, I would say, from the 1930s through the 1970s, is that it's written by women and for women. And so that in and of itself is new and that mirrors a trend in many places around the world of this rise of the domestic cookbook written by and for women cooking within the home. Something really interesting about many of these cookbook authors in Egypt is that a lot of them trained in England, so they were sent to domestic science training colleges, kind of a precursor to home economics colleges in a couple different places in England. And they studied domestic science. And looking through, I went through the archives of a couple of these colleges to look to try to get a sense of like how many Egyptian students studied there and who else was studying there and what their curriculum was. And what I found so interesting is that they were really British imperial institutions in the sense that so many of the graduates from these colleges left English. I mean, a lot of them ended up teaching domestic science somewhere in the uk, but a lot of them left and took up domestic science posts in British territories in East Africa and Mandate Palestine, in South Africa, in Canada, in Northern Ireland, in Australia, all these different places. And this series of Egyptian students in these colleges were the only examples that I saw of countries that actually sent people to the metropolitan study. And then they came back and established this whole a series of cookbooks, of textbooks, institutions for training teachers and so forth. So there's this really interesting kind of colonial dimension to their training, but it was sort of happening on different terms than it did in a lot of other places, in that these Egyptian students were going to the metropole, gaining what knowledge they could, and then kind of translating it and using it on their own terms once they got back to Egypt.
- [34:07]
Another really interesting thing about these books is that they're largely written for a kitchen with no staff, even though they were written for an educated middle class audience. And a marker of middle class status for that audience would have been the fact that they employed a maid or a cook. So there's something interesting happening with the sort of class politics of these books as well. It's almost replacing the knowledge of a staff or a servant or a cook, a sort of subaltern class, with this decontextualized, modern kind of cookbook concept that comes in.
- [34:48]
In terms of why tomatoes were so important in these books.
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This is where their content is really interesting. They have, for example, these cookbooks include a lot of the classics of continental cuisines, the French mother sauces and other European recipes. But they also include a lot of local recipes as well. So some are Egypt specific, but also North African Levantine recipes, recipes from other parts of the Arab world or the former Ottoman Empire. And it's really in those recipes and sort of the Eastern and Arab recipes that tomatoes are so prominent. And I think that's for a couple of different reasons. Even as early as the 1920s and 30s, you see, even in agricultural manuals, Egyptians are commenting on how well suited tomatoes are to Arab and Egyptian cuisines. So they have a high water content, which makes them work really well in stews. And stews were a mainstay of Egyptian cooking going back centuries. Acidity was a really popular element. Also, this is something you can trace back, going centuries back in Egyptian recipes. So even in early cookbooks you see examples of recipes where they might call for a citrus juice, but they say if you don't have it, you can use tomato juice instead. Tomatoes also have this really distinct umami flavor that I think melds really well with red meat, which is very much a prized flavor in Egyptian cuisine. And so tomatoes are partly so prominent in these books because they were used in so many ways. They garnish foods, they show up raw in salads, they're made into sauces that Then garnish all kinds of things. They're often grated into a juice, which is actually used as a stewing mechanism to cook meat and to cook other vegetables in.
- [36:42]
There are a lot of instances where.
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Tomatoes are grated into liquid, and then that liquid is mixed into a soup or another similar recipe to just add a punch of acidity to it. So it's an ingredient, it's a flavoring agent, it's a cooking medium. It's all kinds of things. And as I said, tomatoes are generally most important in these books, most prominent not in the context of the European recipes, but the Arab cuisines and the Egyptian recipes. And so for all of these reasons, I really read these cookbooks as evidence of the way that tomatoes are emerging as major carriers of Egyptian flavors. Like what is specific about modern Egyptian cooking. Tomatoes are at the heart of a lot of that. I think even if we might think of tomatoes as something that might have been mediated originally through the Spanish conquest of what's now Mexico, by the time they get to Egypt, they are taken up by cooks to do something very different with, you know, very little reference at all to Egyptian culinary aesthetics.
- [37:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is a really interesting aspect to hear about. So thank you for telling us about these books. But of course, you didn't just interview, look at the books themselves. You also talked to people about the books and about tomatoes and about cooking practices. This goes back, I think, to what you were saying at the beginning around your kind of food blogging skills and the experiential way of thinking about food. So can we add that in to what you've told us about cookbooks, what you found out when you actually talk to women about their own cooking practices?
- [38:21]
Dr. Annie Gaul
Yes. So oral histories are a really central part of my research methodology. And where I find them most interesting are all the ways where oral history data and narratives contradict or at least complement the information that you can get from written texts and written recipes. I mean, cooking is such an embodied, sensory kind of practice that when you try to write it up, especially in formal language. So Arabic is a diglossic language, meaning that the written register and the spoken register are often quite different. So cooking is already something that you talk about one way and you write about it quite differently. And so that's one reason, in addition to just the embodied nature of cooking, that I find that interviewing people about food, talking to them about food, having them narrate food in their own words, and then watching them cook really reveals a lot that you can't always get from written sources. And I fortunately work on a period of time that's sort of within living memory. So accessing those, like, culinary memories of how people learned to cook or how their grandmothers cooked can really open up a lot of interesting material. So, for example, I devote an entire chapter to this cooking technique called tasvika, which is basically slow cooking vegetables and meat in a tomato stew. I've already mentioned that technique a couple of times, and it. It shows up in cookbooks, but not by that name and not as a coherent category. But it's, I argue, essential to understanding how the tomato really cemented its place in Egyptian home cooking. And ironically, I learned about that word. It's an Egyptian Arabic word that I learned from an archivist, from a woman who worked in the Egyptian National Archives. And she really insisted. She was like, you know, there's just a limit to what you're going to find in written records here if you really want to understand what's going on, you know. And she pointed me to this important vernacular term. So that kind of attuned me to the significance of vernacular repertoires and vocabularies as a key part of studying cuisine.
- [40:38]
And then there are all kinds of questions that, you know, I think these cookbooks that I described are such rich, complicated texts. Like, there's something. In some ways they're transmitting colonial knowledge. In other ways, there are parts of them that are, I think, can be read as anti colonial, but they're sort of both things at once. I always say that these cookbooks raise more questions than they answer, and often oral history work can answer some of those questions. So, for example, a major transition is when people in Egypt have access to electric blenders. For most people, that really doesn't happen until the 70s or the 80s. So then, like, how do you produce all of this liquid tomato content before you can blend tomatoes with something like an electric blender? There was a term for a strainer in some of these cookbooks, but I couldn't quite understand what kind of strainer, what did that look like? How did that work? And in one oral history interview, the woman I was interviewing said, oh, well, my mother had one of those. It was really heavy. It was made out of copper, which is a really important cooking material or cookware material, I should say, in sort of the older generations. And she said, we had a copper strainer, and they rummaged around in a closet and found it. And so just talking to people can sometimes even produce objects that you have just read about and don't really understand from a text but to see them and then also.
- [42:20]
Not just words, but gestures. So in talking about cooking with tomatoes, I noticed that a lot of women, when they were describing, like, how their grandmother maybe cooked with tomatoes before the blender came, they would make this gesture with their hand where they would sort of take their dominant hand and move it around in a circle in front of them. And they were often subconsciously mimicking how you would move a cut, face down tomato across the flat surface of these strainers, which had perforated holes in them, and then the juice would sort of fall through. So you capture these, like, gestures and knowledge of objects that you just can't get from texts. And then oral history is also. I think this is one of the most interesting aspects that they open up is there's such great ways of understanding how people learn to cook and how culinary knowledge gets transmitted. So these cookbooks, the cookbooks from this era, don't really have headnotes. They don't explain where a recipe came from. So you'll have, like, a very local, traditional Egyptian lentil soup on the same page as, like, a Vichy swaz. Like, all this stuff just jumbled together. And talking to people gives you a sense of how different kinds of recipes moved in different places.
- [43:46]
And moved through different places. So these cookbooks really present themselves as, like, disembodied, decontextualized authority. And that's part of this concerted state intervention in the way that reproductive labor happens.
- [44:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Right?
- [44:04]
Dr. Annie Gaul
Because it wasn't just cookbooks. They were translated into domestic science and home economics economics lessons in all of the girls schools in Egypt. And that really expanded through the 30s, 40s, 50s. So this is part of the state project was presenting a particular kind of knowledge and a particular source of culinary authority to all these girls and women. And then you talk to people who actually took those classes or had those cookbooks, and they're like, well, we never took that seriously. You really learned to cook from other people. And then in hearing the details about how that happened, it also kind of complicates another really prominent narrative, which is that recipes are handed down from mother to daughter in an uninterrupted line going back for generations. And that does happen. But there are a lot of other ways that culinary knowledge gets transmitted. And again, this is not unique to Egypt, but. But there's just a lot of rich material about how this happened and having it in the face of a place where, I mean, not even all Arab countries had a similar.
- [45:12]
Complex of institutions supporting domestic science education. So in the face of this really concerted state effort to teach women how they should be cooking. It's really interesting to find all these other ways that that happened. So I found a lot of situations in which, I mean, one interviewee, her mother cooked, but her father really loved cooking. And so she learned from her father a lot of specialties of the village that he came from. Right. And then I found other situations in which somebody's mother hated cooking, but their grandmother loved cooking. And so often the knowledge will skip a generation. And then, just as important as intergenerational transmission was intragenerational, so between women of the same generation. So there were a lot of stories in which people would learn something from a neighbor who came from a different part of Egypt. So once you have these massive trends of rural to urban migration, you end up with people from different parts of the country, totally different recipes, different flavor profiles, different ingredients, even living next to each other, and they exchange recipes with one another.
- [46:23]
And so all of these things kind of really fill out so much information that textual recipes and cookbooks just can't quite provide.
- [46:35]
And also, as I mentioned, it means that I can tell part of the story of tomatoes using as much as possible the words of home cooks themselves, how they narrate things in their own words, which is also important to me.
- [46:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. There's a huge amount of richness by adding this type of source collection and analysis to your work. So thank you for sharing some of the things you learned from doing it. But I have to say I wasn't hugely surprised that you did that. Right. Because we know that those kinds of conversations can be so rich. I was excited, really, to get to that part of the book and be like, oh, I really hope she talked to some people for exactly the reasons you mentioned, of the sort of hand gestures and the sort of smells and those kinds of things. You can't really get just from the cookbook. So I was sort of hoping you were going to do that and pleasantly pleased that I sort of guessed right. And there was a whole section there. And it was really cool to sort of imagine being sort of sat on the sofa in the kitchen with you having those conversations. I then turned the page and was actually really quite surprised by the next thing that I found. So I'd love for you to tell us about why there's a whole section towards the end. Not about the tomato, about okra.
- [47:47]
Dr. Annie Gaul
Yes, about okra. It might be my favorite chapter.
- [47:53]
Because, I mean, I could have finished the book at chapter five, you know, using these oral histories to explain this Tomato stew. And again, I can't exactly remember how okra first came up, but once I started paying attention to it, I realized it actually presented all these kinds of contradictions to this narrative that I had been painting or this narrative I thought that I was tracing of tomatoes get introduced, we're not sure exactly why or where or how they're introduced initially, but they eventually catch on. And once they catch on, they really catch on and they come to dominate everything. And on one hand, the history of okra in Egypt does illustrate that, because I would say it's pretty reasonable to say that cooking okra in tomato sauce is the most dominant, the most mainstream, the most popular way of cooking okra in Egypt today. So for a lot of people, if you say you're making bamia, which is the Egyptian, the Arabic word for okra, they take that to imply that you're cooking it in tomato sauce. That's how kind of dominant that mode of cooking is. And a lot of the mid century cookbooks just have one okra recipe and it's with tomato sauce.
- [49:19]
There's a cookbook published in the 1930s by a professional male chef that is mostly European recipes. Cause he was trained in that tradition, but he has a recipe for okra and tomato sauce and he labels it Egyptian Style Okra. So as early as the 1930s, this becomes a really dominant way of cooking okra in Egypt and is even explicitly identified in all these cookbooks as this is the Egyptian way of cooking okra. And in a lot of my oral histories that was confirmed. So Egyptians love okra. Okra has been around for centuries, if not millennia. And so it's really a testament to the way that the tomato transformed Egyptian cooking. However, I also found that in textual sources like cookbooks and other texts as well, and in oral histories, there was another okra story that was happening, which is really interesting. Basically, there are multiple other ways of cooking okra in Egypt without tomatoes that have been part of Egyptian culinary culture for centuries, long before the tomato was introduced, of course, and they persist till this day. So they're not as obvious. You have to look for them a little bit, but you don't have to look for them that hard to realize that they also coexist alongside this kind of default tomato based okra technique. So for instance, there is a category of okra dish that I explore in the last chapter called wica. And it is generally associated with Upper Egyptian meaning southern Egyptian food cultures and Sudanese food cultures. Right. So this border between Egypt and Sudan is obviously a Recent political border. And there's a lot of shared food cultures that bridge that border, and this is one of them. Often it involves drying okra pods in the sun and then grinding them or making a powder out of them to use in cooking, which gives a different texture. It's a different, obviously, like, culinary manipulation of the ingredient. But then also before the refrigerator was a way to preserve okra, to use it year round.
- [51:34]
What I found interesting is that particularly in doing again, oral history interviews, I realized that because of these migration patterns by which so many people from all over rural Egypt, but including the south, migrated to the north, that many home cooks in Cairo actually count weka among their family recipes. So there's this easy tendency in like casual conversation to say, oh, wica is like southern okra, or that's Sudanese okra and Egyptian okra is tomato okra. But once you actually start to look at culinary practice and how people cook and how they pass along recipes, that's not actually true that Cairo is as transformed by this southern migration as the south is transformed by it. And of course, that migration is tied to these other factors that I've mentioned. The marginalization of southern provinces, investment of state resources in the north, using the water from the south to irrigate the north.
- [52:35]
That's part of this history as well. I think it's partly why the weica and the non tomato types of okra are more marginal. They're a little harder to find, they're not as obvious.
- [52:48]
But this story of okra, you know, it both kind of completes the story of tomatoes taking over the Egyptian kitchen, but it also reminds us that there's something else going on as well. Right. And it also helps us understand the food of Cairo is really deeply intertwined with Upper Egypt, with Sudan. So Eve Trout Powell is a historian who's written a lot about this, the importance of Sudan to Egyptian national identity and public culture in particular. But this, the relationship between okra and tomatoes shows how that relationship manifested in the flavors and textures of everyday life, not just in the south, but also in Cairo. So because the tomato was this relatively recent introduction and okra has been around for so much longer, and it gives us this really interesting sort of periodization and forces us to ask, well, how is this just prepared before tomatoes arrived? What does it mean that these older, different non tomato versions are still made today and they coexist alongside the red okra, the miyahamra, which is how they refer to the tomato based okra in Arabic often. And I should add that there are non tomato based okra recipes not only from the south, but also from the delta rural areas in the north, from Fayum in the middle of the country. And they continue it to exist in all of these different ways. And they move through urban food cultures in really interesting ways too. So one of my interviewees is actually her family is originally from the Delta, from a town in the north of Egypt, and they make wicca, this non tomato okra, as part of their family culinary repertoire.
- [54:45]
And the reason is that the interviewee's mother had moved to Cairo from this village in the north, and she had a neighbor who had moved to Cairo from the south. And so she learned this from her neighbor and then it got integrated into this intergenerational transmission and she passed it on to her daughter, who passed it on to her daughter. And so you can see how, you know, our assumptions about how recipes move even within one country's food culture are not always what we expect.
- [55:15]
So I love the history of okra because it reminds us that as popular as the tomato became, its hegemony in the Egyptian kitchen was never complete, it was never total. And I think there's a lesson there about any culturally dominant trend too, and the kinds of narratives that we are that we tend to want to tell about them.
- [55:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I think this goes back to what we were saying at the beginning of the kind of many threads and the many entanglements, right. It's not just sort of okra over.
- [55:40]
Dr. Annie Gaul
Here and tomato over there.
- [55:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It's like, yes, and they're together.
- [55:44]
Dr. Annie Gaul
Right?
- [55:44]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It's a yes and sort of book.
- [55:46]
Dr. Annie Gaul
And obviously there's no way we can.
- [55:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Cover all of the threads in the book. But I think that gives people, excuse the pun, a taste of what you've done with this project. And it makes me really curious what you might be working on next. Is it, I don't know, tomatoes in another country? Is it another food? Is it something entirely different? Anything currently on your desk you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [56:10]
Dr. Annie Gaul
Sure. There's a couple of different, not quite related, but sort of related projects on deck. One thing that I've just published and I'll be updating and expanding is a bibliography, an online bibliography of work about Palestinian food ways. So everything from scholarship to cookbooks. So that is hosted on a website called Jadaliya. Just look up the Palestinian Foodways bibliography. And I'm working with a group of scholars from all different specialties to sort of bring together different perspectives on that. I'm working on a new book project about domesticity. So I want to look at the relationship between paid and unpaid labor in homes and kitchens and to return this idea to this idea of doing something across North Africa. So comparing Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and really looking at novels and films. And the last thing I'll mention is that I have a co authored article coming out in the journal Afghanistan soon, which I wrote with my colleague and dear friend Marya Hanoun, where we look at two cookbooks published in Afghanistan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which were actually translations into Persian, one of them from British India and another from the Ottoman Empire. So that's kind of an extension of I'm really interested in exploring politics of domesticity and how they work across languages, across regions, across countries, and how they're not just about gender, but also about class and power and all of those things as well.
- [57:47]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that all sounds interesting. Best of luck with the multiple projects there.
- [57:52]
Dr. Annie Gaul
Thanks.
- [57:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
In the meantime, of course, while you are pursuing those various strands of inquiry, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Nile An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato, published by the University of Californ California Press in 2025. Annie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [58:10]
Dr. Annie Gaul
Thanks so much. It was a pleasure.
- [58:23]
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- [58:41]
Dr. Annie Gaul
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [58:44]
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- [58:45]
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