Anny Gaul, Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato (University of California Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Anny Gaul (AG): The book’s subject—a history of tomatoes in Egypt—grew out of a much broader exploration of kitchens and home cooking in twentieth-century North Africa. The idea of focusing on the tomato came from one section of the last chapter of my dissertation, which was about sauces, braises, and stews.
Egypt’s tomato stews and sauces were a fascinating case: in terms of culinary culture, I found that they were central to what people perceive to be “traditional” home cooking today. But from a political economy perspective, tomato-based cooking techniques were distinctly modern and even, in a sense, industrial. Tomatoes are indigenous to the Americas and as far as I have been able to tell, they came to Egypt at some point in the Ottoman era. But they only became really ubiquitous there in the twentieth century, following the construction of a series of Nile dams. In addition to forcing the mass displacement of Egypt’s Nubian populations, these dams allowed farmers to grow tomatoes at greater scales, throughout the year, and throughout riverine Egypt. They also required expanded use of industrially produced inputs like fertilizer and pesticides. And the surge in tomato production was accompanied by the development of new Egyptian food processing industries starting in the late 1920s. Nile Nightshade grew in large part out of my interest in these tensions at the heart of Egypt’s tomatoes, which invite us to consider the familiar categories of “traditional” and “modern” in new ways.
At its most basic, the book is a straightforward history of tomatoes in Egypt, from their arrival to their integration into agriculture and food systems to their appearance in cookbooks and home kitchens. But exploring how something so recently introduced came to be emblematic of home cooking, grandmothers’ wisdom, and rural pasts also offered a window onto other stories that I think are interesting and important: the construction of misleading binaries between “artisan” and “processed” foods, the histories of displacement that underlie so many contemporary cuisines, and the way that gendered labor—in this instance, women cooking within the home—can produce a vision of the “traditional” that claims a much older and durable history than it actually has.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
AG: My previous work focused on the emergence of the modern home kitchen as a new kind of middle-class urban space in twentieth-century Egypt and Morocco. My approach was both comparative and transnational: tracing differences in the way that home kitchens materialized in different places illustrated the contingency of those spaces—in other words, that there wasn’t one particular way that gendered norms or modern culinary tastes and flavors unfolded across North Africa. It also supported an approach to food history that contests the hegemony of the nation-state and critiques its claims to coherence. My research showed how canonizing particular cooking styles or flavors as “national” often entailed erasing both transnational connections and non-dominant local food cultures; writing a certain kind of “kitchen history” offered a way to counter those erasures.
Nile Nightshade shares many of those overarching themes: each chapter in some way challenges the notion that Egyptian cuisine is easily defined or bounded. The book opens with a deliberately noncommittal account of how the tomato first arrived: Egypt’s ties to the rest of North Africa and to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean worlds were so dense that any of those connections might have brought the tomato to its shores. It closes with a chapter about okra that situates Egypt in a wider African context, highlighting culinary cultures shared between Egypt and Sudan. Tomatoes tell a story about Egypt that doesnt stop at its contemporary borders.
At the same time, stepping into the “commodity history” genre allowed me to incorporate more political economy into my work. Following Sidney Mintz’s example, I contend that we can’t fully understand culinary consumption patterns without exploring the labor and capital flows that create and supply their ingredients. Nile Nightshade allowed me to ask questions about how tomatoes were produced and marketed—drawing on many sources that were new to me, from agricultural census data to horticultural manuals to state planning memos on pricing policy.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
AG: Two major literatures that the book addresses are global food history and studies of Egyptian popular culture. Nile Nightshade offers an alternative to the pattern that many global food histories have adopted—namely, as Kyla Wazana Tompkins put it, “tracing the history of a single commodity as it is introduced to a Western consumer demographic, marketed, and disseminated through various commercial venues.” By re-centering the tomato’s global history in Egypt, we can see it differently: as part of a much older history of nightshade diffusion between Asian and African food cultures, for instance, and as evidence that the flavors of culinary modernity were not necessarily introduced to the Arab world via Europe.
The book’s contribution to studies of modern Egyptian culture is two-fold: first, I draw on the robust tradition of studies of vernacular culture to better understand women’s histories, and second, I extend studies of women’s domestic culture into our understandings of popular and public cultures. I introduce the notion of the “culinary public” (riffing on Anita Mannur’s notion of an “eating public”) to explore multiple ways that food and eating defined what it meant to be Egyptian in the twentieth century. The book’s chapters do not argue for a singular or unified culinary public but rather use the concept to ask how communities and belonging are defined and experienced. For example, Chapter three argues that popular complaints about tomato prices speak to the existence of an Egyptian citizenry that makes collective demands on the state, while Chapter four describes a genre of cookbooks that addressed a much narrower reading public of bourgeois housewives.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
AG: I hope that food enthusiasts of all kinds will read the book as an invitation to collectively think more about the connections between culinary cultures and political economy—to consider whose land, labor, and knowledge have nourished the food we eat. I also hope that readers come away with the conviction that culinary knowledge and labor are not rote, unskilled, or innate to any particular gender or social group.
For students and scholars who read this book, I hope that it encourages engagement with the stuff of everyday life, and with histories that aren’t necessarily captured in conventional archives. The book’s introduction quotes the manifesto of the Italian feminist collective Rivolta Femminile: “We consider incomplete any history which is based on non-perishable traces.” What methods can we use to expand our sense of history, and how can drawing on new kinds of materials help us to see the world differently?
J: What other projects are you working on now?
AG: I have been working on the Palestinian Foodways Bibliography, a collaborative, open access list of research and knowledge about all things food and Palestine related. It includes themed lists on topics ranging from olives and olive oil to fisheries to food sovereignty in Gaza. It will be updated periodically and I hope it is of use to researchers, advocates, journalists, and educators in all fields.
I am also working on a new book project that looks at the relationship between paid and unpaid domestic labor in twentieth-century North Africa, with a focus on novels and films.
J: Where can readers learn more about Egyptian food history and culture?
AG: It’s an incredibly exciting time for scholarship, literary work, and reportage about food in Egypt. Recent scholarship includes work by Eman Morsi on meat and hunger as cultural tropes, Noha Fikry on raising animals for meat, Nefissa Naguib on masculinity and food, Jessica Barnes on Egypt’s subsidized bread, Omar Foda on Stella, Egypt’s iconic beer, and a collection of essays edited by Mennat-Allah El Dorry on Egyptian and Sudanese food and drink over the longue durée. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics just published a special issue (Vol. 44) focused on food, which includes work in English and Arabic. For political analysis of contemporary food systems there’s Mohamed Ramadan and Saker El Nour’s ʿAysh marahrah: al-Iqtisad al-siyasi li-l-siyada ʿala al-ghidha’ fi Misr, which examines food sovereignty in Egypt based on fieldwork in Minya and Fayyoum, and lots of outstanding reporting on food security and food production in Mada Masr.
In the realm of literary writing and memoir, there’s Omar Taher’s Kohl wa-habbahan, Charles Akl’s al-Ghidha’ lil-qibti, Omnia Talaat’s Tabikh al-wihda, and Nawla Darwiche’s Fi suhbat al-taʿam. The Arabic short story collection Taʿm al-huruf, edited by Mariam Boctor, Nour Kamel, and Maie Panaga, was translated into English for ArabLit Quarterly’sKitchen Issue—which also includes a beautiful essay about Egyptian food and domesticity by researcher and curator Salma Serry. And on the cookbook side, Dyna Eldaief’s The Taste of Egypt is now out in paperback, and Suzanne Zeidy and Rawah Badrawi’s forthcoming cookbook Egypt: Recipes and Stories from an Ancient Land promises to cover the wide range of regional cuisines typically left out of mainstream cookbooks (and scholarly studies like Nile Nightshade). This is just a taste—and a testament that research and writing about Egyptian food is flourishing.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 6: “Red Stew, Green Stew: Cooking Okra in the Nile Valley,” adapted from pages 157 to 161 and 165 to 167)
“In my house, I only make [okra] with [tomato] salsa and lamb; it has to be filling, slow-cooked, and rich,” Reem told me. This tomato-centric approach to cooking okra is relatively new in Egypt, but it swiftly became prevalent: although absent from nineteenth-century cookbooks, it is ubiquitous in twentieth-century sources. Over the course of a few generations, okra cooked and eaten with tomatoes (often referred to as “red okra” or bamiya hamra) became identified as the “normal” or default way of preparing okra in Egypt.
We do not know who first cooked Egyptian okra in a tomato stew. But Thora Stowell’s 1923 cookbook offers an account suggestive of the circumstances under which red okra was integrated into the kitchens of Egypt’s elites. Like other foreigners before her, Stowell identifies okra as a “specimen dish” of Egyptian cooking. In a departure from earlier accounts of okra in Egypt, however, the okra dish Stowell presents as an exemplar of Egypt’s “typical stew” is tomato-based, including equal parts tomatoes and meat by weight.
Presumably Stowell’s knowledge of Egyptian dishes came from her Nubian cook. Although she never names or credits him, Stowell indicates that all the book’s recipes “have been made either by a [Nubian] cook alone or with my aid.” Stowell’s text includes extensive advice for managing local servants and a chapter of Egyptian recipes that, we can infer, reflects those domestic workers’ culinary knowledge. Her book is a reminder of the significance of domestic workers and enslaved cooks, particularly those from Nubian and other Upper Egyptian backgrounds, within the elite food cultures of Cairo and Alexandria. Stowell’s chapter on managing servants advises speaking to Nubian servants only in Arabic, which Stowell claims helps to preserve the distinctions of rank within the household. To that end, the book includes a glossary of “Kitchen Arabic” to be used with Egyptian servants, which includes a list of “the imperative mood of some useful verbs.”
Stowell’s advice aligns her work with the wider genre of nineteenth- and twentieth-century advice manuals for British colonial wives in India, Malaysia, Singapore, and elsewhere in the British empire. Maintaining and policing boundaries between colonizers and their local servants was central to the ideology of domesticity these books promoted. Stowell’s book includes the hackneyed colonial stereotypes about local domestic servants that British colonizers had repeated elsewhere for decades (even as, Cecilia Leong-Salobir points out, they entrusted those servants with the critical labor of food preparation). But it also provides a glimpse of the particulars of domestic labor in Cairo and Alexandria in the early twentieth century. Stowell assumes that suitable domestic servants are of Nubian origin and notes, for example, that it is easier to find servants in Cairo than Alexandria because of Cairo’s relative proximity to their homeland in the south. Her cookbook thus helps to contextualize the nature of culinary knowledge in elite urban homes in this period in Egypt and highlights the role played by southern Egyptians in developing and transmitting that knowledge.
Nubians, displaced from their home villages due to the construction of a series of twentieth-century dams, are an ethnolinguistic group whose homeland is in southern Egypt and northern Sudan. The exchange of culinary traditions between Egypt and Nubia has taken place since antiquity; cookware and traces of food residue at one Egyptian fortress near the Nubian frontier indicate historical shifts “towards Nubian foodways . . . and mirroring the adoption of Nubian cookpots” that often tracked political alliances—such as during the Second Intermediate Period (1650–1550 BCE) when the area came under Nubian rule. By the time the tomato arrived to Ottoman Egypt, an active slave trade traversed historical Nubia, linking Egypt and Sudan and enslaving populations in and beyond Egypt’s southern periphery. Under Mehmed ʿAli the Egyptian state centralized its control over Upper Egypt and colonized Sudan.
Eve Troutt Powell notes that “by the 1870s, more and more Sudanese and Nubian people had moved into the cities of Lower Egypt, sometimes as slaves but increasingly as merchants and traders or doormen and gatekeepers.” Powell describes how the modern relationship between Egypt and Sudan emerged from this legacy of political domination as well as economies of racialized domestic labor rooted in what was by then a centuries-old slave trade; she documents how these dynamics gave rise to, and found expression in, Egyptian stereotypes about Sudanese inferiority. Although the slave trade was abolished in Egypt in 1877, “African slaves continued to make up significant parts of the domestic labor force” in the late nineteenth century, particularly in elite households. Emancipated slaves and their descendants often continued to work in domestic service.
After 1902 the construction of dams at Aswan drove even more Nubians north in search of work as irrigation projects submerged their agricultural lands. Elite northern Egyptian households employed Nubians and other southerners as cooks and servants well into the twentieth century, as Idris ʿAli’s autobiographical novel Under the Poverty Line attests. His account speaks to the racialization of various southern populations (Sudanese, Ethiopians, Nubians, Upper Egyptians) who found that in Cairo their identities were treated as interchangeable. The book’s narrator protests the dehumanizing treatment that he faces in the capital, addressing Egyptians and demanding: “Why have you taken a farming people and made them into servants and doormen for your palatial villas and homes?”
One consequence of these historical hierarchies and entanglements is that at the time the tomato was being integrated into Egyptian cooking—transforming the way okra was cooked in the process—much of the culinary labor in the households of northern urban elites would have been performed by men from the south. Although their culinary contributions have yet to be studied in detail, Taylor Moore’s work shows that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Upper Egyptian and Black African women from similar backgrounds were deeply influential in other aspects of Egyptian domestic culture as “occult healers and spiritual guides.” It is clear that not just the culinary labor but the culinary knowledge of southern cooks was central to the production of tomato-based okra as an Egyptian dish, at least within certain households.
There are striking parallels here with the history of the southern United States. As Jessica B. Harris, Michael Twitty, and others have documented, the cuisine of the American South depended upon the knowledge and labor of enslaved Africans. The significance of the labor of the enslaved was twinned with the denial of their cultural and intellectual significance. Harris writes that although “for centuries, black hands have tended pots, fed babies, and worked in the kitchens of [the United States’] wealthiest and healthiest,” their contributions have been historically underdocumented in cookbooks and other sources. Mary Randolph’s 1824 cookbook The Virginia House-wife is often credited as a key early source for published recipes for tomatoes and okra in the US. Yet Randolph’s kitchen was run by enslaved cooks whose presence her text obscured. Marie Pellissier writes that Randolph referred euphemistically instead “to the ‘household’ as the dominion over which the Virginia housewife had control—over labour, over knowledge production and over household management.”
Stowell’s knowledge about okra stew, mediated through her Nubian cook, is just one sliver of the history of the relationship between tomatoes and okra in Egypt. Her perspective is limited and her prejudices are plain. But her cookbook offers some clues about the relationship between the marginalization of Egypt’s southern regions and the rise of a tomato-based stew as the dominant approach to cooking Egyptian okra.
The history of red okra relayed here is in a sense the culmination of this book’s argument up to this point. The material factors that rendered tomatoes into a year-round crop and a quotidian cooking medium underpinned a hegemonic understanding of modern Egypt defined primarily by and through northern elites. As it became integrated into everyday practices, red okra was recast as a tradition that rendered the novel familiar and produced a sense of continuity rather than rupture. Red okra came to embody a sense of Egyptian identity oriented toward the Eastern Arab world that became naturalized as dominant, common-sense, and ordinary. We could end the story here.
Okra, however, begs to differ. A quick glance at Claudia Roden’s work—a body of recipes that reconstructs the world her Sephardic Jewish family left behind after they left Egypt in 1956—reveals a more complex landscape of okra preparation in Egypt. Her okra recipes include two variations that she identifies as Upper Egyptian. Both involve mashing the okra pods rather than cooking them whole; one involves no tomatoes whatsoever. The more I spoke to friends and colleagues about okra, and as I conducted follow-up interviews with many of my original oral history subjects, the more I learned about the universe of tomato-free approaches to okra—not just in the Saʿid but in the middle strata of Cairo: the very places where I had sought to understand the production of Egypt’s dominant culinary cultures.
Raymond Williams writes that cultural activity can be studied “both as tradition and as practice.” In the same way that okra offers a means to understand the construction of a tomato-based culinary tradition in Egypt, it also opens up a means to narrate modern Egypt’s culinary and cultural history through the lens of everyday practice and beyond a tomato-centric framing, which the remainder of this chapter explores. In doing so, okra helps to situate Egypt’s culinary cultures within an African context.