Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophes, where Jon booked himself in six different situations in the next couple weeks, so now he’s got less than 2,000 to explain 5,000 years of culinary history. I’m your Culinary Compression folder, Jon O’Guin, and today’s titanic topic is EGYPT. What foods are the land of the Nile known for? What flavors do the pharaohs savor? Why did I not give myself more time to prepare for this? These questions and more will be answered as we dig into the shifting sands of the North-east Sahara for sustenance. Join us, won’t you?

The Dishes of Duat

You have no idea how mad I am that I remembered the word “Duat” for that bit of alliteration, because I DEFINITELY spent like, 3 whole minutes trying to remember it on Monday. I was going to do a brief bit of alliteration about how most of my knowledge about “Egypt” is tied to the “dynastic Deities of Duat”, as a fun textual flourish for my nerd-based knowledge of ancient Egyptian religion, but my brain seized up on “Duat”, and only half-gave me Djehuti, which is at least in the right ballpark (in that it is the name of an Egyptian God…kind of), but was also close enough that I couldn’t remember what I actually wanted, and was hard enough to remember the full spelling of that I confused myself and gave up.

Damnit, Djehuti, not now!
(Djehuti is one transliteration of the deity we call “Thoth”, god of Knowledge. Turns out taking our notes about what Egypt calls things from the Greeks led to some severe spelling errors. )

And now, apropos of NOTHING, I get it instantly, for a title line that doesn’t even WORK. Duat is the Realm of the DEAD! You wouldn’t start a discussion of Greece’s food culture with “A Taste of Tartarus”, or Norway with “The Flavors of Valhalla”.I hate that I remembered it now for a dumb line, and I hate that it came after what felt like one of my better (or at least “more like a Food-TV-Show”) intros in a while.

What are we talking about? Oh, yeah, food. You know Egyptian food already, stop bothering me. What’s that? “No, we don’t?” Yes, you do, you just don’t know that you do. You know the Renaissance, when Italy got super-rich selling fancy spices and silks? Those goods had two main routes into Europe: through Turkey, and Constantinople, and from the ports of the Nile. The Silk Road ran through Alexandria. Egypt is one of the places where ALL the Mediterranean, North African, Middle Eastern, even “Far” Eastern and European cuisines and stuff kind of intermingled and glided past one another. You wanna know what a current popular Egyptian dish is? Macaroni Béchamel, which is a layer of penne pasta in béchamel, then a layer of ground meat, with sautéed onions and tomato paste, then another layer of penne and sauce, and if that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s one of a dozen riffs of lasagna/pastitsio you can find around the world. That’s not a translated name, either: the dish is literally called “Macaroni Bechamel”. That is an Egyptian dish whose name is in Italian and French. Which isn’t all that suprising, since the Arabic WORD for pasta is “Makarona”. Ugh Fine. I GUESS I’ll talk about it.

About Egyptian food in general, not “Macaroni Bechamel” in particular, I’ve pretty thoroughly covered that.

Things Just Keep Cropping Up

One of the big things about Egyptian cuisine is that it’s fairly vegetarian-friendly. This makes a lot of sense when you think it through: ancient Egypt’s growing cycle was dictated by, and LIMITED BY, the Nile’s flooding season. That is a system that is biased toward CROPS, not livestock: the water supply is variable by seasons, and filled with murder lizards.

“I personally love livestock.”

As such, a LOT of Egyptian food is grain or legume-based. They eat hummus, and tahini, and Baba ghanoush, and rice and wheat and barley and fava beans. Fava beans in particular are the heart of a dish called ful medames, which is the other primary contender for the National dish of Egypt beside Koshari. Ful medames are stewed and seasoned fava beans. And by “Seasoned”, I mean “flavored how you want to make it, there’s at least 6-7 spices/flavoring agents they add during cooking, and another 20+ they’ll add while serving.” You could get “cumin-spiced beans with beef, peppers, and a fried egg”, or “lemony beans in buffalo milk”. Apparently the dish was born in part from an amazing historical monopoly/side hustle: the Princess Baths, popular bath houses in the Middle Ages, had huge tubs for heating bath water, and it just took too long to re-start the fires every day, so they started burning them all night, and decided “well, if I have a giant pot of water bubbling away, I may as well cook something”, and started making enormous batches of beans, which would be done simmering in the morning, for a nice cheap and hearty breakfast option. And within a century or two, everyone around town would just send runners out to buy the morning beans from the Baths, and they’d just season it how they wanted it at THEIR home/business, hence the wide variation.

Egypt has desserts that are just “semolina flour mixed with rose water and dipped In simple syrup”, and a regional style of rice pudding called Umm Ali/Om Ali, they make Baklava like the Greeks and Levant do, they make Moussaka like the Balkans and Levant do, they make…well, they don’t make Falafel exactly like everyone else does, but they do make it; basically, if you can think of a grain or starch-based dish from the eastern half of the Mediterranean, you can find it in Egypt. You know about Sahleb/Salep? No? It’s a drink/dessert made from orchid root flour thickening warm milk, and it used to be an old-timey super-food, and CURRENTLY is slowly rendering the wild orchid extinct in Turkey. GUESS WHO ELSE DRINKS IT.

IS this the drink? Who can tell, under the foam?
(It is, assuming we believe Alpha)

You don’t even need to KNOW the crops for Egypt to be serving them up. Which isn’t to say they DON’T eat meat, but that the core of their cuisine isn’t meat. Indeed, it’s something much more…uplifting

That Was The Yeast Awful Pun Yet

I hate everything I have chosen to be. Except hydrated. Doing pretty good at being hydrated atm, and that’s not bad. Anywho, Egypt fucking loves bread. Specifically, they have their own variant of pita bread that’s thicker and chewier, that they take very seriously. How Seriously? Well, it’s called Eish Baladi, and Eish is roughly translated as “LIFE/SURVIVAL/WAY OF LIFE/TO BE ALIVE”, and “baladi” means “Locally/rurally/my country”. The bread’s name is “Our way of life”/”how we survive here”. You know in the Bible when they say “Man cannot live on Bread alone”? Yeah, that used to be a lot more potent a line, since many people in that area viewed bread as life.  

Side note: “Baladi”, since it means “of my country/locally/rurally”, is also the name of a genre of music. (Like how in English we have “country” or “folk” music).
So it turns out there’s a lot more pictures of people dancing to that than there are of the bread.

And they double down on that: “eish” is also used as the signifier for several other breads in the country, from Sourdough eish shamsi, or the baguette-like eish fino. And Egypt STILL takes this very seriously: A not-uncommon meal for poorer Egyptians is just a scoop of Ful on Baladi or other eish breads, and Egypt’s government has been subsidizing bread for the nation for over 50 years now, with a surge in bread prices in 2008 leading to fights that killed 11 people, and the price of bread was one of the frustration points that led to the 2011 Revolution in the country. It’s a weighty topic, but one I DO NOT have time to cover, so let’s jump to the meat of the matter!

Let’s not Mince Words

I have to have used most of these puns already, but that IS a solid lead in to this section, where one interesting thing I see about a lot of Egyptian meat is that it basically comes in three forms: stewed, minced, or cured. Egypt, as far as I can tell, isn’t really a place for pork chops or steaks, but like, Kofta kebabs, pigeon pies, and braised lamb. Which, again, really plays to the pre-industrialized traditions of the region: lamb and pigeon are both fairly low-impact meat sources, in that they don’t need a lot of pasture, don’t take a long time to grow, etc. There’s a similar focus on other poultry like chickens and duck for similar reasons: don’t need a lot of space or feed. Rabbit is quite popular for similar reasons. Egyptians do eat beef, of course, but when they do, they tend to use all of it, grinding the meat, or stewing the offal and tougher cuts.

This is supposedly a “typical” Egyptian lunch, and that meat dish is definitely…one of those options. Could be any of them.

The Nile Delta and coastal regions also have prominent fishing and seafood, and a stronger connection to the international spice trade, with a lot of “Alexandrine/Alexandrian” versions of dishes being more thoroughly seasoned, or made with seafood. Alexandrian Koshary, for instance, draws more deeply on the dish’s Indian influences by seasoning the rice with curry powder and cumin, replacing the tomato sauce with pickled tomatoes, and adding “rolled eggs”, an Egyptian egg-cooking method where the eggs are boiled, peeled, and then coated in a spice/nut mixture and fried. I actually have a MILLENNIA OLD recipe for “Alexandrine pumpkin” I keep meaning to cook, despite the fact that one of its ingredients has gone extinct.

In short, Egypt’s food is a very approachable first step in bridging the gaps between European and Middle-Eastern or Levantine foods: it’s familiar enough to both sides to be recognizable, while also being distinct and unique to itself. It’s a great cuisine for pleasing omnivores and vegetarians alike, and the only people it leaves out are those who struggle to process grains! …Look, no one’s perfect. If they were, we wouldn’t need Ammut, Anubis’ hippo-leo-dile who devours the hearts of the unworthy!

And apparently vomits something into Osiris’ octopus-bowl.
Oh, look, Djehuti’s back.

MONDAY: WE GO BOUGIE, AND TALK ABOUT A VERY EXPENSIVE DISH OF POTATOES I ATE ONCE…PROBABLY, BECAUSE I THINK MY EGGPLANT HAS GONE BAD, AND IT FITS WHAT’S GOING ON NEXT WEEK. IF NOT…I’VE GOT OPTIONS. I’LL EXPLAIN WHEN WE GET THERE

THURSDAY: DEPENDS ON WHAT ENDS UP HAPPENING MONDAY.