Anny Gaul

Between the 1880s and the 1950s, a new genre of cookbooks appeared in Egypt. Largely written by women, these texts addressed the housewives of Egypt’s expanding middle classes. This essay describes how the genre’s authors instructed women to nourish the nascent Egyptian nation. In prescribing specific flavors to notions of “good taste,” these cookbooks’ eclectic combinations of recipes oriented Egyptian readers towards Europe and the Arab East, rather than towards the rest of the African continent. This analysis situates these cookbooks within the overlapping spheres of Egyptian rule in Sudan, the British occupation of Egypt and Sudan, and anticolonial nationalism. It argues that studying gendered and domestic forms of labor, like cooking, can enrich our understandings of how national identity formation hinges on the construction of racial, ethnic, and class hierarchies. Cookbooks thus offer a unique perspective on the relationships between nation, empire, gender, and race.

This essay is a contribution to a roundtable that brings together the work of gender historians whose research collectively ranges from Morocco to Afghanistan, and traces a variety of connections across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Collectively, we demonstrate the many ways that women in the Middle East and North Africa collaborated with one another and with women in other world regions in the name of national independence, women’s rights, and economic justice, often shaping gender norms in the process. This contribution demonstrates that multiple generations of Moroccan women activists engaged with ideas and movements circulating through the Middle East and beyond as they advocated for liberation. It examines how the nation-state sets up particular barriers to narrating these vital transnational dimensions of women's history in Morocco.

Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 17:3, November 2021

Melding the rural and the urban with the local, regional, and global, Levantine cuisine is a mélange of ingredients, recipes, and modes of consumption rooted in the Eastern Mediterranean. Making Levantine Cuisine provides much-needed scholarly attention to the region’s culinary cultures while teasing apart the tangled histories and knotted migrations of food. Akin to the region itself, the culinary repertoires that comprise Levantine cuisine endure and transform—are unified but not uniform. This book delves into the production and circulation of sugar, olive oil, and pistachios; examines the social origins of kibbe, Adana kebab, shakshuka, falafel, and shawarma; and offers a sprinkling of family recipes along the way. The histories of these ingredients and dishes, now so emblematic of the Levant, reveal the processes that codified them as national foods, the faulty binaries of Arab or Jewish and traditional or modern, and the global nature of foodways. Making Levantine Cuisine draws from personal archives and public memory to illustrate the diverse past and persistent cultural unity of a politically divided region.

Focusing on recently translated cookbooks from medieval Arabic and early modern Persian culinary traditions, this essay suggests that recipes and other culinary texts in translation can do more than simply diversify the contours of food studies: they can invite food scholars to question the categories and assumptions of our "gastronomic epistemologies," to borrow Jon Holtzman's phrase.

Gastronomica (2019) 19 (2): 87–95.