Understanding Egyptian Cuisine & Culture

from the library of congress in washington dc good afternoon i'm chris murphy i'm the head of the near east section here in the african middle eastern division and behalf of all the staff and in particular our chief dr mary jane deeb i wish you all the warmest of welcomes uh unfortunately dr deeb can't be with us this afternoon and in a minute when i'm done i have to run off to the same meeting that dr deeb is attending as i said i'm the head of the nearest section the nearest section is one of three sections of the african middle eastern division the other two sections are the african section whose staff are responsible for developing the collection from and about sub-saharan africa and providing reference and access to the collections the hebraic section concerns itself with hebrew and judaica worldwide and its staff is of course responsible for the development of that collection and for providing access to that collection then there is the near east section of which i'm head the near east section covers in its responsibilities all of the arab countries turkey and turkic central asia the countries of the caucasus iran and afghanistan as well as the muslims in western china russia and the balkans or in a more succinct way our area of responsibility runs from casablanca in the west to kashgar in the east from khartoum in the south to kazan in the north and as with the other two sections the staff of the near east section is responsible for developing the collection from and about the countries in each of their areas of responsibility and for assisting readers and helping with access to the collections now the neary section itself is custodial and by that means we hold materials here and in particular we hold materials in the local language collections so of a total collection of about 480 000 volumes about half are in arabic there are 75 to 80 000 each in persian and turkish ottoman turkish and then there are some 36 other languages probably the of those the most numerous number of volumes are in armenian the collection of which is now bumping up against 40 000 volumes and as i said the staff provides access to the collections and part of that creating of access is also outreach and these noontime lectures that we hold are part of the outreach in which members of the staff discover importune otherwise get individuals often who have worked in our reading room doing research to present about their research and about their books and in a moment i'm going to ask dr mohamed salhe one of the arab world specialists to come up and speak about today's speaker but today's lecture like so many others is another way of giving the public access you know to the collections and to what we do here so without further ado i'd ask mohamad to come forward good afternoon everybody thank you all for joining us uh our speaker today uh amy riolo is an internationally recognized expert known for fusing the worlds of cuisine culture and history in her work an award-winning author popular lecturer cooking show host food writer culinary consultant and cooking instructor she was dubbed cooked to the kings by a cairo newspaper in 2008. her books include arabian delights recipes and princely entertaining ideas from the arabian peninsula 16 volumes worth staining as it was dubbed by the washington post uh nile style egyptian cuisine and culture which was given the world gourmand award by or rather the world gurmand award for best arab cuisine book in the united states she also has the mediterranean diabetes cookbook which was published which received the 2011 nautilus book award a note to the audience this event is being videotaped for subsequent broadcast on the library's website and other media the audience is encouraged to offer comments and raise questions during the formal question and answer period but please be advised that your voice and image may be recorded and later broadcast as part of this event by particip by participating in the question and answer period you are consenting to the library's possible reproduction and transmission of your remarks also i'd like to mention that there's going to be a book signing after the event and i'm sure our speaker would be happy to sign the books for you without further ado america thank you so much dr muhammad for that really warm introduction and thank you to mr murphy who couldn't be with us today it's wonderful to see so many of you here some of you i've seen a few years ago and some of you are new and i really appreciate you coming and spending a portion of your afternoon with me and allowing me to speak about one of my favorite topics um in 1996 i picked up a lonely planet travel guide about egypt and they said that egypt has many wonderful things to offer but that cuisine is not one of them so i said great i'm going there and what am i going to eat you know i want to eat well life is short i think that everybody should eat well so that started my quest to discover what egyptian cuisine really was and of course when i went there i found that it was wonderful but more than that i found that there were ties between the anthropology that's involved in cuisine and the history and that with the mediterranean and the world at large so that became one of my missions is to study and record these things and many of them are located in the book and we're going to talk about them today so what i hope out of today's lecture is that we'll be able to define egyptian cuisine and discuss how it's unique i also would like for everybody to experience a little bit about the history and the culture and we're going to discuss some exciting new discoveries what are called cultural periods of understanding egyptian history these are the periods in ancient egyptian history as they're defined today on the left we have the current method and that's the way that they've been pretty much for the last year since napoleon they've really been divided into these types of categories starting with the early dynastic period and 3150 before the common era all the way through romans and the christianity but recently what we started looking at is the pre-dynastic era which is 5500 before the common era and also an area an era which is called the dawn of egyptian art and that's 4 400 to 2649 before the common era and these two areas are of extreme interest to me because for the first time what we're seeing is people dissecting and understanding and researching history not from periods of fighting and war or periods of who was ruling when but actual in terms of cultural similarities and we're calling these cultural periods and this was from an exhibit that they had at the metropolitan museum of art last year called the dawn of egyptian art that i found so fascinating so for example here we have the badarian period starting in 4 400 before the common era and going to 3 800. instead of saying you know this was the war when the the nubians fought the egyptians or cush was feeding the fighting the persians we have cultural markers wheat and barley are farmed but people are maine semi-transient they heard domesticated animals and they talk about the different types of cultural similarities that were going on for centuries and this is really a beautiful way of studying culture and history and cuisine so be on the lookout for more of this as we go forward now egyptian cuisine was influenced by about 19 different cultures and in turn egyptian cuisine itself has influenced lebanese sudanese arabian french italian indian spanish and american cuisine this over on the left is a picture of the temple of karnak and luxor how many of you have been to karnak before i know dr todras has anyone else oh that's great okay so you can see some similarities here i'll try to use the the cursor over sorry over in this area where you see the reflecting pool and then you see some of this obelisk over here there's no uh mistake or no coincidence that they resemble a lot of what we see on the national mall the architectural architectural influences were definitely coming from ancient egypt at that time one of the reasons why the ancient egyptian empire was so important was because of the nile the nile was the highway of ancient egypt and this was the era where goods were transported the nile was actually worshiped and there is a god who is sacred named happy he was the god of the nile the nile flooded twice a year so it provided natural irrigation to give egypt a lot of sustenance and a lot of crops and the wealth that the ancient egyptian empire had was all based on this agriculture because food at the time was exchanged as currency so unlike the romans and the yemenis and many different people in antiquity who had to develop aqueducts the egyptians already had thanks to mother nature this natural system provided to them and the nile led into really important trading centers into the middle east into africa and with europe so it was really located at the perfect place to set up this wonderful empire what we're looking at here are some wooden model boats that were found in tombs in kingdoms they were important parts of funerary cults so a lot of people when they were buried in ancient egypt they were buried with things that would make their life better in the afterlife and by putting these trading ships in the in the funerary centers that meant that they would have trade and prosperity and commerce in the afterlife as well here are some photos from ancient egypt again from on the left luxor temple and on the right karnak you can see the magnitude that this type of crops and agriculture that was going on in egypt at the time led to these were such amazing places in magnitude what we have in luxor right now is only about 30 to 40 percent of what was originally there because a lot of it was destroyed and a lot of it hasn't been discovered yet but for any of you who have been in scene valley of the kings and valley of the queens and karnak and luxor temple you have just a little bit of an idea of the wealth that was there at that time this is an example of the ancient egyptian empire and we see in modern terms this is modern-day egypt with all of its ancient names then we go up through the levant in phoenicia which is modern day israel and lebanon and syria and we go up this area all the way into babylonia so we can see exactly how wide the ancient egyptian empire was lentils were worth their gold their weight in gold in antiquity in a lot of mediterranean cultures there's a tradition of eating lentils on new year's because they promote prosperity and and erroneously a lot of cookbook authors and and people who like to talk about food or culture say that this is because the lentils look like coins but it's not just because they look like coins it's because they actually were coins in antiquity so it's it's hard to think about ingredients that we eat every day and enjoy and take for granted that are really cheap like lentils and salt and pepper to think how important they were you couldn't have a community or an empire if you didn't have these type of things in antiquity spices were also very very important and spices were very rare now just to give you an idea this is 3 000 years before the roman empire when in ancient egypt they're using spices very very heavily the romans were using them more in terms of the emperors and the royalty but in ancient egypt at the time they were actually even used by commoners not in the same amounts but they were available and accessible the spices were used in embalming in 3000 before the common era there was also black pepper that was found in ramses ii's tomb and why is black pepper significant well the only place it was coming from at the time is what is modern-day china so that proved that the ancient egyptians had trade relations with china very very early on hot ship suit who is the one and only female pharaoh also coming from luxer imported splices from the area of punt in 1500 1500 before the common era now punt is what is modern day sometimes referred to as the area of ethiopia and yemen in djibouti and this type of period and we know this for sure because if you go to her temple and look so there's a little tree where they have uh frankincense and it was saying that this tree came from pond and that hot chip suit brought it from there she was doing an enormous amount of trade and her actual foreign policy is something that really deserves being studied as well she was a very effective leader by 80 before the common era in alexandria in northern egypt on the mediterranean port this was such an important area that it became the most important trading port on the mediterranean and it was they had an entrance to the city known as pepper gate crops in antiquity some of the things that were growing in ancient egypt were ful medames which is a variety of fava bean favas are actually the world's oldest agricultural crop date palms were also growing for 5000 years peas lettuce beans cucumbers and grapes and a lot of things that we enjoy today were also very very abundant in ancient egypt because of the abundance and because of the wealth there was a lot of innovations in cuisine and we know this because archaeologists actually find remnants of different types of foods different types of ingredients in the tombs when they do their excavations we can look back to the first dynasty which is about 2700 even before that to 3200 before the common era and we find ancient forms of feta cheese in tombs and this is very important to do this type of research because in egypt unfortunately the middle east and africa they don't really have laws protecting their culinary products like the european union does but feta cheese now can only be called feta if it's done so by the greek government but as we see we have evidence that egypt had it in 3200 bc also many other countries had it in the levant they had it in palestine they had it in bulgaria so many many countries had varieties of fara and then we see tomb scenes like this one here were bred and different types of pastries were being baked and shaped in mass quantities this is important because wheat was very scarce in much of the world but not in north africa it was very very plentiful so we know that they had a lot of wheat and we know that they had the sophistication and the technology not just to make any old loaves but many many different types of bread bread was so important to the ancient egyptians that they gave it the same word as life which is aish which is this is different from the arabic word of hubs so the egyptians call bread life and it's very very important to this day and we're going to talk a little bit about modern times later but in the times when the pyramids were being constructed the pyramid laborers were rationed five pounds of bread per person per day so that's how much bread there was and that's how important bread was and that's how important it is as a staple still to this day if you go to egypt you will see people with trays of wooden trays full of bread and every single family buys a tray of bread every day and just the next day they buy a new tray it's it's uh it's a utensil it's an important ingredient and it's just something that you always have on hand and actually our origin of the birthday cake and our history and tradition of eating birthday cake dates back to the pharaohs because every year on the pharaoh's birthday they would give him a special little cake with seasoning on it it was more of a savory type of bread just to signify his birthday so in the years later that fused with our idea of a birthday cake now salt was also very important in antiquity because if you didn't have access to salt you really couldn't have a very sophisticated society it was a currency but also important for a seasoning and important for health reasons so people had to develop if they didn't live in an area where they could cultivate their own salt or harvest it they would have to have good relations with people who could and the ancient egyptians set up trading routes with the phoenicians who went all around the mediterranean as early as 2800 before the common era to import salt and a lot of times they imported salted fish and this is very interesting because people wonder you know why salted fish they obviously had access to fish in other places of the mediterranean well a lot of different governments especially the romans had very high taxes imposed on salt because they knew how coveted it was and how important it was and people would usually find a way to pay these taxes and the roman government could get richer so they started imposing these taxes and people a lot of them couldn't afford them but they wanted salt so what they started doing was salting fish this is a way of preserving the fish but it was also a way of transporting salt so that they could get salt without having to pay the high tariffs on it and this these recipes for salted fish became so important that all around the mediterranean to this day whether you're in southern italy or southern greece there's specific recipes that use salted fish anchovies or sardines in them that wouldn't be the same without them and even now that there are no taxes people still prefer to flavor with this type of condiment in modern times this shows wadi nathroon which is a beautiful area in egypt very close to the el phion oasis if you ever go and you're in cairo this is about 90 minutes away you can take a very quick car drive but it's a world away you go through a little bit of the desert and then you get to this beautiful oasis and there were salt reserves there and this was where in antiquity they were getting a lot of the salt to export and they also use the salt and mummification and this area you're going to hear more and more about it on the news and in different places because they're doing a lot of excavations and they're finding a lot of examples of egyptian coptic art monasteries and early christian influence in egypt from this era here are some examples of the breads in ancient egypt this is from the agricultural museum in cairo and i apologize for the reflection but i was lucky enough that they let me take the picture in the museum so i didn't complain you can see how similar these breads are to our modern day breads this one looks a lot like chala these look like pretzels this one looks like a bagel or an italian freezer you have ones that look like croissant and breadsticks these are all around in ancient egypt and that's one of the things that i think is so beautiful about bread is that we can make it and if we're doing it the right way the traditional way we're connecting with our ancestors from millennia ago because it really the process hasn't changed very much now foie gras many of us know foie gras via the french it's a very wonderful upscale product that is very important to the culinary patrimony of france but it also has roots in ancient egypt and we know this because if you go to the egyptian rooms or halls in the louvre in paris you'll see a copy of a rosetta stone where they show picture of the ancient egyptians they're hunting with bows and arrows the geese that are flying above and all the depictions of the geese have very full stomachs and what they did was the ancient egyptians used to follow the migratory patterns of the birds and they would notice that as soon as the birds took off for flight to migrate they were they had gorged themselves beforehand so they were fatter and of course they tasted better so once they realized that this phenomenon was occurring they started force-feeding uh the geese and making foie gras at a very very early time and then later on it became as we know an important culinary ingredient around the world nourishment was so important to egyptians that they even took it into the afterlife just like we talked about wanting to ensure the success and the prosperity of the afterlife they also wanted to make sure that they ate really well so they developed these type of things which are food mummies this is actually a roast that's wrapped up and mummified and put into the tomb with the deceased so that they could eat well during the afterlife and we see many many examples of this so that's how important food was to them it's like not only does it matter what i eat before i die but also after i die and we can't talk about ancient egypt or the egyptian culture at all without mentioning the nubians nubians are indigenous to southern egypt and what is also modern-day northern sudan they have their own language in their own culture and they had 27 different kings who collectively ruled egypt for a period of about 100 years in antiquity these are some examples of nubian foods that are now popular many of them throughout the world these are some nubian spices which we'll talk more about later here we have dried hibiscus leaves also dried okra is very common to the nubian community dried dates this is the juice that comes from the hibiscus leaves or carcades it's called and this is some nubian bread as people get dispersed around the world and a lot of people from the middle east are emigrating as nubians emigrate we find that a lot of them are already having difficulty maintaining arabic culture and egyptian culture so a lot of the nubian things are being lost so it's really important that we can pay attention and study and research this because this is a very rich part of egyptian culture and many of the innovations that were taking place in nubia predated the arab conquest we also can mention the bedouins when we look into any part of the middle east but especially ancient egypt the bedouins are really important because they were kind of key holders of the arab culture as they traveled around and they were nomadic they relied on staples like rice and dates and mutton and dairy and they also kind of set the precursor in the common denominator for culinary etiquette and how you treated people when they were your guests because the bedouins had to travel from place to place and they had to take their livestock with them they obviously couldn't afford to kill an animal every day and eat meat every single day so they could only do it when there was a special occasion what they did do every day was they would milk the animal and from the milk they would tie a hide between two palm trees and beat it so that they could make butter and cheese so that would be the daily diet butter cheese yogurt and a little bit of bread and dates and things that were that were plentiful at the time and then when a guest came they would honor them by having meat and giving one of their animals because this wasn't just meat for the dinner that day but it was literally a part of their livelihood so when you had a guest to offer them one of your animals meant that you were cutting off part of what you would be able to eat later on in your life so meat became very very important and this is something that even though it was in antiquity still permeates every single day in egypt and in other parts of the middle east and the arab world as well this is in nueva by the way which is in sinai if you go to shadow shaykh and a red sea in that area of egypt you go a few hours north towards taba in israel right in the middle you come to this beautiful beautiful place called nueva and these are some bedouin women who are from there there's a saying in arabic that the food equals the affection and this is also part of the bedouin culture and the veteran tradition that when you have a guest you offer as much as possible because as much as you offer that shows how much you care for the person the jewish community was very prominent and very important in antiquity and also in various parts in egyptian history starting in antiquity the first synagogue ever was in what is modern day aswan it was actually burnt by the romans but it was the first synagogue and there's also a very important jewish community in cairo that in the 12th century had about 80 000 members and they had in their own area called haratel yahood which was a square in cairo and we can trace and i have many recipes in the book and holidays that we talk about the different types of things that were eaten for these holidays and how there were collaborations between the egyptian community and the jewish community there were even jewish pashas at different times maimonides was actually the physician to salahaddin or saladin as he is known in english this is a soup called juice mellow and it comes from a bitter herb that's very similar to arugula and this was the original bitter herb that was on the seder plates it wasn't horseradish it was this leaf called malachia because it grew very plentiful in ancient egypt it became one of the most important dishes in the 10th century because when the caliph from tunisia who was coming to take over and claim cairo his name was he came from tunisia he arrived in cairo he was very sick so the locals made him the soup which is usually served with rabbit in the picture we have chicken because they do that more nowadays then he got cured so he proclaimed it a miraculous soup in a beloved soup and he named it melohaya which comes from the word maluk which is the plural word for kings in arabic so it went from a very common type of peasant ingredient to a royal soup within a matter of centuries because it cured this important figure who also named cairo he was the person who gave cairo the name al-qahra or of the victorious and then we also see that the jews adapted this idea of carrying nourishment into afterlife and they fused it in with their own judaic traditions so here i apologize this is a fuzzy picture also from the agriculture museum it's a mortuary offering bread from the jewish community in ancient egypt and as we know rosh hashanah is tomorrow and there are some recipes like chala and egyptian hala and other things in the book um that that you can go to there's actually a full menu nile style is divided into cultural culinary menus so there are menus set from pharaonic egypt all the way into modern times we talk about the history of each event and then we talk about the recipes of them and this is the ben ezra synagogue which is in cairo which was actually built on top of the place where it was believed that moses was found in the basket as a baby so you can go to that and and see it's a beautiful place in old cairo then there was persian influence in cairo in the 6th century before the common era and as i mentioned before when the persians came in they set up shop in luxor and they destroyed a lot of the temples and a lot of things were there but one of the things that they left behind was the sugar crop and sugar became one of the most important agricultural crops in egypt from antiquity until nowadays now we're talking about 525 bc so this is very very early on in comparison the french and a lot of people in europe did not have sugar readily available until the 1600s and the 1700s and when they had it available it was sold in the apothecaries and they would give a teaspoon to people who were lethargic or were sick or they didn't know exactly how to treat them so i'd give them a teaspoon of sugar it's very very expensive so here you have the regular everyday egyptian peasant enjoying sugar in antiquity but in europe they're not enjoying it until millennia later food was viewed as a medicine prior to 523 before the common era and we have evidence of a lot of ancient egyptian medical texts and what we can find from them is that they had developed specifical ways of examination diagnosis prognoses simple non-invasive surgeries and also bone settings in antiquity and one of the unique things is that 67 of the ancient egyptian remedies were proved to be true in the 1973 british pharmaceutical codex so people say you know okay well what about that was only 67 what about the other 33 and i said well it's not that those those were not proven to be not true perhaps we just haven't discovered them yet so we can look to see a lot of medical advances um still are being discovered from ancient cultures there was an egyptian pharaoh named king amesis and he loved the greeks he was very very fond of the greek culture in the greek community which had simulated quite heavily with the egyptian community and in the sixth century before the common era he built them a town on the nile called necrotes and he welcomed them into egypt and so many greeks came into egypt that the hellenistic and the in the egyptian cultures really really fused and it became difficult to know what was egyptian and what was greek and to give you an example of that in the town called komombo further south in egypt on the nile they found a statue which is the goddess it's called aphrodite slash isis or isis as we say in arabic so they were actually fusing their religions fusing the goddesses they refusing their styles of dress fusing the the culinary ingredients so many many things where people look at them we might be influenced and we might know them as americans as greek but they could have very well come from egypt or vice versa because there was a lot of exchange going back and forth between these two countries these are all in modern-day alexandria this is the citadel on the mediterranean with some fishing boats and this is the uh port of the mediterranean and this is the alexandria library which is built on the same place that the ancient library was built then we have the founding of alexandria in 332 before the common era by alexander the great now alexander the great never actually set foot on uh the soil of alexandria but he founded it from afar on the island of pharos and so again the greek influence grew and continued to stay strong in alexandria this dish on the right is what we know is musaka which is a greek eggplant dish that has layered with eggplant and bechamel sauce and meat and things like that and tomatoes and a lot of times in the mediterranean there's this kind of fight of who had sakha first because in the arab world and it was made with eggplant and meat and pomegranate molasses and other things long before the tomatoes and things like that came from the new world and also it was the arabs who introduced the eggplant to europe so probably the origins of the dish are definitely um arabic and central asian but over the years it got introduced it became very important part of the greek culture and of other cultures as well here we have a photo of the silk road which goes back to 206 before the common era and we can see the main silk road which is this golden area here and then we see some connectors which is down through egypt and we see the sea route which is through egypt so once again even despite those ancient egyptian trade routes which were very very large we also have a now new trade routes coming in with a silk road so making egypt more and more important then we have the roman occupation in the first century now the romans came to egypt not like the greeks to assimilate and to learn and to to really fuse but to occupy they wanted the wheat and they wanted the grain and they wanted access to the trade routes because with the wheat in the grain they could supply sustenance and wealth to the entire roman empire which at the time spanned all the way what is to modern day uh great britain so it was very very wide we have examples of the egyptian recipes in rome thanks to this gentleman down here who is a roman philosopher named apis has anybody heard of him before he's very very important and he's known to be the father of all gourmands and the reason for this is because he was a poor writer but he loved food so much that he actually wanted he had the palette of an emperor and he went bankrupt because he couldn't afford to eat as well as he he liked so he actually committed suicide so we say that he did the ultimate sacrifice for food which was he healed himself but he wrote the first western cookbook called derek in latin or on cooking in english it's translated into many languages you can get it and read it and in this wonderful cookbook we can see how people ate all around north africa not only um in egypt or in rome and what kind of the styles of the days were what spices they had access to one of the things that apostates mentioned is the bread from alexandria he was really in love with the bread from alexandria and he mentions these prawns or shrimp which the roman emperors used to spend send fleets to the coast of north africa to bring them back and still today in italy there's a lot of studying of marine biology and the way that the fish are migrating and that the seafood is migrating and people pay close attention to get the best fish at the best time this was actually something that started with the romans the romans and the greeks also coveted egyptian wine which is really fascinating not just the fact that egyptians had great wine but the fact that it was being grown in the west what is now the western desert so five thousand years ago this area that is completely desert now was very very lush and very fertile so much so that the greeks and romans preferred its wine to their own wine we know a lot about ancient egypt and what was going on in that type of greco-roman era because of cleopatra during her relationship with marc anthony she led such a fragrant lifestyle that they called themselves the inimitable livers and they wanted to really set the standard of what high living was she had her palace tables decked out in gold and silver she used a lot of tortoise shell and glassware and she had pools that were kept full of fresh lotus flowers and of course many of you have seen lotus before you know that they're very beautiful but this was also very symbolic because as you think of where cleopatra was geographically she was in northern egypt and the lotus is it was a symbol of power and the flag in the emblem of ancient egypt so by having pools full of this flower it reminded everybody around that she didn't just rule northern egypt but also southern egypt and exactly how the extent of her power and her role as connecting these two parts of the nation her dinners would consist of things like oysters and wild boar roasted fish peacocks flamingos seafood and quails she also had a lot of pastries which probably as you would imagine had figs and dates and honey nuts and berries and things like that but she was also known to use sugar quite extensively and in nile style i also have a recipe that was translated from hieroglyphs which are called cleopatra's kisses and what they are are there are half walnuts that are filled with a sugar marsupon and she was said to have fed these to mark anthony so if you look at that recipe and you create it at home you can reenact that whole scene in the privacy of your own home walnuts were believed to be very important for mental power and intelligence in antiquity and it sounds kind of like you know a wives tale but it's been proven that the fatty acid and walnuts are really good for brain power nowadays too so there was some truth to that now architecture was also an area of study at the time and the romans really wanted to emulate a lot of what they were seeing in ancient egypt so you see the temple of edfu which is on the left which was the temple of horus in the third century before the common era and then on the right you see a first century villa in italy and this is the town of potswali and you can see the similarities between edfu and this villa which was one of the emperor's villas now does anybody has anybody ever heard of putsuoli before in italy portsole is where sophia lauren is from so we can see third first century before the common era of the romans and the type of of things that they were borrowing from the egyptians now the romans also introduced christianity into egypt and this was very important because this was the first century before the common era but then in the fourth century the churches split and they were divided between east and west when they were divided egypt became egyptian orthodox or coptic christians which followed a slightly different calendar from the roman catholics and part of the religion was to fast and there were certain amount of fast days on the calendar and fast does it mean not eating at all what it meant was being a vegan so no meat no fish no dairy during this time of the year and there were usually about 55 days in lent then there were other days before christmas for different feasts of different saints or the virgin mary where the coptic community still to this day hold these type of fasts where they're vegans now i mentioned you before the bedouins and the importance of meat and how much egyptians love meat and why this is an important part of the culture so imagine you you come from this meat loving culture and all of a sudden you join a religion which pretty much a third of your year tells you you have to be a vegan it's really really hard and it's a big sacrifice so what the egyptians did and what the syrians did and the armenians and greeks and a lot of people who are ethiopians part of that eastern orthodox religion was they developed really wonderful fasting recipes that are vegan recipes so if any of you are vegan i really recommend that you look towards these communities because you're going to find the most flavorful recipes out there they're not like recipes that are just using substitutes for me there are recipes that really can stand up to me and taste great and one of them is over here this is or the egyptian fava falafel many of you know falafel in the levant or in other areas of the middle east are made with chickpeas but in egypt they make them with dried split favas they're absolutely wonderful they have lots of spice in them and herbs and this was one of the things that the egyptian coptic community developed as a replacement for meat and they're available everywhere and very delicious there's a recipe in in nile style here we have some vegetable kebabs and here we have a dish called fatir which a lot of people believe that fatir was the original pizza but it's it's kind of an injustice to call it pizza because it's very rich it's it's almost like a homemade puff pastry that you make in layer with butters layers of clarified butter one after the other and then bake and if any of you are interested in this recipe on my youtube channel which you have access to on the program note there's actually um a series called delicious destinations looks look sir where i went to look sir and worked with a chef and we reenacted the the original ancient fetid recipe so you can watch that then islam came in the seventh century and islam was revealed to the prophet muhammad in mecca and then the four rightly guided caliphs dispersed their religion into the rest of the arab world in the middle east the caliphates are very very important because as we study history and as we study culture and cuisine many people say this is syrian this is lebanese this is egyptian but really it isn't it might be umayyad it might be it might be fatimid so as we learn these caliphates we can more more accurately identify which time period and which place things came from because we didn't have the same nationalistic borders back then that we do now so the umayyads were from 661 to 750 ambassadors were from 750 to 1258 then we have the spanish umayyads which kind of overlapped the two 756-1031 the glabids from 800 to 909 fatimids from 909 to 1171 and the ayubits from 1169 to 1260. now the umayyads were very very important they were based in in syria but these were this was the caliphate which really promoted city dwelling so we don't think about that nowadays we think about these great you know cities in the middle east like cairo and like damascus we think that they were always there but they weren't the umayyads had a big role in developing cosmopolitanism and making cities important trade centers they introduced islamic art and architecture and also palatial cuisine here are some umayyad influences in cairo we see some spices on the left and then we see the kanakalili spice market now hanahalili bazar was not built until the 14th century but it was built because of the trade that started being promoted by the umayyads seven centuries earlier the spices as i mentioned really really did build an empire and just like the agricultural crops gave the wealth and antiquity by this time period it was the spices and the fact that the umayyads controlled the spice trade which made this empire so wealthy and here we can see the spice roots and you see egypt right here and you see pretty much all of them going right through or at some point leading to egypt and the most close one this is very very important is here down here in zanzibar zanzibar is a little island which is about 15 miles off the coast of tanzania it's my dream to go there and to film there because it's a spice island and you can see where the cloves were harvested where many of these original recipes came from so this is zanzibar and you see everything else traveling from china and the spice islands over here in the far east now the abbasids came in 750-1258 this caliphate was known to create what we call the golden era of islamic civilization they had a lot of wealth and a lot of power they guaranteed free education to all of the the classes even the military which was unheard of at that time they had free public schools they had a lot of wonderful kind of public services and it really created this wonderful wonderful uh community we see that the the the expansion here based in baghdad this map is in arabic so a lot of the names uh like musk that's the arabic name for egypt afrikaa which was the area that is modern-day algeria libya tunisia maghrib which is morocco and al andalus which is of course andalusia or southern spain baghdad was the center of empirical life and the baghdadis took their uh cuisine and a lot of their influence from the persians which were located of course very close so we see a lot of kind of sweet and sour things and a lot of cooking applications and a lot of palatial court cuisine that the persons had already used being adapted into baghdad and there are still 13 medieval arabic cookbooks from this caliphate that are available that we can look at today in the world and many of them are available here at the library of congress then we can't talk about the cuisine of egypt or its expansion into the world without talking about abdul rahman who was a muslim prince in southern spain and he was the first in a line of his successors who also bore his name but he was very important because he was exiled from syria over into southern spain and he all of a sudden had to populate southern spain and he had to make it rival the court cuisine that was going on in baghdad because baghdad was kind of like modern-day dubai and spain was like the wild west they had nothing so he wanted to do everything in his power to make it stand up to baghdad so what he did was he hired this gentleman who was a sort of uh court servant from the courts of baghdad his name was abu hasan but he was known by the name ziriyab which meant blackbird and that's because his his voice had a very beautiful sound to it it's like a blackbird so they called him ziriyab he was very very important in all types of the daily living arts music cuisine fashion art architecture gardening and botany he knew a lot about pretty much everything that there was to know and what he did was he imported rice spices okra and hibiscus from egypt all the way into southern spain so he left baghdad he traveled through north africa picked up these ingredients from egypt and then brought them to southern spain and introduced them to the court and what happened over the years was the spanish rice sorry the egyptian rice which is sometimes in english called calrose rice you can get it at whole foods or you can get at the middle eastern stores where they call it egyptian rice this is like the grandfather or the predecessor to the bomba rice that they have in spain or the colossal rice and then later the arborio and the rices that they have in italy very starchy short grain rice it was planted in spain it did very well as did the saffron and what happens all of a sudden we have recipes like paella which are based upon rice and saffron and things like this this were originally introduced from ziriyab he also introduced many many songs and this instrument which is in english called the loot or the in arabic and he opened the first flamenco school in southern spain he was also the person who said that men should have short hair and that we shouldn't wear white in winter so many many of our gardening ideas of our fashion ideas about the way of decor we might think they're victorian or coming from france or different places in europe but they're actually coming from baghdad via muslim via egypt and muslim spain in the 10th century thanks to this gentleman and there's a restaurant named for him in paris called ziriyad so here we see kabsa this is a dish in saudi arabia which is a rice type of a skillet that has chicken and then it has some pine nuts or almonds and some raisins on top i have that recipe in my arabian delights book then we see very similarly the arrows and paella all of a sudden appear in southern spain with these ingredients that ziriav introduced and then risotto milanese which also has a very similar the derivative of the rice and the saffron that was brought thanks to the fatimids were the next groups which are very very important not only in egypt but in all of the mediterranean this was a north african shiite dynasty that was based in tunisia and you could see this area here with all of this little checkerboard that was their territory and look right up here to sicily which is very key because the fatimids claimed sicily as their capital palermo 50 years before they claimed cairo so that's how important sicily was to them and that's just how deep the the sicilians are rooted in arab culture that it shows this now i love talking about the fatimids because the fatimids love to celebrate and what they did in order to celebrate was whatever holiday it was no matter whose religion it was whether it was uh jewish tradition or christian or islamic was they would invite all the people all the citizens of the society out into the street they would set up lights all along the nile or whatever mediterranean body of water they had and they would encourage everybody to celebrate and one of the ways that they got them to celebrate was they reclaimed recipes from ancient times especially sweet recipes and introduced them to everybody and these became known as fatabit suites or as sweets that were typical of that particular holiday so that nowadays when you go to sicily or when you go to cairo you may find that the same sweet is being eaten for different holidays on the muda de nabi or the prophet muhammad's birthday in cairo they eat the same type of torrone or nougat that they eat for the feast of the santa rosalia in sicily and that's because of the fatimid influence and if it wasn't for the fatimids we probably wouldn't have these recipes anymore at all because the early christians and the early muslims found that a lot of these traditions that predated the religions were paganistic so they they outlawed them so by the fatimids allowing a lot of these traditions again and allowing the recipes people were able to enjoy them and the recipes lived so here we see us a little mention about the mulits mulid is the name of the uh it's a birth celebration that they have in egypt and they have them for specific religious figures that were revered they could be jewish figures they have one for abu hash or they could be christian a lot of times they have them for the virgin mary or the muslims have them for the prophet muhammad or for other sheikhs and here we see again some of the the hazelnut nougat that would be one of the recipes and this on the right is the mosque of al-azhar which is ironic because later al-azhar became known as the seat of sunni islam so this was a shiite group and they named the mosque they constructed it and they named it al-azhar after the prophet muhammad's daughter whose name was fatima al-azhara so and it's just ironic that later on it became the seat of sunni islam so here we have another cookie called now these are ancient egyptian cookies which were falling out of fashion and again not being not being served during early christian times and early muslim times that the fatimids brought back and used them and not just they did they make them again but they actually incorporated them as part of the idle fit which is the three-day holiday after ramadan as ramadan ends and people end their fasting and they go into the holiday period one of their religious requirements is that they give something called zakat al-fit or a charity because your fasting is not accepted unless you give charity once you give the charity you're done you can celebrate and go on and forward with your life so what the fatimids did was they took these ancient cookies and they stuffed them with gold coins and they distributed them to the poor so now you have this cookie which is all of a sudden reappearing on the scene that i've been forgotten about for years ancient and you're giving it as a charity to poor people filled with coins so you're you're fulfilling your religious duty you're you're re uh you know making a recipe which is from ancient times and making everybody happy so the are still a really important part of egyptian history and recipes and christians eat them at christmas and muslims eat them for the idol and of course they're not stuffed with gold coins of course anymore but they are stuffed with a mixture called agamea which is made with honey and it's gold it's to replicate the coins or with turkish delight which came later or they're just served plain now in the 12th century were the ayubids and many of you know this caliphate from saladin who was their most famous member or salah deen as he's known in arabic but during the 12th century during this era of the citadel there was they were producing more than 12 000 tons of food per day and saladin's grand nephew actually wrote a cookbook which is entitled a way to express the love of all good things and he had a recipe in this cookbook for veal scallopini egyptian style which were scallopini which were not were cut very very thin but they were not pounded they were just smoked and so this was a unique recipe that we can look back to the 13th century and trace to this time period cairo was so wealthy at this time that this is a quote that i found from a rabbi which really really tells the story of you if we can't be there we can experience we see what goes on in modern days this is a good way of understanding what was happening in the 15th century we arrived in cairo on sunday june 4 june 17 1481 if i were able to write about its wealth and its people all of this book would not be sufficient i swear that if i were able to put rome venice milan padua florence and four more cities together they would not equal in wealth and in population half that of cairo so we can imagine what it must have been like for someone to come from italy and say this in the 15th century and to have 12 000 tons of food being prepared in one establishment they had free hospitals for the needy and they would invite the needy there to get cured of course for free and they would not release them from the hospital unless they could eat an entire chicken in one city so that's that's the kind of medical care that they had at that time so then the ottomans came out of the scene and they took over again because of the trade routes and because of the wealth and and the central location of egypt and they introduced a lot of recipes into egypt that were unique we know the recipes that are specifically ottoman because during the ottoman empire in the tupcapa palace in istanbul they actually would employ a thousand chefs at a time and each of those 1 000 chefs had 100 understudies and each of those 1 000 chefs and their 100 understudies only made one dish for their whole entire career so if i was working in that time period i might only make this dish which is called sarcase or circassian chicken that way when i die the recipe lives and when that person dies the recipe lives and it's documented so nobody can change or alter the recipe that's how we know it's ottoman so when when the turks say this is an ottoman recipe they pretty much have proof that it is and this recipe became very important to egyptians although egyptians eat it a little bit differently than the turks do and this is turkish delight which is called melbourne in egypt and also became very very important then we have the art of stuffing vegetables this is soft cabbage but little stuffed baby who said yes you someone really loves stuffed ventures they're me too they're my favorite um you have a little baby eggplant little baby zucchini peppers tomatoes all kinds of things are stuffed in egypt depending upon the season and they're really delicious they're one of the highlights of the egyptian diet and the turks struck special deals with the spaniards so when ingredients were coming from the new world a lot of people don't realize because everywhere in the world now we love peppers and we love tomatoes and we love potatoes and we love corn and we love chocolate those were all new world ingredients that people did not have in the middle east or in any part of the world other than the americas before the 16th century but because the turks struck these special deals they got access to these ingredients a little bit before europe and the way that they entered the middle east was very very different because for example when potatoes made their way to france they were served to prisoners and they were really you know viewed with distrust in order to get people to eat them marie antoinette had to make a campaign showing that the potatoes were fashionable and that she ate them so then everybody else ate them but because the turks knew that they would be great ingredients and introduced them and everybody in the ottoman territories wanted to emulate the turks they were accepted right away and they started using them in culinary ingredients right away this is another example of turkish influence in egyptian culture and that's the tanura this is this skirt that egyptian dancers wear folkloric dancers that looks kind of it can when they spin around it looks like a top it's very very colorful and this is a folkloric colorful spin on the whirling dervishes in turkey that has lost its religious significance but is still very very important in terms of culture and folklore in egypt in 16th century coffee arrived in egypt and at this time we don't have time to go into the entire history of coffee today unfortunately but as we look at it we know that it comes from originally modern day ethiopia then goes into yemen and then to mecca and then to egypt and each of those places that it went through it was passed from hand to hand of sufis these were religious clerics who only used the coffee to keep them awake during religious ceremonies which are called zik during these ceremonies they invoke the name of god many many times it's kind of like a chant and they do this they would drink the coffee to stay awake now because this was going on in cairo and the turks were in power and cairo they said wait a minute you know this drink doesn't have anything to do with religion we can we can have the drink and we can introduce it to everybody and all of a sudden coffee houses started springing up so there were 650 coffee houses in cairo alone before europe ever even knew about coffee the turks took the coffee and said we're going to introduce it to europe as the wine of the arabs because just like the wine is used viewed as a sacrament in the church the coffee was being used in the mosques so they did that they introduced it as the wine of the arabs and it caught on and the coffee became popular ever since now egyptian goods as a whole were coveted in europe not just the coffee um and they were very very important egyptian rugs any type of even turkish or ottoman product anything that looked like it had a turkish or an arabic script on it sold very very well on the european markets so much so that there were counterfeit fitters that would just make kind of scribbles and for people who didn't know the difference or couldn't read arabic would buy them paying more money thinking that they came from the middle east but this is a this is a statue in rome in the piazza del minerva which is by the church uh santa maria sopra minerva minerva is the name of the roman goddess who is actually isis as i mentioned aphrodite isis they would fuse their gods and goddesses well they fused also in rome so they had the same goddess but they called her minerva and the reason why this church is called sopra minerva is because it's on top of minerva so you have and you have this all over europe and especially in rome many christian churches built on top of what were once egyptian temples so this was one of those places and bernini the sculptor bernini in the 17th century made this statue with an egyptian obelisk on it and on the bottom he put an elephant and people asked him you know why did you put the elephant on the obelisk and he said because it would take an elephant to support the weight of the egyptian knowledge so someone even as as important as an impressive as bernini was really looking towards the egyptians in 1798 napoleon invaded he was only there for three years and of course a lot of lives were lost but it was very important because napoleon started a lot of trends which are still popular now today in egypt this is his favorite dish called fatta which is a lamb dish with very different from the fatta in the levant which is made with yogurt but this has some leftover bread and toasted bread and egyptian rice and a spicy tomato garlic sauce it's a wonderful recipe and they say that this was his favorite when he was there napoleon is believed to be the father of all egyptologists because what he did was he hired scores of scribes to come with him and to record everything they saw from the ancient history to the botany to the temperature to the the animals and what was going on in the cuisine and he recorded them all into 21 different volumes that he called the description and then he sold these in paris and you can see they have his commission and up until very recently these were on uh view at the hesh museum which is in uh new york city so people could actually go and see these and it was really really uh very very amazing to be able to see that he had this impressive thing on his um on his with his name on it so now it has one volume and we believe that because he studied ancient egyptian history he's the father of egyptologist because nobody had done this before him then came muhammad ali in the 19th century he was an albanian leader in the ottoman army that he became the ruler of egypt and the father we believe of modern egypt because he introduced the rail systems free public education and a lot of wonderful things this is his namesake mosque in cairo where his mausoleum is but you can see it actually looks very much like the turkish mosque because he was introducing a lot of turkish elements as well my favorite thing that he did was to introduce the mangoes from india because egyptian mangoes really really are superior i'm i've become a mango snobs thanks to my time in egypt and i will not eat mangoes anywhere else they're really wonderful and they came from egypt and i'm sorry from india and they did very very well on the egyptian soil the other thing that came from india is kushiri which i like to call kushiri cairo in a cup because it has layers of rice a spicy tomato sauce chickpeas lentils fried onions on top so it has elements and ingredients from pretty much every single place in history and it's very very common and it's a street food so you can get it anywhere and it's very tasty it just it evokes cairo to me then in 1869 with the invention of the suez canal it was very very easy to get more trading into egypt and so tea became something that was introduced more and more and tea quickly surpassed coffee and became pretty much the national drink of egypt in 20th century we see a lot of european style cafes being opened up and in 1922 when carter discovered king tut's tomb as i mentioned because napoleon was bringing a lot of europeans in and kind of talking about egyptology and this kind of thing and now you have people excavating and finding things you all of a sudden have this foreign community this expat community in egypt that needs places to eat and restaurants were not part of the local egyptian community so the only way that you could really eat would be either to have someone bring you food or would be to go into someone's home and that culturally that might have not always been appropriate especially in a lot of the rural areas in southern egypt where they were doing the excavations so now there is a need for restaurants so you see kind of home-style dining in southern rural egypt where people are sitting they still do this today spreading tables cloths on the floor and sitting down and eating this way and then you see hotel in this type of like foreign restaurant dining there was no arabic model for restaurants so they had to go to the west and bring that in and incorporate that into egypt nowadays we're seeing a lot of times there are more local restaurants that are incorporating a lot of the different folkloric elements this is a restaurant right on the nile which i used to consult for and when they started they had a completely western uh menu it was like roast beef uh you know grilled chicken breasts things like that and it was specifically to cater to foreigners and then little by little we were able to incorporate an egyptian menu and to translate that uh for things that taurus would like and this is oh this is a picture from making the fatir that i mentioned earlier in that video so this is actually how it's made um you can go onto youtube and check that out in conclusion here are a few modern dishes again with ancient egyptian roots we see the paella the result biscotti and birthday cake and i'd just like to say a little bit about agriculture in egypt this is something a quote that was said by an economist from egypt's agricultural economics research institute and he said a country's agricultural sector is a vital characteristic of its strength and that it symbolizes a nation's ability to sustain life and we could look here and see where agriculture was in 2010 20 of the egyptian economy now we talked about antiquity when it was pretty much 100 of the egyptian economy we know how well they did that then we see the projected sector of 7.1 by 2030. so this is really an era of area of focus and something that economists and people in the tourism industry in the food industry and the agricultural industry and politics really need to take into consideration as we move forward in egypt because as we can see agriculture is really synonymous with success and i was able to spend a lot of time in egypt during the revolution and after the revolution and i can see kind of this impact and um seeing all of these different wonderful examples of the agriculture that has to offer and the systems that it has i think it's very important that we preserve them as a whole as well as the recipes and the cultural traditions in order to move egyptian cuisine and culture forward thank you all very much for coming and i'd love to take questions comments does sharia law have anything to say about diet or cooking oh yes great question the question is does sharia law or islamic law have anything to say about diet or cooking we could do an entire semester on that topic and i've covered some of it in raven delights and some of it in nile style especially for newcomers and there's another lecture that i did here two years ago called cuisine and culture of the arab world where i touched a little bit more heavily on that very very important this is uh the main way of understanding it the way that i look in in very simple terms in prior to the seventh century there are a lot of natural ingredients and a lot of traditional medicinals that were being used when islam came into into place they kind of highlighted them because there were a lot of what is called hadith or sayings of the prophet muhammad that were that were revealed specifically to talk about ingredients like honey uh there's another ingredient called habitual barakah or which that means the blessed seed in arabic but in english we call it nigella seed or the black seed sometimes they call it black cumin but that's not correct so this seed the prophet muhammad said eat of this seed because in it there's a cure for everything except death so to this day you can go to a middle eastern supermarket and you'll find tonics made out of habitat cough syrup things like that they do many things with it and i was talking about this once at the university of alexandria in egypt giving a lecture and a doctor from al-assad came up to me after he said you know amy please don't mention the habit of barakah again i said why he said because there are 21 different varieties we don't know which one the prophet was talking about and people in the world are going to laugh at us if they don't get cured from illnesses so just don't mention that to anybody so that's one little example of one ingredient but there are also examples like you should never lay down after you're eating you should always sit while you're eating you always eat with your right hand you always wash your hands before you eat so it's it's much more than just ingredients or health it's a spiritual satisfaction it's the way you're grateful for food and um really really beautiful traditions there's uh i believe a book called natural i might get the name wrong but it's similar to natural medicines of the prophet that tells many of them and you can get them online there's an islamic bookstore in baltimore that's that's online and you can you can find volumes written on this topic it's very fascinating and and many of them have been proven to be true wonderful question yes thank you for a wonderful presentation when someone cooks right of course yeah so the question is the phrase to islamidiki or bless your hands whenever someone offers you something in egypt you the usual response is to say bless your hands and even today when we were getting started dr muhammad gave me a glass of water and i said to him tesla medici because it's just something nice if someone offers you something you should bless their hands and it's it's such a beautiful tradition once you get used to it even if you can't say it because it doesn't make sense at a different culture usually i think it because it's very very beautiful and this this is uh born out of that culture because um in a lot of ancient cultures they appreciated food more than we do nowadays so because food was part of hospitality because food was part of culture i would i would guess that this dated back to the veterans yes wonderful comment any other questions yes oh great question i love to talk about that what are the most common types of oils in egypt um this is a this is a big misnomer and people just have no clue so that's why i love to talk about it um oils in terms of fats there are many the first one and the most important kind of uh historically would be what we call samna or aged clarified butter which in indian and in america we know it as ghee this is a very very important fact what they do is they take butter they skim the the fat off the top they clarify it then they pour it through cheesecloth which removes all of the fat impurities and just leaves that pure solid yellow butter and then they age it they close it in a jar and leave it for like a month this has a really deep flavor so when you cook onions or meat or spices it's very very fragrant and that would be a traditional thing that people would use and many women even today housewives make it at home other than that olive oil because they have wonderful olives in egypt especially the siwa oasis they do not get the world recognition that they deserve but egyptian olive oil if you can get it is very very wonderful that's one unfortunately because of distribution uh ways it's more common in egypt to get an oil from another country than it is to get the one that comes right from egypt but hopefully that will be changing um on the on your list there you have some some different ways to stay in touch on facebook i have a group called nile style egyptian cuisine and culture and three days ago i talked about a chef colleague of mine who's the head of the looks or chef association who's working on preserving the egyptian olive oils having said that the most common oil nowadays unfortunately is corn oil and that's because it's cheap there's a lot of corn being grown and we see corn oil being used instead of samna and instead of uh or ghee or instead of olive oil in many places and in nile style every time i mention corn oil i say expeller pressed corn oil people ask me why well in this country when you when you get corn oil if it's not expel or press they use heat methods and when they use those heating methods uh one of the chemicals that's involved in that is hexane which is actually a dry cleaner chemical so the only way you can avoid that is if you get an expeller pressed vegetable oil corn oil whatever and and that's what i recommend it's good because it doesn't have flavor it won't impart a different flavor on your dish but if you want a real egyptian dish for cold dishes i would say use olive oil for hot dishes i would say use the samna or the ghee and they have different kinds of ghee you can get the ghee with buffalo milk you can get it with cow milk you could get a vegan ghee i like the buffalo milk and if you think about it actually the italians got the buffalo in antiquity like that they make the buffalo masala with from egypt just how that buffalo has that wonderful rich flavor more than the milk from the cow so does the ghee but if you can't find it the regular cow one is good too that's a great question thank you anyone else no well thank you all for your patience and for listening to me i really appreciate your attention thank you this has been a presentation of the library of congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 12,916

Rating: 4.7910447 out of 5

Keywords: Library of Congress, Egyptian Cuisine

Id: wl2GQAUG5o4

Length: 65min 11sec (3911 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 27 2014