cooking with gaul

My book Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato is now available to preorder.

Much of the history of the tomato in Egypt — the subject of Nile Nightshade, my forthcoming book — is oriented north and east.

Blog posts have been few and far between over the past year or two as I’ve devoted most of my spare time to writing a book on the history of the tomato in Egypt (which is on schedule to be published sometime in 2025!).

If you read this blog, you probably know the numbers already.

My favorite thing about this cookie is that it’s a sweet, bite-sized Arabic lesson: it’s spelled the same in every country in formal Arabic (fus7a/العربية الفصحى) and it’s a nice example of a diminutive form (a “little” so-and-so).

The persistent prestige of French cuisine in today’s food cultures is hard to ignore.

At the end of 2021 I had the privilege of interviewing Anas Atassi, author of Sumac: Recipes and Stories from Syria, for Radical Books Collective event titled “Gastropolitics, Gastropoetics.”

It’s been a while, but here I am.

I ate my first bowl of koshari in 2013, and ever since I’ve been collecting bits and pieces of its eclectic history.

I have been baking a lot lately (original, I know).

Since graduating from college I’ve moved, on average, more than once a year.

The latest edition of Rawi, Egypt’s glossy, impeccably designed heritage review, just came out––and it was all about food.

For me, this was the drink of 2019: I made this sweet-and sour mocktail throughout the year for friends in Rabat, Cairo, Washington, and Charlotte.

It’s been happening again.

Earlier this year I wrote an essay for The Recipes Project about the forerunners to today’s hummus, based on a group of recipes in a fourteenth-century Egyptian cookbook – recently brilliantly edited and translated by Nawal Nasrallah.