“Nile Nightshade” Book Talk with Anny Gaul

By the end of the twentieth century, the tomato—indigenous to the Americas—had become Egypt’s top horticultural crop and a staple of Egyptian cuisine. The tomato brought together domestic consumers, cookbook readers, and home cooks through a shared culinary culture that sometimes transcended differences of class, region, gender, and ethnicity—and sometimes reinforced them.

In Nile Nightshade, Anny Gaul shows how Egyptians’ embrace of the tomato and the emergence of Egypt’s modern national identity were both driven by the modernization of the country’s food system. Drawing from cookbooks, archival materials, oral histories, and vernacular culture, Gaul follows this commonplace food into the realms of domestic policy and labor through the hands of Egypt’s overwhelmingly female home cooks. As they wrote recipes and cooked meals, these women forged key aspects of public culture that defined how Egyptians recognized themselves and one another as Egyptian.

Anny Gaul is a cultural historian whose research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of food, gender, and culture in the Arabic-speaking world, and an assistant professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research and writing begin with the premise that if we take culinary knowledge seriously in all its forms (written, oral, embodied) it can offer us new ways of understanding the world.

In discussion with: Hanna Garth

This event is organized by Timothy Loh, Cotsen Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and Anthropology at Princeton University, as part of a Humanities Council Magic Project. Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Princeton Food Program, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and Labyrinth Books.