6p to 8p
Join us for a very special evening in celebration of Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato. Today, the tomato is a cornerstone of Egypt's cuisine. But its integration into the country's fields, markets, and kitchens is surprisingly recent. Nile Nightshade uses the tomato to retell the history of modern Egypt from a new perspective.
Author Anny Gaul with be joined in discussion with poet and translator Yasmine Seale on all things tomato! Expect good conversation, a Q + A, a book signing, and some mingling...
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About the book:
A cultural and culinary history of modern Egypt through the nation's beloved tomato.
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 food historian whose research focuses on the Arabic-speaking world. Her food writing has appeared in Eater and ArabLit Quarterly and her scholarship has been published in Gastronomica, Global Food History, and numerous other scholarly journals. She is also the co-editor of Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean, a collection of essays and recipes. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbright Program, among others, and commended by the Sophie Coe Prize. She teaches at the University of Maryland, College Park and blogs at Cooking with Gaul.
YASMINE SEALE ◤ is a poet, critic and translator. Her translations from the Arabic include The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton, 2021). She lives between Paris and New York, where she is a Visiting Professor at Columbia University.