The NYT discovers Moroccan honey. Skip the boilerplate travel-writing imagery and take heed, Moroccan honey is great. Especially if spread on a buttered gheif (the much better Moroccan equivalent of Egyptian feteer.)
Well, that’s my culinary nationalism post of the day done. Also, one of the most beautiful books you could ever read on Fez, or on Sufi Islam for that matter, is Titus Burckhardt’s amazing Fez: City of Islam. Below: detail from a public fountain in Fez.
A pox on you and all these travel writers who talk about inaccessible yummies.
That picture looks very psycadelic doesn’t it?:-) The association of the subject with Sufism is manifested, you can say.
The honey is the best! And you know what else I miss? The clementines. I would buy them by the kilo…
Mate, any food is better than Egyptian.
Oddly I never cared for the honey.
Sufism in Morocco, by the way, re Seneferu, isn’t terribly psychedlic by nature.
Dude, after some Moroccan hash everything is psychedelic, even if you think that Moroccan Sufism isn’t so “by nature.” (Vincent Crapanzano would beg to differ, I believe)
More importantly, is any of this fabulous Moroccan honey exported to the US? Any brands that you guys recommend?
I’ve heard that some people mix the hash in their honey. Or the pollen of the plant actually.
I don’t know about the availability of this stuff in the US because the really good stuff is not really produced industrially, it probably doesn’t meet US or EU health standards. But big expensive cities will probably have ethnic food stores that will have something.
Ya akhi Lounsbury,
Tell me about it. A few years ago I was having dinner in Rabat with a bunch of Moroccans including the historian Halima Ferhat, who was working on book on the history of Middle Eastern culinary traditions. We talked about Egypt’s complete lack of decent “high cuisine” and could not find an explanation for it in a region that has tons of nice foods, notably from the Ottomans. I still lean towards a theory based on the social divide between foreign (Turkish) aristocrats and a mostly poor peasant local population.
Still love fuul bil bei wa zeit harr in the morning, though.
Ah, theorising about the Lack of a Real Egyptian Cuisine…my favourite pastime. There’s something to be said for the lack of court culture, but interestingly, shaabi food tends to be much better than elite food, and more spicy. It’s like the Egyptians only learned the blandest stuff from their colonisers, like sharkasiyya and that awful firakh bane. Perhaps it’s because Md Ali & Co were wimpy Albanians with bland Balkan tastes, and not proper Turks, or insufficiently Turkicised??
eh-ahem- more skewed reporting… i turned a blind eye initially but things have gotten out of hand….
The fact that you people don’t appreciate today’s ‘egyptian cuisine’ is probably because you’re foreign and so haven’t had a good home cooked meal by mamma or you don’t know the right places to eat out.
puhlease. Egyptian fiteer is by far the most superior. One place. El dawa, share3 lebnan, mohandeseen. eat and weep at how tasteless your gheifs are! (taxi not car as it’s right next to habib Ib. el adly’s pad, i think – whoever, there’s no parking)
True egyptian cuisine might only consist of the delectable fool and molokhia, but the mixed bag that egyptian cuisine is today is delicious.. from mahshi everything to fiteer- you just have to know where to eat!
Rania, with all due respect – I adore good Egyptian foul (Tarek Mahrous!) and kebda iskandrani (Gad!) and firakh mashwi and fiteer and Alexandrian fish (Samakmak!), but in terms of variety and overall quality, Egyptian food simply can’t compare to the good Lebanese stuff, and Moroccan is just miles ahead. Sorry. I love Egypt and everything about it, and I’ve had a few good home-cooked meals, but it’s not enough to put Egyptian in the same league as Moroccan. Y’all need to put garlic and lemon in everything the way you do with the fish.
If you have suggestions for restaurants that could change the collective sceptical mind, please let us know!
My God, Sp…I don’t mean to yank your chain (well Rania already answered you so I am yanking it a little:) but don’t you find what you are saying about the lack of real Egyptian quisine vis-a-vis its colonisers to be the least bit offensive?
Khod yabni el ol2aas massalan. If your definition of high quisine is by the tediousness of the culinary tasks invloved…there’s a long process involved in making that one.
And what is high and what is low anyway? What you buy in Istanbul as neatly packed “Turkish delights” are more of a shaabi Egyptian sweet in Cairo (and btw, they are not necessarily Turkish given their name). Maybe if we colonized Turkey you would be raving about the servings in Turkey’s finest hotels of our delicious Egyptian kishk. Right?:D
Ok sorry for yanking your chain.
Ya ‘amm….Lebanon and Morocco did not colonise Egypt…but they have better food. It’s not a question of high versus low cuisine, and for what it’s worth, I think the Turks did a lousy job of colonising anyway, in the culinary realm above all (witness the fact that shaabi food is better than elite food). The point I was making is that it’s a shame that Egyptian “high cuisine” is so bland, and tediousness of tasks notwithstanding, it’s a surprise that with access to every possible kind of vegetable and spice, Egyptian food isn’t as varied and complex as the other good cuisines in the region. It was Issandr who was complaining about insufficient Ottomanisation of Egyptian food, so you can go yell at him now.
La I’m only joking with you, no yelling involved.
Sorry to the Egyptians out there, and maybe it has nothing to do with the Ottomans, but even in households eating Mama’s food I find Egyptian food generally disappointing. Now, I love fuul, I eat it several times a week in the morning from carts, at Tarek Mahrous in Garden City, at Gad, at Gahsh, and elsewhere. Mohammed Ahmed in Alex is a pilgrimage site for me. I like koshari, which even many Egyptians I know think is an awful dish.
But my prejudice against Egyptian food more generally, and the tagens especially, is not so much a khawaga one as a non-Egyptian Arab one: the Lebanese, Syrians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians, etc. I’ve met all think Egyptian food is almost inedible. Seriously. And SP’s point is true: how come the country with probably the most fertile land in the world, with the possibility to grow virtually anything, has a range of ingredients that seems so limited?
Anyway, sorry to the Egyptians I’ve offended – but I’m not the only one who feels this way.
come on, comparing egyptian food to lebanese cuisine is a bit unfair. Any food compared to lebanese cuisine is going to come out looking bad. My point was that egyptian food is better than most taste wise and nutrition wise.
the best place to eat egyptian food is at someone’s home. All ‘egyptian’ food like mahashi etc is not restaurant fare. So to alleviate this collective scepticism, seneferu has agreed to have you round his/her place. thanks seneferu!
That aside, some good eats:
abu sid- zamalek/ mohandeseen- the closest you can get in a restaurant to decent mamma cooked food.
kadoora, gam3et el dawal- fish
el gahsh, el madbah
abu sha’ra, gam’et el dawal- decent kebab
koshari el tahrir, tal3aat harb for the best koshari
tab3i, gam3et el dowal
abu ramy el madbah- decent kebabs
none taken issandr 🙂
Rania – agree with you on all those places (except for Abu Ramy, which I haven’t tried). The best mahshi I’ve had was made by the amazing mother of one of our very talented journalists (hmm…maybe we need to swap recipes). Best stuffed hamam was in the special pigeon place in Khan el-Khalili.
I’d have to see what this “most” you’re referring to is, when you say Egyptian food is better than “most,” though 😉 German? Polish?
there was me thinking you eat at fluffy places like ‘aubergine’. Well, I’m glad we at least agree on something
i classify ‘most’ as being 75% so keep going- just don’t include french, lebanese, syrian or indian 🙂
Aubergine is lousy. Shaabi is way better in Cairo. I’ll have to try the fiteer place you mentioned. Is the Kadoura in Cairo as good as the one in Alex?
“Most” of the world includes France, Italy, China, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico, Lebanon…all have great cuisines…sorry Rania :p
This is becoming quite the culinary drop in…..
Get you! I have never tried kadoora in alex. This ain’t right, khawagas beating us at our own gluttonous game.
You don’t mean what you typed above, read it again 😛
The point is SP, it’s a matter of tastes and conditioning. The average Egyptian will be put off by most of the foods of the countries you mentioned, and will consider the rest to be unreal, as in sissy or unsatisfactory, meals.