Shelf Life Page 6
Beginning in the 1940s, Abla Nazeera was a recurring voice on Egyptian radio. Between 1941 and 1952, she coauthored six textbooks on cooking and home economics. In 1973, she was honored for her work in the field of women’s education, receiving a medal commemorating the opening of the first state school for girls one hundred years earlier, in 1873. By the time she passed away in 1992, at the age of ninety, she was a household icon whose influence spanned generations.
Hind stocked Abla Nazeera in her cookery section. Written in classical Arabic, the book’s florid language was only lightly adorned with sparse illustrations. I scoured lists and databases for an English edition, but none existed. I asked Amir, Hind’s assistant (and a future book buyer of ours), to find one for me, hoping that a local publisher had translated it. In the world of Arabic publishing in the early 2000s, databases were like genies: we’d all heard of them and we would have welcomed their presence in our lives, but we were under no illusion as to the likelihood of that happening.
“Is this book for Diwan, or for you personally?” Amir asked, puzzled.
“Both. Why?”
“I can’t picture you with an apron, standing at the stove, ya Ustazah.” He was right. At that point in my life, my cooking repertoire consisted of boiled and scrambled eggs, and baking was as stressful as a visit from the tax inspector. Number One, an American, made unforgettable lasagna. When we married, his mother, a resident of South Carolina, an ardent golfer, and president of the gardening club, had given me a corrective gift: Joy of Cooking. I didn’t know how to respond to her careful penmanship on the inside flap of the red-and-white book jacket: “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” I didn’t tell her that this was not my preferred route. Instead, I joked about her image of me as the Angel in the House: in a sweet apron, perhaps broderie anglaise or gingham, with coiffed curls. I suppressed my urge to give her an accompanying head tilt.
In 1999, three years into my marriage, Hind returned from a trip to London with a copy of a newly released cookbook by Jamie Oliver. (Little did I know then how much angst this particular chef’s metaphoric nudity would cause me after we started Diwan.) Books like that one—English, nonessential, frivolous—would never have been found in Cairo’s existing bookshops. Before Diwan, no one thought they had a market. And there was no market. Jamie Oliver whacked and whizzed his way into my life with his noisy shirts and schoolboy enthusiasm over a glug of balsamic vinegar and a dollop of ricotta. He discarded the exacting measurements of liters and teaspoons in favor of smidgens, bunches, and handfuls. He gave me the confidence to enter the kitchen and claim it as my own, a feat I wouldn’t have dared attempt in my premarital home.
* * *
Growing up, Hind and I had a nanny named Fatma. She was diabetic, dictatorial, fiercely traditional, and kind. She lived in the neighborhood of al-Matariya, north of the well-to-do suburb of Heliopolis and south of El Marg, bordering the governorate of Qalyubia. During the day, though, our kitchen was her domain. Once, Hind and I visited her home and played football with her son on the roof of their modest apartment building. Afterward, when Fatma fed us kofta for lunch, I asked for ketchup, and her husband asked what that was. The roads to the house weren’t paved, but they were spacious and clean—Cairo’s streets hadn’t yet succumbed to the disarray of overpopulation and the absence of basic government services. The discrepancies between our lifestyles were not so pronounced. Today, very few people allow their children to play with the offspring of their domestic staff. The divides have exceeded the commonalities.
As Hind and I grew older and no longer needed a nanny, Fatma became our cook, and a far more intimidating version of herself. My mother trained her in a repertoire of recipes until she was an expert. My father, on occasion, would venture into the kitchen and cook his favorites. But his more essential role lay in the procurement of ingredients. Throughout my childhood, I shopped with my parents at the different stalls on 26th of July Street. Our modest interactions with vendors and patrons deepened into lasting personal relationships. My father bought his meat from Bolbol, the butcher, who seemed related to Fares, the fishmonger, who manned the shop next to him. “Bolbol” is usually a nickname for Nabil, though I never learned his real name. He could carry conversations in French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish. It was rumored that he owned a villa in the South of France. They always greeted each other: Bolbol addressed my father as king; my father reciprocated, calling him basha. My father would plant himself behind the counter and sort through different cuts. He didn’t mind that the cuff of his handmade shirts got soiled with blood. They discussed their meat in code. “Without any writing,” my father would insist, meaning that any white tendons should be knifed out. Bolbol would give his knowing smile. As he got to work, my father would stand next to him, peering over his shoulder, overseeing the cleaning and the trimming. He was unable to delegate this particular task to my mother, who would rather call Bolbol and instruct him to deliver the cuts on her list. My father never trusted meat that he didn’t select in person. He tolerated my mother ordering fruits and vegetables by phone, though he always chided her for not picking them out from the stalls. Looking back, I realize that my father was the first demanding customer I knew: the man who taught me to nudge, barter, and interrogate his vendors without degrading them.
After visiting the shops, my father would bring the goods back to Fatma, who continued to cook for our family for decades. When her husband died and her son got married, she gave him their family home and moved in with us, cementing her status as a part of our family. Her son would come to visit her, eat lunch at our kitchen table, and collect her salary. Fatma’s brother was my parents’ driver. Like Fatma, he was illiterate. Unlike Fatma, he smoked hashish cigarettes. When Fatma’s eyes failed her, my parents suggested that ‘Am Beshir, our sofragi (a household assistant who handles general upkeep), cook under her pedagogy.
‘Am Beshir was Nubian, a short and bent man with a mizzle of hair. I remember him as old and defeated, throwing his head back to drain the last drops of booze from any glass before depositing it in the sink. He had four sons, an ailing mother who promised to leave this life but never did, a wife who bullied him, and more grandchildren than he cared to count. Fatma instructed him on the prep work of washing and chopping. My mother was fascinated by Fatma’s ability to get others to do her bidding. My father loved cooking and being in the kitchen. Fatma, conscious of the source of her power, guarded the space like a fortress. My mother and ‘Am Beshir, who shared a quiet resilience, did nothing until the conflict resolved itself eventually. When Fatma passed away, my father bossed around ‘Am Beshir as Fatma once had. When my father died, my mother replaced him as chief order issuer. Though Hind and I were unaware of these hierarchies, we instinctively avoided the family kitchen throughout our childhood. Hind, who shared my father’s love of cooking and my mother’s patience and tenacity, would reenter the kitchen in her forties—as a student at Le Cordon Bleu in London.
* * *
Around the mid-2000s, family cooks and grandmothers began to be replaced by celebrity chefs, the stars of Egypt’s newly hatched satellite television channels. These chefs spawned a flurry of cookbooks, written in informal Arabic, with styled photographs. In their wake, Hind’s Arabic cookery section began to resemble my English one. Culinary power emanated from these famous cooks; readers trusted their qualifications without question. In their author photographs, as well as on their cooking shows, the male chefs posed in professional kitchens, donning the traditional toque blanche and white double-breasted jacket. The female cooks didn’t wear uniforms and were often photographed with their hair done, heavily made up, with an accompanying head tilt meant to conjure domestic bliss. Interestingly, because their shows aired on satellite channels, they extended their repertoires to encompass regional dishes to cater to a wider audience, just as Claudia Roden had done decades earlier with her cookbooks.
Next, the Egyptian restaurant cookbook arrived in Cairo, and in
Diwan, delayed by the centrality of the home in food culture. In 2013, a restaurant located down the block from Diwan chronicled its recipes in Authentic Egyptian Cooking: From the Table of Abou El Sid. The following year brought Cairo Kitchen Cookbook: Recipes from the Middle East Inspired by the Street Food of Cairo. These were not translated into Arabic, because their target audience was never the mainstream local book market. Still, English-speaking Egyptians bought them out of a sense of pride, or, as I believed, a mixture of nationalism and narcissism. Internationally, these cookbooks corresponded with a burgeoning trend toward “fusion,” commercializing and combining local tastes for global markets.
* * *
Diwan’s cookery section underlined a simple fact, gleaned over years of observing Fatma, my parents, and Hind: in Egypt, food is about much more than eating. In the kitchen of our office, clusters of staff members, depending on status and background, breakfasted together, chipping in to buy a selection of bread, cheese, olives, and fuul and taamiya sandwiches. They joked that lo’ma haneya tekafi meyya: a kind bite is enough to feed a hundred people.
* * *
The ancient Egyptians buried their dead with food to sustain them during the afterlife, and high-ranking officials received more lavish provisions.
* * *
In 1977, the Sadat regime removed subsidies on basic foods; bread riots ensued, Egyptians took to the streets in protest. The government immediately reinstated subsidies.
* * *
Food unites families: the highlight of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, is breaking the fast with relatives and friends at sundown. At the end of these evenings, guests wish their hosts many more meals, “Sofra dayma.” Hosts respond with hopes for many more years of life, “Damit hayatkom.”
* * *
Food affirms, or disrupts, marital bliss: a couple’s decision on whether to have their customary Friday lunch with the wife’s or husband’s family is a familiar conflict. Nihal always diagnosed incompatible couples by saying that each came from a different dining table.
* * *
When my father died, friends and relatives, as dictated by tradition, cooked the lunch that took place after the burial. The day after his death, Bolbol sent over his preferred cut as a tribute: without writing.
* * *
Food, cooks, and eating were among the preferred subjects of Egyptian proverbs, which were the preferred vehicles for spreading wisdom across generations. On being once burned, twice shy: he who burns his tongue from soup will blow into yogurt to cool it. On hospitality as friendship: an onion offered with love is as satisfying as a leg of lamb. On karma: one who cooks poison tastes it. On striking first: eat him for lunch before he eats you for dinner. On the importance of a warm welcome: a heartfelt greeting is better than lunch. On one who forgets the kindness of others: he eats and denies.
* * *
Recipes, like popular sayings, were passed on without writing. As older generations passed away and younger relatives rejected culinary traditions, these recipes were forgotten. The few women who were granted the opportunity to transcribe what they knew remained fairly niche, like Abla Nazeera and her Principles of Cooking. Her influence on successive generations transformed the culinary industry, but she’s rarely credited for having done so. Somehow, her words and her legacy remain confined to the realm of the kitchen, fodder for housewives undeterred by her demanding, labor-intensive recipes.
Fatma was illiterate and memorized recipes. She had no use for measuring cups, preferring to rely on her senses. Her power in our kitchen, and in our home, came from the elusive nature of her knowledge. My mother’s friend spared no detail but withheld one ingredient to guarantee her dominion. Each of these elisions relates to power: granting it, securing it, protecting it. In a country with a tendency for censorship, there’s a peculiar irony, and subversion, inherent to keeping secrets—if you don’t transcribe a record, it can’t be destroyed.
* * *
It was a cookbook that took me to the censor’s bureau. On a molten Sunday morning in the summer of 2004, when I considered myself well-read but not well-versed in life, I received an angst-ridden call from our freight forwarders. In the two years since the inception of Diwan, we had been exposed to situations that we never anticipated would accompany our relatively docile career of bookselling. In the making of Diwan, Hind, Nihal, and I remade ourselves. Immigrants new to the land of business, we quickly realized that if Diwan was going to survive, we would have to adapt to our new world. We all understood that we depended upon a shared ecosystem of support and strength. This was especially true in the more alienating settings, like business, bureaucracy, and government: structures we would come to know well.
As Diwan’s sales had grown and our readers’ tastes had expanded, so had our import of books from abroad. According to the freight forwarder, one of our shipments from the United Kingdom had been delayed in customs because it contained titles deemed offensive to “public morals.” The person responsible for the shipment—me—was asked to visit the Mogamma’, the main government administration building, in Tahrir Square (where, seven years later, the Egyptian revolution would unfold).
The request prompted me to visit my lawyer, Dr. Mohamed, for advice.
“Ustazah, there is nothing to fear. They just want to get to know you. Diwan’s reputation has grown in just two years. Your path was bound to cross with the censor’s. Think of it as a dog sniffing someone visiting his master’s house,” he said, trying to pacify me.
“I’m uncomfortable with what I do not comprehend and cannot navigate.” (My formality here is purposeful—it’s general practice to maintain this kind of decorum when speaking to male “authority figures.”)
“Then your stay on this earth will be a troubled one. Trust in the will of God.” He asked Adham, a junior partner from his office, to accompany me on this “friendly” visit to the censor.
President Mubarak was proud that under his governance, Egypt was a country free from censorship. This meant that we were permitted to speak or act as we chose, provided it was within the law. As law-abiding citizens, we knew that it was illegal to say, write, or print anything that offended public morals, threatened national unity or the social order, or tarnished Egypt’s reputation in the foreign press. Violating these rules could result in imprisonment, payment of fines, or the suspension of licenses. Mubarak ran our lives, and our homeland, under the guidance of a tried-and-tested Egyptian proverb: strike at the shackled and the free shall be deterred.
In 2008, the opposition journalist Ibrahim Eissa was sentenced to two months in prison on charges of offending the president after writing about Mubarak’s ailing health. Civil lawsuits were filed against him, and the issue received substantial media coverage. Mubarak eventually pardoned him. As a respected and influential member of the fourth estate, Eissa was never going to jail. It was a performance meant to remind everyday citizens of the government’s power to punish. I used to think that the arbitrary ways laws were enforced, and the opacity of the laws themselves, were accidental. But after almost two decades of conducting business in Egypt, I know it’s by design. The pervasive uncertainty and endless delays are tools for control. You watch from a distance, knowing that one day, your turn will come. Until then, you surrender to panoptic self-censorship, measuring your words.
* * *
My driver, Samir, was a seasoned navigator of Cairo’s chaos—on the day I was scheduled to visit the censor, he zipped through the packed streets of Mohandiseen. Calls to prayer, emanating from towering minarets, echoed around the city. They didn’t deter Samir from pelting the occasional choice word or phrase through the rolled-down window. These ranged from “You donkey!” to “Ya Khawal!” to my personal favorite, “You are lower than a razor blade strewn on the ground.” Samir’s deepest contempt was for the microbus drivers who were known to drive under the influence of any drug that would numb them out of existence. I didn’t notice a difference between the microbus operators’ hash-fueled d
isregard for human life and other drivers’, mine included.
This disregard extended to pedestrians. I yelped as a man sprang out of nowhere and hurtled through the traffic to cross the street. Samir barely missed him. Cairo doesn’t have crosswalks, so pedestrians need Olympian skill to survive, let alone get anywhere: jumping onto moving buses, making space for more passengers, and then disembarking in the midst of other vehicles in full motion. Traffic lights flash one thing; traffic police officers dotting the intersections signal another. Chaos. We used the streets for protest, whether collective or individual: our disregard for traffic rules was a kind of civil disobedience, as was our creative relationship to bureaucracy.
Samir was one year older than me. I joked to friends that aside from my father, he was the only man who’d ever been useful to me. For me and many others in my socioeconomic cluster, having a driver in Cairo was essential. In Egypt, a deeply classist society, the differences between how people live are irreconcilable. Samir paid my bills: phone, electricity, water, and land tax. He renewed licenses and memberships. He dealt with government offices. All these responsibilities involved fan-shaped lines and delicate ecosystems of personal relationships. Since I spent most of my time working, Samir had become my replacement: he completed my to-do list; he got my groceries; he haggled with Bolbol the butcher; he dropped off my ironing at Akram’s shack on the other side of Zamalek and arranged for it to be delivered when he knew I would finally be home. If I didn’t answer my phone because I was in a meeting, my mother would call Samir, and he’d give her my schedule for the day. On the mornings I started work before eight thirty, he drove my daughters to preschool, bought them chips against my wishes, and ensured they didn’t leave their lunch boxes in the car.