The best dinner guests leave you lingering at the table long after dessert has disappeared.
Not because they’re telling the loudest stories, but because every conversation seems to open the door to another. An anecdote becomes a history lesson. A memory becomes a map. A passing observation suddenly reveals something larger about the world around you.
Suzanne Zeidy and Rawah Badrawi possess that rare quality. Spending time with them feels less like an interview and more like being welcomed into an ongoing conversation, one that has been unfolding between friends for decades and now finds its way onto the pages of Egypt: Recipes & Stories from an Ancient Land.
The longtime friends and co-authors speak with the easy rhythm of people who know each other’s stories almost as well as their own. One memory triggers another. Alexandria leads to Siwa. A discussion about food becomes a reflection on migration, identity and belonging. Before long, you realise that this is precisely what their forthcoming book does, too.
Set for release on September 8, the 420-page volume journeys across 14 Egyptian cities and towns, moving through landscapes rather than regions: Sea, Desert, River, Mountain and Cairo. At first glance, it is a cookbook. Spend a little longer with it, however, and it reveals itself to be something far richer. A portrait of Egypt told through the people, traditions and histories that continue to shape it.
What emerges is not simply a collection of recipes, but a cultural archive. Across its pages are monks, matriarchs, Bedouins, Nubians, farmers, fishermen and community elders; stories that might otherwise remain within family homes and local communities. The book’s remarkable scope feels ambitious, but never overwhelming. Instead, it invites readers to pull up a chair and stay awhile.
THE SPARK
Like many meaningful projects, this one began over lunch.
Zeidy, whose career has spanned restaurants, publishing and Egypt‘s contemporary food scene, had long been considering a return to bookmaking. Badrawi, meanwhile, had spent years nurturing a passion for travel writing, first realised through her book on Siwa after becoming captivated by the oasis during a visit in 2009.
Life, as it often does, intervened. Careers evolved, families grew and eventually children left home. Yet the desire to create something remained.
“We were both itching to do something in the book world again,” Badrawi recalls.
The pair met for lunch a few years ago. Zeidy was contemplating a book about Egypt’s coastline. Badrawi was considering delving into Nubia. In what she describes as a lightbulb moment, the pair quickly decided to merge their talents to create a cookbook on Egypt in its entirety.
What followed would become a years-long undertaking, in the form of a nation-wide road-trip.
LANDSCAPES OF BELONGING
One of the most distinctive elements of Egypt: Recipes & Stories from an Ancient Land is its structure. Rather than organising chapters by region, city or meal, Zeidy and Badrawi chose to divide the book according to landscape.
Sea. Desert. River. Mountain. Cairo.
The decision feels deceptively simple, yet it unlocks a deeper understanding of how geography shapes culture.
“People don’t realize how diverse Egypt really is,” says Zeidy. “There’s been this obsession with Cairo, for foreigners, right? There’s Cairo and there’s little else.”
Yet each landscape reveals its own story. Along the Mediterranean coast, culinary traditions carry influences from Greece, Italy and the Levant. Further south, flavours reflect connections to Sudan and Ethiopia. In Siwa and the Western Desert, entirely different histories emerge.
“The people are different, the crops are different, the weather is different – it affects the food and the culture,” she explains.
For Badrawi, the structure became an organising principle as much as a storytelling device.
“We needed our chapters to showcase the massive scale of the country culturally, as well as, from a culinary heritage perspective.”
As they travelled through each landscape, patterns began to reveal themselves.
“Even when you go down the Nile Valley, people start to look, speak, and act differently, but they are all Nile dwellers,” she says. In turn, “they have commonalities, and their food has commonalities.”
The result is a portrait of Egypt that resists simplification. Rather than presenting a singular national identity, the book reveals a country shaped by countless local ones.
THE STORIES RECIPES CARRY
While the recipes are central to the book, they are rarely the destination. More often, they serve as an entry point into larger stories about memory, migration and belonging.
“When you’re talking and writing about food, you’re giving people beautiful recipes to cook in a modern kitchen,” says Badrawi. “But you’re also storytelling, archiving a people and a culture.”
That philosophy runs throughout the book.
Recipes become repositories of history. A dish is never simply a dish; it carries traces of religious traditions, migration patterns and family histories. Throughout Egypt, the authors discovered that food often preserved stories long after other forms of cultural memory had faded.
The book’s greatest achievement may be that it manages to capture both. The practical and the personal. The recipe and the story.
PRESERVING THE EPHEMERAL
The project was shrouded in a certain sense of urgency, partly stemming from a simple reality: many of the traditions documented throughout the book have never been formally recorded.
“Nobody writes anything down,” says Zeidy. Much of Egypt’s culinary heritage continues to exist through oral tradition, passed from one generation to the next through observation and repetition.
For Badrawi, that reality became increasingly apparent throughout the research process.
“Some of the things that Suzanne was prying off of people’s hands and turning into recipes that were tried and tested were around for thousands of years, but because of a lack of documentation, were on the brink of extinction.”
The book never frames preservation as nostalgia. Instead, it presents documentation as an act of care. A recognition that these traditions deserve to be recorded with the same seriousness often afforded to more formal histories.
EGYPT AND ITS LAYERS
Among the many encounters that shaped the book, one remains particularly vivid.
In Alexandria, Zeidy and Badrawi met Antigone Zoulias, head of the city’s Greek Community Centre. Their conversation became a meditation on cosmopolitanism, identity and the ways cities transform over time.
Badrawi remembers watching Zoulias move effortlessly between English, Greek and Arabic while reflecting on the Alexandria of her youth.
“We heard the story of a city that transitioned into a faded version of itself as a result of the loss of its cosmopolitan texture.”
The conversation prompted broader reflections on cultural inheritance and what is lost when communities disperse.
Yet for Zeidy, Alexandria also offered evidence of remarkable continuity.
“In a place like Alexandria, we saw how strong the connection to food remains.”
Despite generations of change, the influences of Greek, Italian, Jewish and Levantine communities continue to shape the city’s cuisine. As Zeidy puts it, “there’s so many layers of history.”
It is also why both women reject the persistent notion that Egypt lacks a distinct culinary identity.
“The one infuriating thing that we’ve heard time and time again is that Egypt doesn’t have a cuisine.”
The stories contained within this book suggest quite the opposite.
ANOTHER WAY OF SEEING
For the authors, imagery was intrinsically linked to storytelling.
Award-winning photographer Jonathan Gregson travelled across Egypt along with the pair, capturing the landscapes, people and moments that define each chapter, while multidisciplinary artist Louis Barthélemy created the cover, maps and chapter illustrations.
Just as importantly, they wanted to move beyond overdone representations of Egypt.
“We tried to avoid clichés in our photography,” says Badrawi. “That’s why Jonathan has such a special eye, as he’s not going to pop a pyramid on your page.”
Instead, the focus rests on people.
“My favorite photos are the photos of Egyptians of every walk of life,” she says. “Just seeing a farmer in Dakhla or seeing a beautiful Nubian woman. I just love those photos because it showcases diversity of people within each landscape.”
Despite the scale of the project Zeidy can distill its essence surprisingly simply. Asked to describe the soul of the book in three flavours, her answer comes without hesitation: “Tasha, tasbeeka and tahina.”
It is a fitting response. Each forms part of the foundation of Egyptian cooking, appearing across regions and traditions. Much like the book itself, they are familiar enough to unite the country, yet versatile enough to tell a different story each time they appear.
By the final page, what begins as a journey through food becomes something far broader: a portrait of Egypt in all its complexity. Not a singular story, but many. Not one landscape, but several. Not one identity, but countless threads woven together across generations, geographies and communities.
A cookbook may have been the starting point.
What Zeidy and Badrawi have created is something much larger.
Egypt: Recipes & Stories from an Ancient Land is available to pre-order from major retailers and bookstores in the UK and USA.
