Egyptian Diaspora Foodways

Diaspora

Two distinct movements. THE LABOUR MIGRATION to the GULF — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar — and to Libya and Jordan from the 1970s oil boom onward, which is numerically much the larger, largely temporary, and generates remittances that are among Egypt’s biggest sources of foreign currency; Egyptian cooks, bakers and ful-and-ta’ameya sellers are a visible presence in Gulf cities. AND THE SETTLED EMIGRATION to the UNITED STATES — New Jersey, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago — CANADA, AUSTRALIA, ITALY, FRANCE and the UK, which from the 1960s carried a disproportionately COPTIC and professional population, so that Coptic churches abroad are often the institution around which Egyptian food appears. ⚠ AND A DEPARTURE RATHER THAN A DIASPORA: the Greek, Italian, Jewish, Armenian and Levantine communities of Alexandria and Cairo largely left between 1956 and the 1960s, taking a cosmopolitan urban cuisine with them — Egyptian Jewish food is now cooked in Israel, France and Brooklyn rather than in Egypt, and that loss is part of the record.