Cairo Foodways

القاهرة

City

⚠ THE LARGEST CITY IN THE ARAB WORLD AND AFRICA, and its food is the country arriving in it. Greater Cairo pulls migrants from every governorate and each brings its own kitchen, so the city holds Sa’idi, Delta, Nubian and Bedouin cooking alongside its own. The institutions: the KOSHARY shop, a single-dish restaurant type; the FUL and TA’AMEYA cart at dawn; the hawawshi baker; the KEBDA and SOGO’ sandwich stand; the grilled-meat house; the FITEER bakery; the ahwa (coffee house) where tea, coffee and shisha are the whole menu; the juice bar with sugarcane and mango; and KHAN EL-KHALILI and the Ataba and Rod el-Farag markets. ISLAMIC CAIRO’s Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk history is in the sweets and the Ramadan street life; KHEDIVIAL Cairo’s nineteenth-century European layer is in the patisserie. ⚠ AND BREAD IS THE CITY’S POLITICS: subsidised BALADI bread is a documented instrument of state, the 1977 bread riots followed an attempt to cut the subsidy, and "aish" — the Egyptian word for bread — literally means "life".