Egyptian Cuisine

Egyptian cooking is among the oldest in the world, and what marks it out is that it built itself on the cheapest and most available ingredients: lentils, fava beans, rice, seasonal vegetables and bread. Nothing in it is rare and nothing is technically complicated — all the flavour comes from small details passed down in households.

What defines Egyptian food?

First, pulses. Fava beans, lentils and chickpeas underpin more than half the everyday dishes, and that is what let Egyptian cooking feed large numbers cheaply — koshari feeds six for roughly the price of one restaurant plate.

Second, the taqleya: crushed garlic and dried coriander fried in ghee and poured over the dish while it bubbles. This is a purely Egyptian signature, and it is what separates Egyptian molokhia from every other version in the region.

Third, acidity. Vinegar and lemon appear almost everywhere — in koshari sauce, in fatteh stock, in sayadeya — to balance the richness.

The dishes to try

Starting from scratch, begin with koshari, the national dish: four layers in a single bowl. Then molokhia, the fastest main course in the Egyptian kitchen at about an hour. Mahshi needs patience more than skill, and fatteh is the Eid dish, built layer over layer.

For breakfast nothing beats ful medames and ta'ameya, the cheapest and most filling breakfast in Egypt. And Egyptian ta'ameya is not Levantine falafel: it is built on soaked split fava beans, not chickpeas, which is why its centre is green.

Sweets and drinks

Egyptian sweets track the seasons closely: qatayef, kunafa and luqmat al-qadi in Ramadan, kahk at Eid al-Fitr, and basbousa all year. The drinks are seasonal too — erksous, khoshaf, qamar al-din, tamarind and sobia are all Ramadan drinks — and Sham El-Nessim has a spread of its own: herring, fesikh, coloured eggs and lupini beans.