The 1930s, 40s, and 50s witnessed the flourishing of a new genre of Egyptian print cookbook––namely, print cookbooks written by and for women, aimed at a relatively new figure: the modern housewife. While some early print cookbooks elsewhere in the Arabophone world (Morocco, Lebanon) engaged directly and openly in projects of canonizing their national cuisines, Egyptian cookbooks present a slightly different case. In these cookbooks, it was in the careful assembly of a kaleidoscope of diverse recipes, rather than the framing of a national cuisine in those explicit terms, that authors performed the work of signaling what a proper Egyptian housewife ought to be feeding her children––the future of the nation. Overall this understudied subgenre of cookbooks promoted a vision of Egyptian cuisine that was middle-class, urban, and couched in terms of an Arab modernity oriented towards the Mashriq and the Eastern Mediterranean and away from the rest of the African continent. The paper argues that these texts projected a world where modern domestic ideology brought a specific flavor of economy to the kitchen –– a sense of order inseparable from particular aesthetic choices –– by introducing new taxonomies of acceptable food. These cookbooks emphasized European sauces like bechamel, the Circassian dish sharkasiyya, and eastward facing dishes like koshari. Meanwhile they excluded certain ingredients like shaṭṭa and ḥilba (hot pepper and fenugreek), and included with careful qualification foods perceived as “African,” like weka. Drawing on close readings of books by three major cookbook authors from this period as well as related archival material, this paper details the social and ethnic hierarchies embedded in the canonization of Egyptian cuisine. These readings form part of a broader argument that the domestic sphere, and the home kitchen in particular, was a key site where Egyptians began to identify as part of an Arab east or Mashriq, rather than North Africa, in a modern sense.