The construction of the Aswan High Dam (1960–1970) marked an unprecedented change in the history of Egyptian agriculture. After millennia of annual floods that had dictated Egypt’s growing seasons, the vast waters of the Nile were placed under the control of the postcolonial state. It was a pivotal moment both for Egypt’s nation-building and decolonization processes and for the destruction of historical Nubia, which was flooded by the dam’s rising waters. As food scholar Krishnendu Ray has observed, “nation-making is a refugee-making process.” How can we read the traces of human displacement in the displacement of one cooking method by another? This paper responds to this question with a history of okra preparation in Egypt to show how the High Dam, a transformational event in the political economy of plant cultivation in the Nile Valley, shaped the texture and flavor of Egyptian nationhood in urban quotidian contexts. While recipes (manuscript, print, and oral) are at the core of the paper’s evidence, it also draws on travelogues, lexicons, vernacular poetry, and oral histories to produce a historical ethnography of the context that produced those recipes and which explains how they changed over time. The paper shows that preparation methods using dried okra and/or beating okra into a thick green stew, historically associated with Upper Egyptian, Nubian, and Sudanese cuisines, became residual elements of Egyptian cooking in ways that contributed to constructions of the cultures of the southern Nile Valley as traditional and archaic. Meanwhile the newly dominant mode of okra preparation in Egypt embraced the tomato, a relatively recent introduction to the Egyptian kitchen whose mass cultivation was made possible by the damming of the Nile that had submerged the Nubian homeland. The tomato stew, originally a mode of preparation tied both to Ottoman sophistication and modern cooking, swiftly domesticated okra into a new expression of Egyptian national cuisine. By tracing changes in everyday interactions between urban Egyptian home cooks and two important edible plants––okra and tomatoes––this paper reveals how the High Dam drove the production of Egyptian nationhood through domestic and intimate practices, flavors, and tastes. It shows that a focus on plants and human encounters with them offers a way to trace unconscious and affective reverberations of major infrastructural and political projects.