This paper examines an Egyptian cookbook from the 1930s, Nazira Niqola’s ‘Uṣūl al-Ṭahī (commonly known as Kitab Abla Nazira), to explore aspects of Egyptian national identity formation connected to gender, class, and ethnicity. The product of a “colonial pilgrimage” (Niqola and her co-author studied home economics in the UK), Kitab Abla Nazira explicitly addresses itself to “the young Egyptian woman who contributes to the intellectual renaissance we are now living;” its preface refers to the “spirit of the age.” Its contents are a mix of European and indigenous foodways, underpinned by the science of nutrition and normative discourses about how a kitchen ought to be organized and run. It was by no means a marginal text; over a dozen editions were published throughout the twentieth century. The realities of how Egyptians prepared and ate their food in the 1930s would not have aligned neatly with its prescriptions; but it was (and remains) the case that what and how one eats are tightly bound up with what it means to be authentically Egyptian, and what it means to be modern. A close reading of the introductory and pantry sections as well as a number of key recipes (including béchamel sauce and koshari) demonstrates that in the kitchens of the newly emerging male elites so often associated with the rise of Egyptian nationalism, a complex mixture of influences and identities was brewing. In the decades leading up to the book’s writing, for example, French cuisine had emerged as the international standard of sophistication and modernity; according to food historian Rachel Laudan, béchamel sauce was its surest hallmark. A historical account recorded by the Orientalist Richard Burton dates the presence of koshari (a Egyptian version of the Indian dish kitchiri) as a staple in Suez to the 1850s. That a cookbook addressed to middle class, educated housewives in the 1930s included multiple variations of these very different dishes––a street food adapted from South Asian cuisine and a “mother sauce” of French haute cuisine––is telling. The strategies Niqola used to translate, adapt, reconcile, and combine the disparate influences her recipes draw upon can complicate understandings of how “tradition,” “authenticity,” and “modernity” were negotiated in the negotiation of Egyptian identity during this period. The kitchen, at the intersection of market and home, public and domestic, and symbolic and concrete, adds new dimensions to a familiar Egyptian story.