This panel explores what popular cooking literature written by Arab women can reveal about twentieth-century Arab histories of gender as well as national and transnational politics. Focusing on published cookbooks and food journalism from the 1930s through the 1980s, these papers consider how Arab women exercised agency as modern citizens and as national and transnational actors, in Egypt and Sudan and among Syrian and Lebanese migrants in the Arab-American diaspora.
Drawing on popular cookbooks and food writing published in Egypt and the United States, in Arabic and English, this panel examines visions of domestic modernity promoted by Arab women for their own benefit and for the consumption of non-Arab audiences. Sources include cookbooks written by and for Egyptian and Sudanese women in the 1940s; the "Sitt al-bayt" ("Housewives") section of Egypt's largest women's magazine Hawwa'; Scheherezade Cooks! published in 1960 by Lebanese-American entertainer and singer Wadeeha Atiyeh; and books by author Helen Corey on Syrian and Middle Eastern cookery framed through an American interfaith lens.
The visions of domestic modernity presented in these sources allow panelists to illustrate contrasting constructions of race, gender, religion, class, and modernity, as modeled by Arab homemakers in Egypt and Sudan on one hand and by Syro-Lebanese food writers in the United States on the other. Analyses of the emergence of home economics as newly available scientific knowledge in fu??? publications, and of Arab socialist instructional rhetoric about procuring and cooking food in Egypt, contrast with studies of cooking literature by Arab women written in English for American audiences. The latter works show how culinary adaptations of Tales of the Arabian Nights subverted classic Orientalist tropes, and how biblically-oriented depictions of Middle Eastern cooking amounted to inter-faith diplomacy within a pluralistic American landscape.
Papers addressing Egypt and Sudan detail how cooking instructions called upon women to contribute actively to the modern nation through discourses that elevated cooking from the realm of the quotidian and vernacular into modern, scientific, and technical forms of knowledge. Meanwhile, contributions about Arab-American cookbooks show how their authors used the kitchen as an arena for challenging dominant assumptions about gender roles and the cultural makeup of the American homeland. Ultimately, the panel demonstrates how culinary sources bridge realms typically associated with "high" and "low," tying seemingly mundane practices and concerns to broader political considerations.
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Dr. Jennifer Dueck
Born in 1903, Wadeeha Atiyeh made the journey as a young girl from Mount Lebanon to the United States. Reaching adulthood, she worked as singer and entertainer based in Chicago and then New York, and often represented herself with tropes of orientalizing exoticism. Public recognition came to Atiyeh most significantly through the publication of her cookbook Scheherazade Cooks! in 1960. Featuring on its cover a drawing of an ostensible Sheherezade, famous seductress from the Thousand and One Nights, Atiyeh’s cookbook was written for mainstream American readers. The book represented not only Atiyeh’s efforts to earn a living, but also her attempts at cross-cultural mediation on behalf of Arab diaspora communities in the United States.
Atiyeh’s cookbook is unusual in that lively and fantastical stories of Scheherazade and King Shahriyar introduce each chapter. These tales depict Scheherezade and the King not only engaged in a dance of seduction, but also fully involved in running an ostensible palace kitchen. Atiyeh’s narrations deploy orientalizing tropes, such as lavish feasts and sensuous harems, which were already familiar and accessible to American readers owing to the proliferation of Arab-themed restaurants and films since the 1930s. But Atiyeh’s stories also describe how this fictional Scheherazade entices the King into assisting her with running the household. He chops vegetables, rolls stuffed vine leaves, learns about the cost of different cuts of meat, and accompanies her on a shopping expedition in the market. This Scheherazade appears skilled, knowledgeable, and sophisticated, a woman who is at least as concerned with the division of household labor between herself and the King as she is with seduction. Atiyeh herself was a successful business woman making her way in post-war American society. She was careful to retain in her book markers of exoticism that she knew her audiences would find accessible and enticing. At the same time she depicted Scheherazade’s relationship with the King in ways she surely expected would defy her American readers’ assumptions about Arab women. Drawing on press articles and archival sources, as well as contemporaneous Middle Eastern cookbooks, this analysis of Scheherazade Cooks! demonstrates Atiyeh’s agency and resourcefulness in the cross-cultural project of self-identifying as a modern, wage-earning, Arab woman for American audiences.
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Dr. Heather J. Sharkey
In 1962, Helen Corey (born 1923), the daughter of immigrants from Damascus who settled in Ohio and Indiana, published The Art of Syrian Cookery. Her cookbook sold so well that it reportedly spent almost thirty years on the bestseller list of Doubleday, one of the most popular and prolific U.S. publishers of the mid-twentieth century. The Art of Syrian Cookery had a mission: to convince middle-class and largely Christian American audiences that Syrian, and more broadly Arab and Middle Eastern people, were heirs to the Bible lands and that, as immigrants in the United States, they were loyal, believing, and upstanding members of society.
Helen Corey conveyed her message about the familial, civic, and religious virtue of Arab-Americans in several ways. She discussed her own Antiochan Orthodox Christian traditions at length; quoted extensively from the Bible, often juxtaposing verses to particular recipes; included letters of endorsement from ecclesiastical authorities, along with photographs of her priests, parents, and siblings; and lavished attention on Orthodox Christian food practices, especially the fasting cuisine of Lent. Years later, in 1989, she issued another cookbook, called Helen Corey’s Food from Biblical Lands, which added stronger inter-faith and pan-Arab “ingredients”. She did so by recognizing Muslim and Jewish food cultures, and by including recipes from friends who either had either come from or lived in a wider range of Arabic-speaking countries, such as Libya and Morocco.
Drawing on editions of The Art of Syrian Cookery and Food from Biblical Lands, on reviews and food blogs about these two cookbooks, and on newspaper articles about Corey’s career, I will argue that Helen Corey was a pioneer in culinary diplomacy. However, the imagined homeland that she promoted through her cookbooks was not Syria, but rather a pluralistic United States. Indeed, Helen Corey became an “intra-national” (as opposed to international) diplomat for Syrian, Arab, and broadly Middle Eastern people within the American landscape, using food to emphasize her own civic credentials while making a plea for Arab-American inclusion.
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Dr. Laura Bier
This paper looks at the intersection of gender, politics and domesticity in the context of Arab Socialist planning by considering the advice around food shopping and preparation in Egypt’s largest women’s magazine Hawwa’. In particular it focuses on the section of the magazine entitled “Sitt al-bayt” (The Housewife) as both a source of instruction to Egyptian housewives and a (mediated) lens through which to view the everyday experiences of Egyptian women with Arab Socialism.
“Sitt al bayt” first appeared in Hawwa’ in September of 1964 and billed itself as a supplement to help Egyptian housewives gain the knowledge and skills to navigate the demands of consumption--particularly food consumption--necessitated by the establishment of an Arab socialist economy. The state control of food distribution, which reached its most formal expression in the state run consumer cooperatives (jamai’yyat istihlakiyya), entailed both control over prices and the availability of specific goods and foodstuffs. At the same time, the government’s import substitution program, launched in 1961, meant that cooperatives were often touted as showcases for Egyptian manufactured goods, including processed foodstuffs.
I argue that ‘Sitt al-bayt” engaged housewives as political subjects charged with the success of Arab socialist planning. With sections on weekly menu planning, recipes, reports on what food was available on cooperative shelves and reader ‘tips” the articles in Sitt al-bayt advised Egyptian women on how to cook with leftovers, substitute ingredients based on what was cheap and available, and how to deal with new kinds of prepared and processed foods such as canned beef and frozen fish as well as how to “domesticate” imported meat as a solution to the high prices and regular shortages of locally sourced fresh meat. At the same time, it reported on the complaints of shortages and price gouging that characterized the state cooperative system and the difficulties women faced in provisioning a household and feeding a family in the context of state socialist planning. While the readers of Sitt al-bayt were exhorted to avoid the black market and to find substitutes for goods in short supply, the section also frequently criticized the failings of the cooperative system and called on the Minister of Supply to account for them, calling on Egyptian housewives to mobilize themselves and their expertise in household consumption as active agents of social and political transformation.
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Dr. Anny Gaul
In Egypt between 1914 and 1976, cookbooks written by and for the modern middle-class housewife (rabbat al-bayt) flourished, with at least 17 distinct titles –– far more than the number of cookbooks published by men during the same period.
The most famous book of this genre was Nazira Niqula and Bahiya ?Uthman’s 1941 U??l al-?ah?: al-na?ar? wa-l-?amal?, popularly known as ‘Abla Nazira’s book.’ Yet their volume was not the first of its kind and was in fact part of a much broader trend: British and Egyptian archives attest that Niqula and ?Uthman were only two among dozens of Egyptian men and women of their time who participated in transnational circuits of culinary education, training, and exchange, and wrote cookbooks as a result of those experiences. Egyptian women learned European cooking techniques from domestic science schools in England; Egyptian men apprenticed with European chefs trained in French haute cuisine. In the introductions to their cookbooks, these men and women framed themselves as experts translating modern culinary knowledge into Arabic for the benefit of their compatriots. These books invite us to reconsider the kinds of texts and actors working as translators in twentieth-century Egypt, as well as the kinds of modern knowledge that introduced new words and publishing conventions into the fusha of the period.
This paper focuses in particular on one title from this genre, al-M?’ida al-?ad?tha (The Modern Table) by Najiba Qurunfuli, published in 1949. It is largely similar to the other cookbooks of this genre, with one key difference: it addresses the Sudanese, not the Egyptian, housewife. The paper argues that this text is emblematic rather than exceptional within its genre, however. Analyzing the book’s text and imagery offers a new reading of the gender politics of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium that governed Sudan at the time as well as the racial and ethnic dimensions of those politics. Specifically, it shows how the emerging norms of modern womanhood were bound up not only with a specific middle-class identity, but with racial and ethnic overtones that emphasized a proximity to light-skinned, Arab, and European identities over non-Arab African ones. Drawing on an understudied corpus of texts, this paper offers new insights into the intersections of gender, race, and class in late colonial Egypt and Sudan.
