ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT
Beyond Recipes How MAAS alum Anny Gaul studies cookbooks By Vicki Valosik
Image Credit: Nicole McConville
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ookbooks can teach us how to and gender when a bookseller told her about and Bilad al-Sham (the Arabic-speaking braise a lamb shank, thicken a sauce, the iconic cookbook author Nazira Niqula. provinces of the former Ottoman Empire) or bake a perfect pie crust. But for Gaul soon learned that Niqula was just one, dominate the cookbooks while foods from MAAS alum Anny Gaul (’12), a cultural albeit the most famous, among many female Arabic-speaking parts of Africa are nearly historian of food and gender, they can do so Egyptian cookbook authors of the era whose absent. Although this may not be an accumuch more. “Cookbooks books promoted “modern” methods and dish- rate reflection of what people were actually can tell us something es. Their books “articulated to women the eating, says Gaul, the push toward Western significant about norms relatively new idea that their role in nourish- or “modern” cooking, selectively defined, was and ideals, what is indicative of broader political and good taste, what social trends. “People were working is good food, and out what it meant to be a modern how those quesArab Egyptian, and nationalists and tions are connected to who we are as a intellectuals were making arguments nation,” says Gaul. about Egypt’s place in the world.” Yet That is an argument Gaul explores despite their value as primary sources, in her recent Global Food History arthese cookbooks can be nearly imticle “From Kitchen Arabic to Recipossible to find in Egyptian archives pes for Good Taste: Nation, Empire, and libraries. Gaul has had to rely and Race in Egyptian Cookbooks.” instead on Cairo’s booksellers to help In Gaul’s paper, which earned her her, over multiple trips to the region, the Global Food History Prize for an develop her own private research colEmerging Food Historian, she takes a lection. Now the owner of more than deep dive into a unique literary subtwo dozen of these cookbooks, Gaul genre: cookbooks written by Egyptian plans to make them available to other women between the 1880s and 1950s. researchers by donating her collection This was a period in Egypt, says Gaul, to the Cairo-based history organizawhen female literacy was on the rise, tion Women in Memory Forum. girls were going to school in greater Gaul first discovered the potential numbers, and women were beginning for using cookbooks as lenses into to pursue degrees abroad. Domestic larger cultural phenomenon during science was a popular choice, with the MAAS program when she wrote programs in England and Europe a paper on Israeli cookbooks and the training female students to run efextent to which they did (or did not) ficient and modern home kitchens. incorporate Palestinian and other A cohort of these women returned Arab foods. Her interest in cookto Egypt to author cookbooks that books isn’t strictly scholarly, however. would become widely influential, Art by Sohila Khaled (see page 3) created in collaboraAn avid cook and prolific food blogfinding receptive audiences among tion with Gaul for the Global Food History issue featuring ger, Gaul has been known to say that Gaul’s article. The art incorporates elements from the the country’s emerging middle-class “the best way to study a cookbook covers of the cookbooks in Gaul’s collection, including the housewives, as well as the public edu- “modern housewife” in pearls and chef’s cap, while adding is to cook your way through it.” She cation system, which often adopted traditional Arabic motifs and kitchen tools. credits her interest in cooking, as well their books as home economics texts. as her egalitarian perspectives on food Gaul’s first introduction to this genre of ing and forming the nation was deeply im- hierarchies, to her godmother, a self-taught cookbooks was at a book market in Cairo. portant,” says Gaul, “and that what they cook chef who traveled the world cooking on priShe was searching for inspiration for a disser- really matters to public life and the thriv- vate yachts. “She was well-versed in fancy tation topic combining food studies, Arabic, ing of their society.” Recipes from Europe continental European continued on p. 21 13
