It will not form part of the domestic nutritional plan or preparation of meals. However, no such concept exists in Alexandria. We don’t go out for Chinese, any more than we go out for Greek or Italian or Lebanese. Such “cosmopolitan” food, readily available in the great cosmopolitan cities of today, such as London, New York or Dubai (not strictly a city), is vastly different from Alexandria’s culinary experience. Alexandrians simply ate their own food, which was partly ethnic, partly a borrowing from the neighbor’s kitchen. And so a typical Alexandrian supper may consist of the staple Egyptian dish of ful, along with the Armenian pastrami (basturma) either plain or cooked with eggs. If it was a dinner party given at a home, the buffet had to offer some basics: the huge fish covered with mayonnaise, piccata aux champignons, a béchamel dish, moussaka (is it Egyptian or Greek?), alongside kebbeh, the stuffed vine leaves (dolma, warak enab) which the Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Syrians and Lebanese all claim for their own, and its accompanying yoghurt and cucumber salad. For dessert there would be profiterole and meringue as well as oriental sweets like baklava and kunnafa. When inviting people over for drinks only, the hostess would provide tarama, a Greek dip made of fish roe virtually unknown outside Greece, and tahini, a sesame dip. Such a variety, combining French cuisine with food common in the Levant, Turkey and Armenia is the natural expression of the cultural diversity of Alexandria. Nowhere more than in its eating habits does Alexandria reveal its magnanimous nature of accepting the other, though not always of total assimilation. In America, that great melting pot, a third generation Italian or German would know little about the language, food or history of his grandparents who “came over”. But in Alexandria, the sense of belonging to one’s community kept alive their language, habits, denomination and past. And so, though they intermarried, each held on to his or her community. An Armenian married to an Italian meant that the children would speak the two languages, French (the lingua franca of Alexandria), Arabic (the language of their adopted country), and they would eat molokheya as well as typical Armenian and Italian food at home and at the homes of their Armenian and Italian grandparents. Grandparents, in Egypt as in the Mediterranean, are greatly honored by children and grandchildren, and were as much a means of sustenance as was the material gain to be made in Alexandria. Our grandmothers' cuisine was in no danger of going down the drain of the kitchen sink. With a reverence to the community’s cuisine and the local one combined, the result is a cuisine grand-mère; and in many an Alexandrian household, gran’mamman, granny, ya ya, nonna and anna will originally often have come from across the Mediterranean.

If language is one of the main markers of cultural identity, so is cuisine. Claude Levi-Strauss has taught us that using fire to transform raw food into cooked dishes is the difference between nature and culture and is what makes humans culture specific, as opposed to animals. At the same time, historian Fernand Braudel discovered from travel literature that “breaking the bread of others” was a difficult process, a fact testified to by nutritionist Jean Trémolières who acknowledges the rigidity of people’s alimentary habits. So, if cuisine is culture specific, and if partaking of the other’s food or changing one’s own eating habits is difficult at best, then the Alexandrian experience of sharing food and culinary customs is also its ultimate experience of sharing cultures and offering a table laid for all. We owe our taste of Alexandria to those who have broken bread together without an awkward social lurch, or cultural dissonance. Mettre la main à la pate, whether for the young apprentice earning his daily bread at the Greek baker's down the street, or the French or Swiss pastry shop downtown, or the wide-eyed newly-wed young bride next door learning a culinary secret from overseas, it all became a labor of love consolidated by the common pursuit of the pleasures of food to which our neighbors were, by virtue of a healthy Mediterranean appetite, likewise inclined. 

In our collective digest and in the pantries of our culinary history there is no ethnic dyspepsia. Dishes have emerged from a multi-ethnic kitchen that is recognizably shaped not so much by local produce as by local color and character. It is a cuisine whose chef raises his many hats to all, and the foreigner raises his back. This was neither confusion nor fusion in a strict modern day culinary sense, but variety; in the only and best sense there is. With its meeting of cultures and tongues, and its cross fertilization, and the aroma of a distinctive human ingredient, it could be the culinary equivalent of cosmopolitanism.  Historically, therefore, we were way ahead of what became common culinary practice in a later more informed and studied manner. Elements mixed, tastes and recipes crossed, we learned new ways from various and different examples. With a flexible natural inclination reflected in a distinctive DNA of tolerance and plurality and an accommodating palate attending, we were able to reach out more readily in a way the Moroccans, the French, the Italians and the Spanish have never felt the need or the inclination to do.

So while there is no Mediterranean cuisine per se, there is now a general agreement that there is a Mediterranean diet, and a consensus that it is the healthiest. That would be a preference for fresh vegetables and fruits, pulses, cereals, fish, poultry, dairy products (cheese and yoghurt), small amounts of red meat and eggs, moderate amounts of red wine and plenty of olive oil. Nutritionists and doctors believe that this diet, though not bland or low fat, reduces heart disease, certain cancers, diabetes and obesity. However, these benefits come not from the diet alone but a whole lifestyle built on exercise (originally physical labor) and leisurely meals. The main meal would be lunch, taken around 2 pm, with a properly laid table, a variety of foods offered, a glass of wine perhaps, and fresh fruit to follow. Many households would have an elderly aunt or uncle, or a grandparent, living with them, and they would share the meal too. The relaxed family atmosphere accompanying the consumption of healthy food was an essential part of the Mediterranean diet. The preparation of food, as well, was something of ritual. Time and care were given to the process of nurturing. Here is an example of how food was part of living in an Alexandrian household and was closely attuned to nature:

The days followed peacefully upon one another. Father went to work every morning and when he came home at lunchtime the kitchen smells that filled the house were delicious and closely identified with the seasons. Lentil soup on cold days in winter, and stuffed cabbage and sweet lemons and tangerines seemed to blend with the raindrops hitting the panes and the smell of naphthaline from our woollens just removed from storage. They were the essence of winter and we were snug and warm inside. In summertime there was molokheya and red onions and grapes and water melon. Mother was a full-time housewife with no side-tracks, wholly devoted to running the house and looking after her family. Certain things she allowed no one else to do. In spring she made the year's stock of strawberry jam; in autumn she would spend a whole day peeling dates with Abdallah preparing for the jam. Then one by one she would stuff them each with an almond, a clove, and a thin strip of tangerine skin. In winter she spent hours slicing bitter oranges into paper-thin strips. Her jams were always perfect because she prepared them strictly according to age old traditions and closely supervised the cooking. (Wadida Wassef, “Aunt Noor”)

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