What is traditionally taken to be typical Mediterranean food, though, turns out not to be native at all! We may consider all these fresh fruits and vegetables indigenous to the area, but many of them were introduced by the Arabs in the Middle Ages to the Mediterranean basin. The Arab presence in the region meant that they introduced to Europe better material conditions and a refined style of life. In addition, they modernized technology, thereby improving agriculture on both sides of the Mediterranean. It was the Arabs who introduced new foods such as the citrus fruits one thinks of as being an essential part of the eastern Mediterranean diet, including lime, as well as wheat, rice, bananas, mangoes, aubergines, taro (colocasia), sugarcane and watermelon. (Wright, pp. 7; 22-23) Alexandria itself acted as a place of exchange, from which certain foods traveled to Europe through the Venetian and Genoese merchants whose fundoks ran a brisk trade in the Mediterranean.

There was an exchange, therefore, of the basic ingredients, but not necessarily of cooking, “the process by which Nature becomes Culture” as Claude Levi-Strauss pointed out. Nor do certain ingredients necessarily make for a Mediterranean diet. Wright believes that what is common in the diet is a “shared trinity ingredients”: olive oil, wheat and the vine (p. xv). Wine, though, would not necessarily be very popular in Alexandria. True, there was a successful wine industry promoted by the Greeks, such as Gianaclis, Bolonaki and Zotos, and the Italian Bertocchini, which were enjoyed by the foreign communities resident in the city. A cold glass of Stella beer, produced locally, was always welcome. But the Moslem restriction on alcohol meant that wine was not part of the staple diet of the Egyptian, though beer was part of the trinity of the ancient Egyptian diet that was composed of bread, onions and beer.

Indeed, some of the ancient Egyptian foods have endured unchanged for millennia. Beer is consumed in far less quantities today, because of the Islamic ban on alcohol, though the Stella is still around in its green bottle, and in a cans form – a tribute to modern times. Onions remain great favorites, whether white, red or spring. Cucumbers, popular in the region for their ability to slake thirst, were grown in ancient Egyptian times and continue to be eaten widely, either in a salad or with white cheese, which may be the Egyptian version of the famous English cucumber sandwich (the combination of white cheese and cucumbers would change according to season: there would be white cheese and watermelons in summer, or with grapes, or with green beans). Diced cucumbers in smoothed yoghurt, with crushed garlic, salt and chopped mint, are the necessary accompaniment to stuffed vine leaves, and will be found in more or less that form all over the Mediterranean. Cucumbers are also pickled, along with carrots, cauliflower and turnips. Bread, of course, is the king of foods in Egypt, ancient as well as modern. Emmer wheat was grown in ancient Egypt, and barley too was used for the poor. Egyptians continue to eat bread for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, and hence it is called eish, derived from life, rather than the word khubz used throughout the Arab world. A small piece of bread folded to form a cone shape for dips, or to mop up the sauce on plates (called wedn el otta, the cat’s ear), is widespread and stretches across all classes of society, though the more correct ones will do the mopping with a fork rather than their fingers. This habit of ghumous, as it is called, dates back to the ancient Egyptians and is also popular in Turkey and Armenia. In the common Egyptian tongue, people will say they have eaten bread and salt together, signifying the importance of these two foodstuffs. Bread is eish, life itself, and salt too was precious to the extent that sometimes Roman troops were paid in salt and hence the word salary. The English would say “A man worth his salt” to indicate how worthwhile he was. Ancient Egyptians mined it from Wadi el Natroun (from Natrum Muriaticum) and used it for the preservation of the dead (mummification) and for the preservation of food. In Egypt – as in other countries round the Mediterranean – salt has mystic powers. It is used to ward off the evil eye and as a protection against black magic, and is a necessary component in rituals such as circumcision and celebration of newborns (see Sebou’). Excavations and paintings on tombs show that ancient Egyptians held lavish feasts and ate meat, fowl, pigs, grains, vegetables and fruits, though a number of their foods, such as gazelle and onyx, have disappeared from the tables of modern Egyptians. Some eating habits have remained: ancient Egyptians used to eat parsley with meat, and modern Egyptians will serve kebab on a bed of parsley. The cultural interaction between an ancient Egyptian habit and an Ottoman dish notwithstanding, it has been proven by modern science that parsley brings down cholesterol and uric acid and thus counteracts the effect of red meat.

Essentially, Alexandrian cuisine would be an amalgam of ancient Egyptian, Ottoman and Mediterranean foods. However, it is not necessarily in keeping with what is typically known as a Mediterranean diet. The third component of the trinity, olive oil, is not as popular in Alexandria as it is in Spain, Italy, Greece or Belad el Sham, as Syria, Lebanon and Palestine were commonly referred to. Egyptians have a love for samna, clarified butter or ghee, and will use it more than any other cooking fat, though a more health-conscious younger generation has begun to switch to corn oil and sunflower oil, and there is certainly a greater variety of olive oil on the shelves than heretofore. Yet samna baladi remains the favorite and often food would be advertised as having been cooked with samna baladi. In the good old days, well-to-do families would prepare it at home, rather than buy it from the market.  A whole day would be set aside for the process, which often involved a peasant woman coming especially from the countryside to supervise the activity. Here is Wadida Wassef describing how samna was made at her parents’ home in the 1940s:

When spring came it would be time to make the yearly stock of samna. Om el Hana would appear at the kitchen door with our ration of butter which she carried on her head in a huge flat basket all the way from her village. In a first operation in the village the butter was kneaded with salt then shaped into fat sausages, then loaded onto Om el Hana's head. Then she and her basket were sat on a donkey who took them to the railway station where she boarded the goods train that stopped here and there to pick up all manner of passenger, animal or human. When she reached our house the second operation began. Mother sitting on a low stool, Om el Hana on the floor, placed the butter in a huge copper cauldron and took turns stirring it … [the] butter settled at the bottom, the samna, without which no food cooked in Egyptian homes was worthy of the name, floated on top. It was then poured into big earthen jars and stored in the pantry to last until the next spring. The operation lasted from early morning until sunset. Samna is a classic of Egyptian cooking. Egyptian women are extremely fond of it as their volume indicates. The thought of food cooked in oil or vegetable fat made their stomachs turn. … [Om el Hana] must have been the forerunner of the modern computer. Illiterate and unschooled, she could do complicated mathematical operations with amazing accuracy and she was never wrong. One could almost hear the clickety-click of figures in her brain as she calculated the exact amount she expected to be paid.
Wadida Wassef, her mother and her grandmother were all educated at foreign schools. Her mother was an expert at French cuisine, and consulted with great care the manuals of the day, such as the Comtesse de Qencé's Encyclopédie de la vie Pratique, which instructed housewives in the art of cooking and running the household. It “propounded a typical highly sophisticated French cuisine, requiring special herbs and long and complicated procedures for cooking. Accordingly my mother's Lapin à la crême à l'estragon and her Savarins were proverbial.” Despite the French influence on her kitchen, the mother honored the samna baladi and did not replace it with olive oil. Such behavior was probably common among all Egyptian housewives in Alexandria, and despite the cry against it in today’s call for a healthy diet, it is still the mark of good Egyptian cooking, as is the vegetable and meat stew cooked with tomato sauce.

The Ottoman influence on the Egyptian cuisine is perhaps the single strongest influence, more so perhaps because the Ottoman Empire included countries whose communities have been an integral part of the Alexandrian social fabric. Dominating parts of Asia, Europe and North Africa for 400 years, the Ottoman Empire assimilated foods from the three continents and spread them round. Foods and practices that originated in the Central Asian steppes with the nomadic Turkic tribes eventually found their way to Armenia, Bulgaria, Greece, the Levant and Egypt. Golash and baklava made of thin phyllo dough and stuffed with either nuts or meat, have become delicacies on the Alexandrian table, with no thought given to either their origin or name. Because it is a collection from a number of different countries, it is not easy to discern a basic element or a single dominant feature, like the Italian "pasta" or the French "sauce". Whether in a humble home, at a famous restaurant, or at a dinner in a Bey's mansion, familiar patterns of this rich and diverse cuisine are always present. It is a rare art which satisfies the senses while reconfirming the higher order of society, community and culture, but it is also cause for cultural contention, as the various communities resident in Alexandria, and the world around, will each claim dolma or yoghurt for its own, for it is food that cultures are most possessive about, next to territory. Are kebabs, souvlakia, and shawerma Turkish or Greek? Were cubes of meat first skewered on the sword and cooked over a fire in the steppes of Asia or by Homer’s heroes?

A practical-minded child watching Mother cook cabbage dolma on a lazy, gray winter day is bound to wonder: who on earth discovered this peculiar combination of sautéd rice, pine-nuts, currants, spices, and herbs, all tightly wrapped in translucent leaves of cabbage exactly half an inch thick and stacked-up on an oval serving plate decorated with lemon wedges? How was it possible to transform this humble vegetable to such heights of fashion and delicacy with so few additional ingredients? And, how can such a yummy dish possibly also be good for one?

One can only conclude that the evolution of this glorious cuisine was not an accident. Similar to other grand cuisines of the world, it is a result of the combination of three key elements. A nurturing environment is irreplaceable. Turkey is known for an abundance and diversity of foodstuff due to its rich flora, fauna and regional differentiation. And the legacy of an Imperial Kitchen is inescapable. Hundreds of cooks specializing in different types of dishes, all eager to please the royal palate, no doubt had their influence in perfecting the cuisine as we know it today. The Palace Kitchen, supported by a complex social organization, a vibrant urban life, specialization of labor, trade, and total control of the Spice Road, reflected the culmination of wealth and the flourishing of culture in the capital of a mighty Empire. And the influence of the longevity of social organization should not be taken lightly either. The Turkish State of Anatolia is a millennium old and so, naturally, is the cuisine. Time is of the essence; as Ibn Khaldun wrote, "the religion of the King, in time, becomes that of the People", which also holds for the King's food. Thus, the reign of the Ottoman Dynasty during 600 years, and a seamless cultural transition into the present day of modern Turkey, led to the evolution of a grand cuisine through differentiation, refinement and perfection of dishes, as well as their sequence and combination of the meals.

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