The Changing Relationship between Food and Happiness in Egypt, ca 1900-1952

What is it about?

In early twentieth-century Egypt there was a rapid increase in the number of textbooks, cookbooks, and advice columns instructing women how to cook modern, healthy meals for their families. This prescriptive literature consistently emphasized that feeding one's family properly would provide for both the health and the happiness of the family and the nation. But what exactly was the relationship between the kitchen or cooking and happiness? To answer this question, this chapter explores how novels and memoirs imagined, narrated, and interpreted this relationship. It demonstrates that there was no one stable understanding of this relationship, and that we should understand happiness as a sensibility with its own history in Egypt –– one that can be read through the lens of the kitchen. I trace two different frameworks for understanding happiness that mapped onto different kinds of social structures, bodies, and practices. One highlighted the importance of fertility, generosity, and abundance; the other emphasized productivity, efficiency, and economy. But these two were not mutually exclusive in any given generation, context, or life trajectory.

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Why is it important?

Despite a rich academic literature exploring modern womanhood and the ideology of domesticity in Egypt during this period, it tends to focus on dominant norms rather than the individuals who navigated and negotiated them. By reading novels alongside cookbooks and memoirs alongside curricula, this essay provides a framework for questioning the coherence of dominant ideological narratives about gender and the family in twentieth-century Egypt.

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