ARCE Missouri: Walk Through Egyptian Food History

Description: Is there such a thing as Egyptian cuisine? Certainly, with thousands of years of culinary innovations, technological developments, and new crops and flavors certainly make a cuisine, Egyptian cuisine is rich and diverse. This talk will walk us through ancient Egypt, medieval Egypt, all the way to the 21st century, and present what is known about Egyptian cuisine of the time. The talk will question the notions of “authenticity” and how it is possible, if at all, to pinpoint a defining moment of Egyptian cuisine. It will also survey the different sources that scholars have available in order to study the history of Egyptian cuisine.

Bio: Mennat-Allah El Dorry has a PhD in Egyptology with a focus on archaeobotanical analysis (2015). Her research revolves around food and trying to reconstruct how people in the past cooked, ate, and how food played a role in their social and religious lives. 

She has worked extensively on the field as an archaeologist, surveyor, illustrator and archivist. She is affiliated with the Ministry of Antiquities, where she has served as head of the Minister’s Scientific Office (2016-17). El Dorry also served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the French and Polish Archaeological Institutes in Cairo, where she organized an international conference on food and drink in Egypt and Sudan, in addition to undertaking her own research on food history (2017-18). She was the guest editor of Rawi Magazine’s Food History edition (2019). She is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the ERC Desert Networks Project (HiSOMA, Lyon 2/CNRS).