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Egyptians take great pride in their national cuisine. Egyptian cooking is associated with its long, ancient history and much of the traditional cooking techniques and ingredients are a reminder of these classical times. Trying the local cuisine is an essential part of Egypt holidays. If you’re planning a Trip to Egypt on your holidays, make sure you eat well on your trip with our quick guide. We take a look at ten of the most popular and best tasting examples of Egyptian cuisine.

Egyptian food tends to include a lot of vegetables, mostly because the fertile lands surrounding the Nile make for rich crops. Main dishes often include beans and legumes and are seasoned heavily with garlic and onion, which dates from ancient cooking styles.

1. Bread. Bread has been a mainstay in Egyptian diets since ancient times. Meals are nearly always served with bread and this is considered to be the heart of the meal. The main bread is a thick pita style called Eish Balad, which roughly translates as ‘alive’.

Bread is seen as a central food for life and an essential item in Egyptian Cuisine. One of the reasons for the popularity of bread is that it can be used as a utensil. Pitas are convenient for holding other local dishes, such as falafels or kebabs.

2. Falafel. Not only eaten in Egypt but common in many parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. Falafel are deep fried chick pea balls that fit perfectly in a pita and make an ideal starter or side dish.

3. Kabab, also known as Kofte. Kabab traditionally involves lamb cuts grilled on skewers. It is common for this meat to then be enjoyed in a pita bread.

4. Mahshi Hamam is made by stuffing pigeon with rice and then roasting the bird. This dish is very popular in all parts of Egypt.

5. Mashi Waraaenab. Instead of putting it inside meat, the rice in this dish is mixed with either beef or vegetables and the stuffed into grape leaves and heavily seasoned. It is then topped with a tomato sauce.

6. Alexandrian Fish. In Alexandria, fish is very common and famous fish dishes from this are include Samak Mashway, which is simply grilled fish and Samak Makly, which is fried fish.

7. Tagin. This dish can be found all over North Africa. It derives its name from the pot (tagin) in which the food is cooked and can include a variety of ingredients such as beef, lamb, chickpeas, broad beans and a selection of vegetables.

8. Tahin is a sesame paste made from ground sesame seeds and is so prevalent that it is used where the British may have butter or mayonnaise as a moistening agent.

9. Koshari is a very popular dish in Egypt. It is traditionally made using lentils, rice, garlic and onion and then topped with a tomato sauce. Koshari doesn’t date as far back as ancient times, but it thought to have been brought to Egypt from India by British troops.

10. Basbousa is an example of a popular Egyptian dessert, although it can be found in many other countries in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. Basbousa is made from semolina and is enhanced with spice and sugar syrup

A country so rich in history is almost certainly going to offer a wide selection of local delicacies that are created with traditional and age old cooking techniques. The widespread use of bread from ancient times and classical techniques such tagin cooking can still be experienced today. Making good use of seasoning, age old styles and local crops, Egyptian cuisine is rich in both flavour and history.

Luxor and Aswan, Egypt Private Tours

When it’s cold at home, where are the best places to go to find sunny weather and rid yourself of your hat and gloves? If you’re looking for ideas for where to go on your holidays next year to ensure you get some warm weather in January, we take a look at some of the sunniest places to go during the month of January.

From Asia to Africa and all around the globe, while we are in our winter doldrums, others are sunning themselves and drinking mojitos. Here’s a look at five of the best places to go to find fantastic January weather.

When it’s cold at home, there’s somewhere you can guarantee it will be warm and that’s down under. The island continent of Australia enjoys its hot summers during December, January and February. Average high temperatures in Sydney are around 78F in January.

When it’s hot, many Australians head to the beach to cool down. The Bondi Beach area in New South Wales has long been considered one of the world’s best surfing spots. Visitors can enjoy the surf or just watch from the comfort of a sun lounger.

Mexico is a popular place for January holidays. Great places for beach holidays include the Baja California peninsula, home to the famous Cabo San Lucas resort. Average highs in January are around 76 degrees Fahrenheit.

If you want sun with a bit of culture thrown in, then Mexico offers many archaeological treats. The famous Mexican ruins of Teotihuacan, dating from over 2000 years ago, are located close to Mexico City and are considered by some to be the best ruins in Mexcio.

Although it’s their cool season, January is the ideal time to visit Thailand. The weather is warm and they get the most hours of sunshine and least rainfall during January.

If its beach life you’re after, then the party islands of Koh Samui and Koh Phangnan are popular destinations. Koh Phangnan is home to the famous Full Moon party held each month.

For a more laidback Thai holiday, then Chiang Mai on the mainland is a wonderful place to enjoy the wildlife and taste the very best of Thai cuisine. Cookery classes and elephant rides are some of the popular activities at Chiang Mai.

During January, South Africa has average high temperatures of around 79F. It’s hard to decide the best place to go in South Africa, but the Western Cape area, with its Table Mountain and great beaches, has become increasingly popular with holiday makers.

Over the New Year period, Cape Town celebrates New Year like nowhere else on earth, with a huge carnival. Other South African highlights are the many safari experiences, most famously in the Kruger National Park.

For a perfect blend of culture, good weather and great activities, then the ever popular country of Egypt has it all. Attractions such as the Pyramids of Giza, the Temple of Luxor and the Abu-Simbel Temples are all big pulls for history lovers.

Nile cruises are a fantastic way to appreciate the beauties of Egypt. With average temperatures in January around 78 degrees Fahrenheit, where better place to be than on the deck of a boat?

If you’re after cheap holidays, then Egypt is an ideal location. Beach culture in the Red Sea resorts such as Sharm el Sheik is alive and kicking during January. The Red Sea is famous as an excellent deep sea diving destination. By night, the bars and clubs of Sharm El Sheik keep going till the early hours.

When New Year has been celebrated and Christmas is a memory for another 12 months, if you live somewhere chilly, January can be a miserable time. Finding sunshine during January is a guaranteed way to lighten the winter doldrums.

With warm places a plenty in January from Asia to Africa, Australia to South America, you may end up wishing Christmas away so that you can start your holidays in the sun.

MOHAMMAD THE GUIDE
The often mentioned Mohammed was our guide for the twelve days we toured in northern Egypt. He is a very religious man with the stain on his forehead, the result of banging his head either on a stone, if the story can be believed, but certainly on the ground during his time of prayer. The stain is still a bruise and had not yet become a callous, but he is still young. As an observant Moslem, he does not question the rules. He obeys, he submits to the will of Allah and does not drink whiskey or beer. He understands he is excused from prayer when he is working but will not miss the all important Friday prayer. More than once we were left sitting on the side of the road while he grabbed his prayer rug out of the glove compartment and rushed to take part in a service held in a roadside mosque. Mohammad is also an educated man. He graduated from college, became an Egyptologist, and can read hieroglyphs. He values the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. He lived and worked in England in the tour business for five years before returning to Egypt to become a free lance tour guide. Like the other Egyptian men we spoke with, he likes Obama, hates the Israelis, also hates the Palestinians, knows his country is corrupt, knows the elections are managed, and welcomes Mubarak’s son to take over from the father as a way to maintain stability.

What I did find remarkable was his thoughts about Naquib Mahfouz. Mahfouz, the winner of the 1988 Noble Prize for Literature, is Egypt’s most important author and probably the best author in the Middle East. At first, influenced by Western writers, he soon found his Arabic voice. He wrote about ordinary Egyptian people, using universal themes describing their struggles, hopes, and failures. The people living in the alleyways were often his subject matter. However, according to Mohammad, in his books, Mahfouz defamed his country, his people, and his religion and for these reasons, Mahfouz has to be killed. Mohammad fervently proclaimed to us that he was prepared to kill him if they should ever met. Mahfouz had been the target of a knife attack in 1994 and the fact that he died in 2006 did not seem to faze Mohammad. I pointed out to him that as an educated man, who has lived outside his country, he should be able to separate fact from fiction and that Mahfouz was writing fiction. Mohammad was unwilling to change his point of view and because Mahfouz’s characters did bad things, Mahfouz, the author, had to die. I asked him if he did not think he was being irrational. By this time, he was yelling his responses and told us he knew if he had the opportunity to do this, he would become a different person. He was prepared to become a martyr, not Mohammad the educated guide. As a believer, it was his obligation to protect his religion from abuse. He was more than ready to accept the consequences for killing someone. Keep in mind, this is the opinion of a young educated Egyptian.

THE GUIDE NUMBER 3
When our time with Mohammad was over, he told us he had never encountered people like us. No one had ever asked him about politics, no one had ever made him go the camel market or stop alongside the road to pick dates off a tree. I had told him I was a history major, had turned art history into a hobby and had been reading about Egypt for the past eight months. Like a client profile, all of this information must have been passed along to our second guide, Aiyman. Ayman was responsible for us in the areas around Aswan and Luxor. He might not have had Mohammad’s polish and breadth of knowledge, but unlike, Mohammed, Aiyman at least had a sense of humor. He told us about the Egyptian name game. If you forgot someone’s name just call him Mohammed or Ahmed or Mahmud, derivatives of Mohammed, and 90% of the time you would be correct. He did well in Aswan and Luxor but when it came time to visit the temples at Abydos and Denderah, Aiyman played it safe and called in an expert.

When I met him in the lobby, he told me to call him John and yes, he was an expert on these two sites, as per his own recommendation. John was wearing faded jeans and a hoody. He told me there were ten children in his family and even though his mother had died, his father made sure that all of his children went to college. I did not get the details on how this was possible but he told me he graduated from the American University in Cairo. After that he was one of 14,000 applicants for a scholarship to study in the United States and was one of the 650 who succeeded. To make it a small world story, he told they sent him to a college in Atlanta, Georgia , where he received a master’s degree in English literature. I had never heard of his college and even though he had not heard about U.T. football, I found no reason to doubt him.

We did the touring and yes, he was good. On the way back to the hotel, not to miss an opportunity, I asked him what he thought about Mubarak’s son succeeding his father. In a manner similar to the others, he wanted this because it would assure stability. Even though this is not the exact comparison, I kept thinking of the Germans in the late 1930′s who thought the same about voting from Hitler. Being a literature major, he did not want to kill Mahfouz even though he was critical of Egyptian society. As per Mohammad, he hated both the Israelis and the Palestinians and knew the government was corrupt. Unlike Mohammad, he was skeptical of Obama and said so far Obama was more words than action. Before I could ask him more questions, he brought up the war in Afghanistan. He was confident in his knowledge that the American army fighting there was made up from mercenaries recruited from Central America. He told me that America would not send its best young men into such a conflict. I told him that was just not true. What I have found most interesting with all the men we spoke with, when the Egyptian makes up his mind, regardless of the facts, he is staying with his opinions. I am not sure where this information came from because he told me that he did not believe anything he read in the Egyptian newspapers and would only believe that which he saw with his own eyes. A statement that verbally contradicts what he said before. I asked him if he read English language Western newspapers on the internet. He told me he was not interested in that news. I asked him when he became disinterested in the world around him. He replied this happened when he become an Egyptologist. Maybe trying to regain the upper hand, he looked at me and said I have criticisms about your democracy. He then refused to explain what he meant. Now these are the statements from one of their brightest who spent time living and studying in the United States and remains firmly convinced we have a mercenary army in Afghanistan.

TAXI DRIVER’S LAMENT
Donald and I often stood on a corner and flagged down taxi drivers, especially in the evening as we were going out to dinner. The taxi, usually painted black and white, is small and similar to the Ambassador car in India, it is stripped down to the bare necessities without any thought for passenger comfort. Depending who you ask, the car is either made in Russia or Italy. The dash board is usually draped in fake animal pellets and prayer cards dangle from the rear view mirror and suction cups attached to the roof. The back seat is the repository for the dust and sand blown in from the nearby desert.

One night in Alexandria, we were picked up by a young man. When he found out we were from the United States, he promptly told us 9/11 happened because we treat the Muslims very badly. He was repeating the “party line” and apparently not willing to change his mind, we felt no need to respond to his statement. Then he told us he lived in the United States and liked it very much. Everyone was very nice to him. He drove a taxi and we think he owned a car. He lived in Harrisonburg, Pennsylvania, and married a woman he called Becky. He is angry with the U.S. because he was deported. Apparently, he did not have a green card. The details of his story do not mesh but I found it interesting that even though he learned to repeat the mantra that we treat Muslims poorly, he still wants to return to the United States and remains upset we threw him out.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

TOURING

Depending on whose figures you use, approximately twelve million people visit Egypt each year. From all parts of Europe, they are rounded up and packaged into inexpensive tours and arrive in plane loads or ship loads to be repackaged into bus loads and deposited at the tourist sites. Wherever Donald and I went, we had the feeling all twelve million tourists had just arrived ahead of us. It was a struggle to view the monuments without peering over someone’s shoulder or around the back of someone’s head. When walking in front of the crowd to get a better view, we constantly had to apologize for interfering with someone’s photo. When they look at their photos, I am sure many will wonder who we are. Briefly stated, the crowds made it hard to maintain the aurora, if it was a popular monument, we saw it from the back of someone’s head and if it was precious and found in all the art history books, it was closed. At times, it was hard to fight off the debilitating sense of frustration.

THE TOURISTS ARE COMING

Even though they are not able to alleviate their traffic nightmare, they have been very cleaver in organizing their tourist sites, adept at moving people quickly in and out. The parking facilities are the size of football fields and bus drivers park their buses so close together that passengers can only pass between the buses by standing sideways. With their motors running and air conditioning blasting, they are leaving yeti size carbon footprints.

Each monument has an organized entryway through the main gate with a ticket taker and the exit is always through gift shops that are set up like a souk where individual merchants sell a variety of Pharaonic kitsch. The owner of these mini shops is usually the overweight man sitting in the corner, wearing a white shirt and drinking sugary mint tea from a juice glass. His sales clerk, usually a member of his extended family, is in the aisle hawking his wares. They approached us with beaded necklaces, shawls, Arabic head scarves, pocketbooks, guide books, draped over their arms and around their necks and miniature busts of Nefertiti and small pyramids stuffed into their pockets. Even before we had a chance to say no, they would lower the price. Compared to the aggressive Asian vendors, these people are tame. One firm no thank you and they were off, maybe because behind us were twelve million more opportunities.

EATING OUT

Even though there are Egyptian specialties and I am sure every Egyptian male loves and honors his mother’s cooking, there does not seem to be, at least in America, a designated Egyptian cuisine. When you consult Zagats for New York, there is no separate listing for Egyptian restaurants. Egyptian food, such as it is, is considered part of Middle Eastern cuisine where the Lebanese reign supreme. Most nights we consulted the tour books, the guides, and the concierge for restaurant recommendations, left the comforts of the hotel, flagged down a cab and were off for an evening’s adventure. We soon realized the variety of food was limited and often we repeated for dinner what we had eaten for lunch. Of course, there are no pigs, no bacon, no BBQ ribs but the chicken was usually good, the beef as kebabs workable and much better when it was minced up like kofta and surprisingly, the lamb, which was probably mutton, unworkable. But like the denizens of Santa Fe who must have a daily chili fix, we always looked forward to the selection of mezzes that always landed on the table in plate after plate. As addicts, we dipped pita and flat bread into plates of hummus, tahina, babaghanosh, labneh, and fuul. We devoured the falafel and the salads of tabouleh, even though we had to spend the rest of the day picking parsley out of our teeth. Like anywhere else, we could judge the quality of the meal by the selection of bread, when it came warm, the food would usually be good. Sadly, so many times the pita was cold but the Middle Eastern pastries never failed to satisfy. As for my opinion, the best Middle Eastern food is still Time Out Deli in Knoxville, Tennessee.

FINDING SOMETHING TO DRINK

We found out very soon that beer, wine, and whisky are available only in hotels or restaurants catering to foreigners. If you do not want to pay five to seven dollars for a can of beer, then you can always chose from their excellent selection of fruit juices. However, for a country that does not approve of drinking, they have an excellent beer, Stella. As they have done in other countries, the Germans taught them how to make it. As for wine, they produce a red wine that is so bad someone would “have to hold a gun to your head to make you drink it.” The white wind is acceptable and went down easy, especially when poured over a glass of ice. However, the best of all was Arak, sweetly smelling of licorice and soft on the pallet.

SECURITY

Egypt has three main sources of income: tourism, the Suez Canal, and remittances from overseas workers. We were advised that tourism represents 20% of the GDP. Since Sadat’s l978 peace treaty with Israel, home grown militant Muslims have targeted Egypt, hoping to dislocate the tourist industry. The attacks during the 1990′s, climaxing with the 1997 bombing of a tour bus in front of the Cairo Museum to be followed a few weeks later with an attack on tourists in Luxor at the temple of Hatshepsut, sent tourist numbers plummeting. In 2005, Sharm el-Sheikh, the famed diving center and main tourist city at the end of the Sinai Peninsula, witnessed the destruction of much of its old market area along with the deaths of a sizeable number of tourists. Today, the area is just beginning to recover. As a result, the tourist sites and much of Cairo and Alexandria are under the protection of the tourist police. X-Ray machines screen all bags and tourists can be padded on a regular basis. It will take only one terrorist with a well placed bomb to cripple their tourist industry, which in turn would be devastating to their economy. Nevertheless, as with so many other aspects of Egypt, the need for security is juxtaposed with a laxness of execution.

THE PAST THE PRESENT BUT IS THERE A FUTURE?

Five thousand years ago, the Egyptians were brilliant, witnessed by the construction of the pyramids, their advances in agriculture, medicine, and science. Yet today, they are so stymied by the presence of modern dilemmas that they cannot alleviate their traffic problems, free themselves from their suffocating pollution, or find adequate housing and jobs for their twenty plus million people. By 2:30, the traffic in Cairo no longer flows and as time passes, it ripens to a standstill, a parking lot with drivers so resigned to this state of affairs they rarely honk their horns. Then if there is a brief opening, cars rush to fill the void, creating another traffic jam that requires more time to sort out because no one gives the other a chance. Both Cairo and Alexandria suffer from a lack of traffic lights and rubbish bins and even in five star hotels, the water runs the color of sand.

Since 1992, Donald and I have traveled widely, especially in third world, developing countries and know the intellectual dishonesty inherent in comparing one place to the other, one culture to another. But Egypt is different, it did not develop in a vacuum. Since it was “discovered” by Napoleon in the early 19th, it has developed under the watchful eye of Europe. Until the advent of Nasser, after his 1952 coup, Egypt had leaned toward the West and no manner how mismanaged, it had been under the governing hand of England and the cultural influence of France. In 1956, Nasser denied the western concept of democracy and the respect for the individual and began to reclaim Egypt’s Moslem heritage. The French language was out, Arabic was in. Foreigners and non Muslims were encouraged to leave and others were forced out, even those who had made their home in Egypt for generations. Nasser’s mysterious death from a heart attack in 1970 led to the advent of Sadat, his second in command. From that time, Sadat turned his back on Russia, ended Nasser’s nationalization policy with a return to privatization and made peace with Israel, for which he paid with his life.

Since the time of Sadat, Egypt has been in transition with elements of society embracing the modern world, globalization and all that entails. As in every developing country, the elites seem to be doing well, but not everyone is making the great leap forward. In addition to being a tour guide, the good jobs are in the civil service, the police department, and the army and, as per tradition, these coveted positions are obtained mostly through family contacts. If all else fails, Egyptians work outside the country, mostly in the Arab world, where there is a chance of being mistreated or cheated out of their pay. Faced not only with a stagnant job market, the Egyptians are experiencing increases in foodstuff and the cost of living has sky rocketed.

For many, the promise of prosperity has been forgotten, replaced with a lack of hope. Today, Egypt is fragile but it is the patience of the people and the power of the government that is holding organized society together. As palpable as the pollution, a malaise of futility has settled over the country. When we spoke to the people, the taxi drivers, the hotel baggage handlers, the waiters, we could feel hopelessness and the lack of optimism for the future.

When we went to dinner with my daughter’s friend, Jon Shippard, a Fulbright scholar and a political science professor at the American University in Cairo, he took us to an up- scale restaurant. Here we had the opportunity to observe what could be considered Cairo’s young Jet Set, the scions of wealthy Carines. The parking lot was packed with Mercedes and drivers waiting. Not one woman was wearing a head scarf. Instead, this smart set was concerned with the latest fashion. Women were wearing tight jeans and revealing tops, enjoying the company of men and smoking sheshas. The beer and wine was flowing and the music was Arabic hip hop.

While these affluent young people are seeking answers in the global community, others are turning to their religion. In the 1920′s, women desiring to be modern, threw off their abeyyas and headscarves, somewhat akin to American women burning their bras in the 1960′s. But today, the freedoms sought by their grandmothers is being thrown on the dust bins of history as almost all women in Egypt are wearing head scarves and many more are reclaiming the abeyyas, covering their bodies and well as their faces in black.

The soul of Egypt seems to be caught in a vise of its own making. The moral authority lies with the time honored traditions, expressed in the strictures and traditions of their religion: mullahs, prayers five times a day, Friday prayers, madrasses where students learn nothing more than how to read the Koran. Whether or not it is part of the religion or Arabic tribal society, women are expected to be subservient. But the sirens of the secular global world are calling and many are answering. Egypt is becoming a schizophrenic society, to learn to recite sutras by heart or to learn how to order from a wine list. As for the future, inshallah. Why can’t they have both?

Experience the Luxury of Egypt Independent Journeys and Tailor-Made Tours