Winner of the 2026 James Beard Award for Reference, History, and Scholarship
Best Culinary History Book in the World, Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2025

“Leaves few cultural-societal stones unturned in chronicling how the tomato gradually came to be a constant presence in Egyptian life.”―The Wall Street Journal

A cultural and culinary history of modern Egypt through the nation's beloved tomato. 
 
By the end of the twentieth century, the tomato―indigenous to the Americas―had become Egypt's top horticultural crop and a staple of Egyptian cuisine. The tomato brought together domestic consumers, cookbook readers, and home cooks through a shared culinary culture that sometimes transcended differences of class, region, gender, and ethnicity―and sometimes reinforced them.