Egyptian Cuisine

Egyptian cuisine is characterized by heavy use of poultry, legumes, vegetables and fruit drawn from Egypt's fertile Nile Valley and Delta, the product of thousands of years of culinary evolution across successive civilizations. A significant portion of the cuisine is vegetarian, largely a consequence of the country's agricultural landscape and its farmers' historical food traditions, and it relies on rice, lentils, fava beans and vegetables in dishes such as ful medames, stewed fava beans, koshary, a mixture of rice, lentils and pasta, and molokhiya, a green soup made from jute leaves, alongside eish baladi, a thick pita bread eaten at nearly every meal. Ancient Egyptian cooking centered for millennia on bread and beer, the Greco Roman period introduced olive oil and wine, and the medieval era brought further influence through trade and migration, including Persian and Moroccan culinary contact, while the twentieth century saw formal cooking education narrow the divide between elite and peasant food. Tea is the national beverage, desserts favor dates, honey and nuts, and the cuisine is generally strongly spiced with cumin, coriander and garlic and centered on communal dining.