It is past midnight in Old Cairo on the eve of 14 Ramadan (14 March), and the restaurants around Al-Muizz li-Din Allah Street are getting ready for Sohour.
Various options are available, with some focused strictly on fuul, falafel, and eggs and others taking menus to a richer and more expensive level.
“It is really a matter of what one can afford and what one enjoys. Personally, I prefer to go basic and stay away from the pricey versions of Sohour because I think they strip the tradition of its unassuming feel,” said Tarek, an engineer at a multinational company.
A Cairo resident in his late 50s, Tarek is accustomed to what he calls “the standard Sohour routine at Al-Hussein: fuul and falafel followed by yoghurt or rice pudding and tea with mint.”
This was the way things were prior to the introduction of fancy eating as a must-have experience for the well-to-do. In this respect, he added, his children’s generation is different, as “for them a Ramadan Sohour has to be trendy and chic.”
“I cannot blame them because it is part of the result of our class-segregated education system,” he said.
If planning a Sohour out with the family, Tarek said he would bow to the choices of his three children. However, for one with his high-school and university friends, he always goes basic.
“We might try something new, but we don’t go fancy,” he said. For their weekend Sohour last Thursday, they decided to try a new restaurant that is “only slightly more expensive and that serves beef liver, sausage, and kofta sandwiches” on a street called Harat Bab Al-Zahouma in Old Cairo, he said.
According to Abdel-Azim Fahmi, founder and chair of Sirat Al-Qahira, an initiative designed to document the history of Egypt’s longest-surviving capital city, the venue of this new restaurant is a centuries-old building that has been reworked to fit its new function.
It is one of two facing iwans, he said, explaining that an iwan is a rectangular space with walls on three sides. These two are part of the ruins of the Madrassa Al-Salaheiya, which was built in association with the 13th-century Ayoubid ruler Negmeddin Al-Saleh Ayoub.
However, Fahmi said, what was really special about this new popular restaurant is that it offers a meat-based menu. The name Harat Bab Al-Zahouma is associated with an even older period of Cairo’s history, that of the Fatimid Dynasty, he added.
“Bab al-Zahouma was one of nine gates to the Al-Qasr Al-Sharqi [the Eastern Palace] of the Fatimids, and its name is associated with the fact that it led to the kitchens of the palace,” Fahmi said.
He added that it was through this gate that meat, chicken, and other ingredients would enter the building.
Al-zahm, he explained, literally means the “sizzling” sound made when high-protein meals are being cooked. He added that throughout the year and especially in the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, it was through this gate that the rulers of the time would send large trays of food for distribution to the poor.
“Despite the few details we have about their cuisine, it is an established fact that the Fatimids had one of the best cuisines in Egypt, with cooks being brought over from different parts of the Islamic world at the time,” Fahmi stated.
He added that it is equally an established fact that the Fatimids were particularly generous with their food donations, especially during the month of Ramadan.
Generous food donations, Fahmi said, were signs of the stability and wealth of the rulers of Egypt throughout the subsequent Islamic dynasties, especially during the fasting month of Ramadan that has always been associated “both with food and charity”.
Today, however, food charities are more about economic difficulties than about times of prosperity, he added.
“Charitable gifts of food always took place in Ramadan, because they are part of the Islamic creed, but during the past few decades we have been seeing many more such charities due to the economic difficulties that have been making it increasingly difficult for many to put sufficiently nourishing food on the table,” said Hoda, an upper-middle class housewife who is committed to several charities, both in fund-raising and distribution.
FOOD AID: Like other members of independent small charities, or larger and government-supervised ones, Hoda argues that more and more people are in need of help to get their basic dietary needs, especially in the month of Ramadan where Iftar meals are part of the festivity of the month.
“Food prices have been increasing year on year, and a modest family that would have been able to provide chicken or meat for Iftar a few times a week a few years ago is now unlikely to be able to do this more than once or twice during the entire month,” she said.
She added that the inflation the country has seen in food prices has also come at a cost for charities. The charities she is associated with have stopped giving out enough meat or chicken to cover all family members for every Ramadan Iftar, for example.
“It is not sustainable, not just because prices have been increasing and donors have been working with tighter budgets, but also because the number of people we need to help has increased,” she added.
This has been the case despite the many government-operated markets that provide food items, including meat and poultry, at reasonable prices across the country.
“It is all relative because even though the prices in these outlets are cheaper than those at other supermarkets or butchers’ shops, they remain too expensive for an increasing number of people,” Hoda said.
“What people do is go for the cheaper items that make them feel full but don’t provide a sufficient intake of protein or vitamins,” she added.
Critics of food-subsidy programmes in the country blame low-protein and low-vitamin and high-starch and high-sugar items for poor nutrition and obesity.
According to hunger index figures for 2023, around 14 per cent of the population are at some risk of food insecurity. Meanwhile, malnutrition figures have been on the increase, especially among children, according to UN agencies. According to the statistics agency CAPMAS, family spending on food has declined significantly over the past few years.
“Even if people were still allocating the same percentage of their monthly budget to food, they would still be suffering from significant reductions in high-protein and high-vitamin elements given the huge increase in prices,” Hoda said.
“This is why this year we decided to focus only on providing meat, chicken, and fruit rather than the more diversified basket we had before. We also don’t do the entire list of families on our lists on a daily basis, but we use an every-other-day scheme,” she added.
Despite such cuts, Hoda said that Ramadan has become for many the only time when they get to eat meat and chicken several times during the same month.
Meanwhile, the Ramadan culinary luxuries that every Iftar should have are off the table for many, including those not helped by charity. “For the first day of Ramadan and when we have family relatives coming over for Iftar, I make sure to stick to rich meals. But to compensate I cook vegetarian meals on the other days,” said Hala, a civil servant.
“Different times have different norms, and what was possible a few years back is no longer possible,” she added.
Hala is content that her family can still eat the traditional roasted duck and stuffed vegetables on the first day and the boiled-and-fried chicken with rice and vegetables for two days a week, which is above the increasingly once-a-week average of the past two years.
Otherwise, she said, she makes use of recipes collected from magazines and cookery programmes on TV that she would ordinarily not look at. She is trying to learn how to cook new recipes, she said, and to get family members to enjoy them, “even if they are not what they would have normally expected.”
In his book Kohl and Habban (Kohl and Quadrumane) issued in 2019 after the first two devaluations of the Egyptian pound that ushered in severe food-price inflation, Omar Taher documents the taste for roasted and grilled meat and chicken that most Egyptians enjoy especially in Ramadan.
The preferred dishes come from the heart of Egyptian cuisine, including meat stew or boiled-and-fried duck, he said.
According to food historians, because Egypt was once part of a larger Islamic Dynasty, its cuisine, like that of other parts of the Muslim Caliphate, is inevitably eclectic. It was mostly during the 19th and 20th centuries, especially after the rule of the Khedive Ismail who was keen on embracing European norms, that European meals and eating habits were introduced among some sections of the population.
The first cookery book of European recipes, especially French, appeared in Arabic in Egypt in 1906. However, given the fact that at the time Egypt was under British occupation, there was a mood to reject everything European in favour of everything Egyptian, and this led to a vogue for cookery books focusing on national recipes, including those from specific geographic zones including Upper Egypt and the coastal cities.
“It is unfortunate that we have nothing left from the recipes of the earlier Islamic dynasties, as this would have allowed us to examine the evolution of dishes, cooking methods, and festive meals,” Fahmi said.
“What we know for a fact is that there was always a passion for a good meal followed by an abundance of desserts, especially in the month of Ramadan. This much is established,” he concluded.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 20 March, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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