It is only a few days to Easter and Sham Al-Nessim in Egypt, and the hype is growing on food-making and food-shopping.
With all the Christian churches in the country celebrating Easter on the same day this year, rather than two different dates for the Eastern and Western churches, the excitement is even higher.
However, with the Sham Al-Nessim holiday coming only three weeks after the Eid Al-Fitr holiday at the end of Ramadan, the holy Muslim fasting month, and against the backdrop of increasing prices of fuel and subsequent rises in the prices of food, there are question marks among some merchants about the possible negative impacts of declining purchasing power on food-shopping, especially in areas with middle and lower incomes.
“Owing to tighter and tighter budgets and higher and higher prices, people are spending less on non-essential food items, including those related to specific occasions like Sham Al-Nessim,” said Mahmoud Tahnoun, the owner of a chain of salted fish stores in the Delta.
“This Sham Al-Nessim is not going to be good for sales,” he said. Speaking around a week before Sham Al-Nessim, which falls on the Monday following Easter according to the Coptic Orthodox Church, Tahnoun said that his regular clients have been placing “significantly smaller orders” for fesikh (salted mullet), with some reducing the quality wanted in order to cut down on the prices paid.
“We used to get some really big orders of close to 100 or more kg for families who hold a Sham Al-Nessim lunch on the extended-family scale, with many cousins and nephews and so on, but this is rare this year,” he said.
Moreover, he added, the cuts in supplies have also included the big supermarkets in Alexandria and Cairo, which would normally have requested large orders of quality fesikh to be sent over, including shredded and jarred fesikh for those who do not wish to enjoy the traditional Sham Al-Nessim meal while abandoning standard table manners.
According to Tahnoun, the cuts are particularly noticeable in stores in Muslim-majority neighbourhoods and less so in neighbourhoods where there is a significant Christian population. Muslims have already had their festive fesikh banquet on the first or second day of Eid Al-Fitr, which means they have a tighter budget to spend on the Sham Al-Nessim banquet.
Christians, who have been mostly observing Lent, would be spending more money on fesikh, he said.
Moreover, in the big cities, where more people can afford the fesikh feast more than once within the same month, there is a declining taste for salted mullet. “In Cairo or Alexandria, people do not particularly like to go for fesikh or molouha (salted dogfish). They are more into salted herring or some other types of seafood, and this further cuts fesikh consumption.”
“I am not seeing a good season this year, and even with Eid Al-Fitr the demand was not as high as it used to be. Obviously, spending on this type of non-essential food is suffering significant cuts due to the economic situation,” he said.
He added that the increase in the prices of fuel has “got people apprehensive, and apprehension prompts less spending on all non-essential items.” He said that he had decided to produce less fesikh this Sham Al-Nessim compared to last year.
Luckily, the salting techniques used have seen advances with the introduction of salting ovens that allow for the mullet to be ripe for fesikh fans in a shorter period of time. “Instead of waiting for two weeks or so, I can now secure the same quality of fish within a few days due to the updated techniques of salting,” he said.
Tahnoun has also decided to cut down on the quantity of shredded fesikh this year, given the smaller orders he has got from supermarkets.
“For the majority of Egyptians, eating fesikh is not just about the meal itself, along with the green onions, the green salad, and the baladi bread. It is also about the ritual of eating without cutlery. Above all, it is about having the entire mullet served and having to cut it up in the process of eating,” Tahnoun said.
“I guess this applies to the majority of people who live across the country from Alexandria to Aswan.”
However, whichever way people eat their fesikh, or for that matter herring or molouha, cuts are in order due to the economic crunch.
CUTTING BACK: According to Ragia, a Heliopolis housewife, “cuts are inevitable for everything nowadays, sometimes at a radical level, sometimes less so.”
On Palm Sunday, Ragia would normally be buying several crafted palms both for her family and for friends and neighbours, especially Muslim neighbours who enjoy receiving them.
However, this year, “more than last year or the year before,” Ragia said that she was much more economical in her purchases. “The prices are much higher this year,” she said. Consequently, she had decided to cut down not just on the number of giveaways, but also on the items she gets for her own family.
“I used to get each of my grandchildren several items — a cross, a crown, and maybe a bracelet or a ring for Easter, but not this year,” she said. On stepping out of church on Palm Sunday, she asked each of her five grandchildren who attended the mass with her to choose only one item.
Moreover, she said that this year she had decided to cut down on food purchases. This started with Lent, when she decided to make vegan food at home, “including falafel”.
“The prices are insane. I made falafel at home from scratch instead of buying it on the go as I have been doing for the longest time. I did the same with koshari, and I stopped buying frozen ready-to-fry potatoes and went back to making fries from scratch,” she said.
For Easter and Sham Al-Nessim, Ragia said that she also made some significant cuts. She had scrapped the traditional cheese and chocolate shopping. She had bought fewer kg of kahk (traditional cakes) “to keep the tradition,” and she had decided to only buy salted herring and to drop the salted mullet because her grandchildren are not into fesikh.
According to Khaled Mahmoud, founder of a three-year-old craftsman cream business, in Cairo and other big cities, especially in communities with relatively high spending, it is unusual to find many in the younger generation who fancy a typical fesikh banquet.
He argued that for this segment of society, which has the highest purchasing power, it is more smoked salmon, smoked herring, and seafood salads with shrimps, tuna, crab, avocados, pineapples, and green apples that people go for. This, he added, has made his business that makes smoked salmon tarts and shrimp tartlets successful this season.
However, on the understanding that for most families the older generation are still into fesikh, Mahmoud had created a fesikh tart on a base of avocado, green onions, and brown toast. “Our clients often place an order for several non-fesikh items and add one fesikh tart,” he said.
When this item was first introduced, he said he was not sure that it would qualify to be “fesikh enough” for the lovers of traditional salted mullet. However, “it actually worked very well as part of a wider selection of dishes.”
Mahmoud said that creating untraditional presentations of otherwise very traditional dishes has been quite successful.
“It is not just about fesikh but also about many other traditional dishes,” he said. For Ramadan like for Lent, Mahmoud created several items that went viral, including falafel tartlets, bessara [salty fava beans and a green onion dip] tarts, and a mini-shawerma sandwiches tower.
Mahmoud argued that while a “fashionable presentation” is certainly a factor when the well-off consume traditional meals, there is also “the fact that when they can afford it, people like to have something new on their dining table.”
This, he said, was the key to the success of items like his shrimp and salmon selection assembled in a Christmas tree shape and in an arrangement created in a Christmas wreath fashion.
NARRATIVES: According to Sabrina, manager of one of the oldest patisseries in Heliopolis, festive food “is always subject to the influences of diversity”.
“For example, for close to 70 years we have been making chocolate Easter Bunnies. Some older patisseries have been making them in Heliopolis and Downtown for much longer. We also make Easter bread with dyed eggs, which is not something many patisseries would do. This is clearly owing to the influence of the foreign communities who once lived in Heliopolis,” she said.
Novelist Karoline Kamel argued that the Christian festivities are already subject to the differences of the churches from a cultural and not just from a confessional point of view.
“For example, the braiding of palms in the shape of crosses and crowns is something that is very specific to the Coptic Orthodox Church, and this style of braiding is very Egyptian,” she said. Other churches, in Egypt and elsewhere in the world, just carry regular palms “or alternatively tree branches or leaves”, she said.
With Easter being celebrated this year by all the churches at the same time, it is more visible, though the sellers of palms were mostly in the vicinity of the Coptic Orthodox Churches. When Easter does not fall on the same day for all the churches, it is practically impossible to see palms sellers by a Catholic or an Evangelical church.
Equally, Kamel said that the long masses that the Orthodox Church holds for Holy Week, with many chants being performed in the Coptic language, is not paralleled in other churches, including the Catholic Coptic Church of Egypt.
Monica Hanna, dean of the College of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage in Cairo, agreed that the influences of ancient Egypt on the country’s Coptic Orthodox Church are clear in the exercise of several rituals, especially processions that are longer and more elaborate than those of other churches.
Meanwhile, Kamel noted that even among the followers of the same church, norms, and traditions can vary according to geographic and socio-economic zones. The behaviour and practices of the followers of the Coptic Orthodox Church in the well-off Zamalek neighbourhood of Cairo are different from their counterparts in the less economically privileged Shubra district, for example.
Equally, she said that there are clear differences between Easter festivities in Upper Egypt, the Delta, and Cairo.
In her hometown of Mahalla Al-Kobra in the Delta, Kamel said, a key baked item is fetirat al-samna (ghee brioche). “This is not something that one would typically find in Cairo,” she said.
Today, she added, due to the economic crunch many people depend on vegetable oil rather than the more expensive ghee to bake these brioches. “However, they insist on having them baked because just like fesikh it is part of the Easter/Sham Al-Nessim tradition,” she said.
Moreover, it is unlikely for Coptic men in Cairo, Alexandria, or the Delta to wear a crown made of braided palms on Palm Sunday. “It is, however, perfectly ordinary for men in Upper Egypt to wear these crowns and other items,” she said.
Judging by her own experience as someone who has lived in different governorates, Kamel argued that festivities have been changing all over the country. “For example, in many urban areas Christian families from different economic classes have been replacing the traditional kahk biscuits with chocolate and French pastries.”
This is not necessarily part of a trend of Westernisation among some segments of Egyptian Coptic Christians who have during the past two decades chosen Latin versions of Christian surnames for their children. She explained that it is rather a matter of convenience, given that it is easier and more economical to buy a big chocolate cake and to have it served at the Easter dinner than to have to buy kahk, which is not traditionally bought in small quantities.
Kamel added that for the largest segment of the middle class, kahk is still baked for Easter as it is for Christmas, in line with tradition.
According to Nahla Emam, professor of Folk Habits, Beliefs, and Traditional Knowledge at the Higher Institute of Folklore at the Academy of Arts, it is mostly the residents of rural areas and the members of the middle classes in urban areas away from the capital who act as “the guardians of traditions and heritage”.
She argued that unlike those with more means and more exposure to foreign influences, “those people are the most faithful to keeping the traditions and passing them on to the younger generations.”
It is this communication of habits and traditions, Emam argued, that is essential for the survival of living heritage. “But whatever happens, things are always subject to change, especially when it comes to food associated with certain holidays.”
“This is the important thing — that the tradition does not fall out of practice, even as it inevitably recreates itself in some sense,” Emam said.
“From this point of view, it is not particularly significant to try to determine whether the kahk we eat today is really similar to what the ancient Egyptians knew,” she said. “Nor is it important to decide when exactly the Egyptians started to throw powdered sugar on top of their kahk or when they started to make inscriptions on it and whether there are specific inscriptions on specific occasions.”
“On Muslim and Christian festive seasons, the inscriptions are always the same in a way,” she said.
According to Hanna, it is pointless to try to force a single narrative onto any aspect of heritage simply because there is not enough evidence about these practices and also because it is wrong to assume that heritage is one story that is never contested.
“Heritage is about how we in the present engage with the past. This is why we argue that heritage relates more to the present than to the past,” she said.
“Some people argue that the kahk they eat today started in ancient Egyptian times, and this is true to an extent,” she added. “In any case, heritage is about multiple narratives. There is no reason to assume that any one narrative is particularly significant.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 17 April, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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