Travel Guide

Travel Guide

Useful Information about Egypt


Food

Not a lot of people know that Egypt is not only famous for its ancient monuments, culture and revolution, but it is also famous for its great food. Egyptian food is a mixture of all the different civilizations that came to Egypt in the history of its existence. Nowhere in the world will you be able to taste so many cultures in one plate. Below is a list of the most delicious and popular dishes served up in Egypt today.

Kushari: Considered to be the Egyptian national dish, it consists of pasta and tomato sauce, among other items, including rice, lentils, caramelized onions, garlic and chickpeas. Having four sources of carbohydrates has made it the most popular lunch item in most common food outlets in Egypt for over 100 years. Interestingly enough, Kushari’s origins are not Egyptian at all, in fact it was a dish brought in by the British army in Egypt in the 19th century: the pasta was imported from Italy, the tomatoes are from Latin America and the rice from Asia, however the idea to mix them all together in one extremely delicious and vegetarian dish was conceived in Egypt.

Ful Medames: One of the common staple foods in Egypt, it consists of lava beans served with oil, garlic and lemon juice. Ful Medames can be traced to Pharaonic roots, and quantities have been found in the Twelfth dynasty. The word “Medames” is Coptic for “buried” which refers to the way it was initially cooked: in a pot buried in hot coal or sand. Ful Medames can be served with many embellishments such as butter, tomato sauce, tahini, fried or boiled eggs and pastrami. However, the most traditional method is to eat it plain and salted in an Egyptian bread bun. Nowadays, Ful Medames is exported to many Middle Eastern countries such as Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.

Fatta: Considered a Nubian dish, fatta is usually prepared for festivities such as a woman’s first birth, and both Christian and Muslim holiday celebrations. It consists of layers of rice and fried bread, covered in a garlic and vinegar meat soup. Large chunks of stewed beef and deep-fried poached eggs are usually served along with the rice and bread base. As you can presume, Fatta is a really fattening dish, with an extremely high calorific value; it is rarely eaten during the year, except after a major religious fast such as the 50 days before Easter for Coptic Christians, or the month of Ramadan before Eid-Al-Futr.

Konafah: Konafah is an Egyptian sweet made of a very thin noodle-like pastry. The origins of Konafah are very mysterious, its presence has been recorded in Arab medieval cookbooks in both Egypt and the Levant and Turkey, but its exact origins have always been unknown. Konafah is made by drizzling long rows of the thin noodles in their liquid state on a hot plate until they become dry and more rigid. The now-rigid noodles are then mixed with butter or oil and wrapped around a filling made out of nuts, whipped cream or both. It is baked and presented with a fruit syrup on top.


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