Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato

Order: Bookshop | Barnes & Noble | Indiepubs (discount code UCPSAVE30 for 30% off @ Indiepubs)

Upcoming events & talks (click for links with more info):

Bol Bookstore, Washington, DC, Wednesday 9/23, 6:30 pm

Rice University, Houston, TX, Thursday 10/15, 4 pm

James Beard Media Award, 2026 (Books: Reference, History, Scholarship)

Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award – First Book, 2026

Best Culinary History Book, 2025 Gourmand Awards

Shortlisted for the 2025 Nach Waxman Prize for Food & Drink Scholarship

“…it would be hard to find another writer who brings Ms. Gaul’s particular strengths to what could have been merely esoteric culinary-history trivialities. First of all: She thinks like a cook…Almost as important: She has a gift for shedding light on nuances of meaning in written or spoken Egyptian Arabic.”
— The Wall Street Journal

About the book

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. Nile Nightshade tells the story of how this came to be.

Along the way, the tomato offers new stories about familiar things: how tomatoes moved through the Indian Ocean world as well as the Mediterranean; their prominence in both Italian cuisine and Ottoman cuisine (and how both converged in Egypt); that the now-common association of Egypt with the “Middle East” rather than the rest of Africa was neither inevitable nor incidental; how seemingly ephemeral practices like home cooking transform the “modern” into the “traditional” and consolidate—or even create—notions of difference that come to be understood as common sense.

Read more from the publisher.

“In Nile Nightshade, Anny Gaul offers a sweeping survey of the country’s devotion to Solanum lycopersicum that adds colour and depth to portrayals of the social and political whirlwind that have enveloped Egypt over the past 150 years.”
— Times Literary Supplement
“Nile Nightshade provides a master class in food history by deftly and accessibly navigating a complex political, culinary, and linguistic story through a now-common vegetable. By prioritizing the kitchen, Anny Gaul produces a new way of thinking about the building of national cuisines that traverses borders both imposed and imaginative.”
— Alicia Kennedy, author of No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating

Listen to a podcast!

Tomatoes in Egypt, The Hungry Historians

Food for Geopolitical Thought, None of the Above

Nile Nightshade on The New Books Network

“Gaul’s amazingly documented, engagingly erudite, and insightful story of how Egyptians made the tomato their own is a fascinating way to learn about Egypt: its history, agriculture, culinary culture, and people.”
— Claudia Roden, author of Claudia Roden's Mediterranean and The New Book of Middle Eastern Food

Cook (from) the book

Recipes from (or inspired by) Nile Nightshade and the cookbooks & culinary practices it discusses:

Weeka: Nile Valley Okra | Sweet Tomato Jam | Baladi Lentil Soup | Roasted Duck | Tasbikassoulet | Saʿidi-style Egyptian Roasted Duck | Koshari | Sharkasiyya

“I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It adds a fresh and original dimension to the study of modern Egypt.”
— Marilyn Booth, author of The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-Siècle Egypt 

Read & explore more: