A Kitchen in Upper Egypt: a Writer Encounters Melokhia

By Nancy Harmon Jenkins

I DID NOT GO TO Egypt because of an interest in food. Everyone I asked beforehand cautioned me not to expect much — “fool, fool, fool,” said one archeologist, speaking of the stewed fava beans that some Egyptians eat morning, noon, and night. My own experience, some 25 years earlier at a time when I considered myself to be an Egyptologist and before I b…