Wendell, friends, koshari and the Nile
In the early days of the Egyptian revolution, the Mubarak regime denounced the protestors on Tahrir Square as “Kentucky Fried Chicken eaters”—foreign agents with laptops and fresh $50 bills in their pockets. In fact the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet on Tahrir Square was, like everything else in the vicinity, boarded up. Later its frontage became a gallery for political cartoons: Mubarak strangling his people, Mubarak with devil horns and blood-red eyes.
The hundreds of thousands of protestors who ended up urban camping in flower beds and gutters laughed at the “Kentucky” slur and waved their improvised sandwiches of lowly, gritty subsidised bread and Laughing Cow cheese triangles. This was the Egyptian revolutionary mix of defiance and satire—Mubarak, if you squint, has a passing resemblance to the eponymous laughing cow on the packet. As momentum and crowds gathered, every-one shared their bread and bottled water. But the most popular fare on the square was the great staple Egyptian dish koshari.
Koshari, as one activist friend of mine accurately described, is “a carbo bomb.” It is a mash of macaroni, vermicelli, rice, lentils and chickpeas. A dollop of watery tomato sauce is ladled on top together with a big pinch of fried onions. Some people like to add a sour vinegary sauce and some chilli oil. It is everyone’s easy lunch: cheap, filling, and I can attest, strangely more-ish.
It is served, usually as takeout, from dedicated koshari restaurants. The two most famous in Cairo, Koshary El Tahrir and Abou Tarek, are within blocks of Tahrir, and both kept open during the scariest days of the revolution. People would buy dozens of portions and hand them out. One afternoon I talked to some protesters who were staging a sit-in under several tanks. They sat amid the blankets and plastic bags of supplies that had been hung up between the wheels of the tank tread housing, happily refusing to move and spooning koshari into their mouths. I turned to an Egyptian friend, a pharmacist who was tending the wounded. “Perhaps we should call it the koshari revolution,” I joked.
I am now living full-time in Cairo, and had the idea to pay homage to the koshari that fuelled the revolution. “I think I want to deconstruct it,” I told Ali, a friend of mine, a lawyer who went through the revolution on Tahrir and is now active in one of the new liberal parties. He looked at me quizzically, but then said. “OK. I’m in!”
We rounded up a few friends and I bought packets of macaroni, vermicelli, brown lentils, dried chickpeas and a box of basmati rice. Then I went looking in a neighbourhood market for ordinary Egyptian ingredients that would hopefully spark an idea or two. I found tomatoes, red onions, little green peppers that to me looked like Spanish padron peppers, a fat purple aubergine, parsley and garlic. I asked where I could buy yoghurt and was pointed to an unassuming storefront with a stainless steel vat of slowly churning milk. The proprietor nodded and brought out a tub for me, “Yes. Yoghurt. Fresh.”
I spied a bucket of lemons preserved in salty tomato gloop and bought three. Then I suddenly had a left-field notion about basturma—a pungent Armenian cured beef, pressed, air dried and rolled in a mix of cumin garlic and chilli, that I have found in all the places Armenians have settled from Tbilisi to Cairo. I remembered once discovering it crumbled on top of hummus in an Armenian restaurant in Beirut, a very happy combination of salty, gamey salami and creamy, bland legume. “Basturma?” I asked the yoghurt man. He pointed me left and I navigated the mazy alleys until I found the basturma man, who kindly offered me a chair and a glass of fenugreek tea as he shaved off a few purpley slices.
At home I set about soaking and boiling the main ingredients of koshari separately. Mohamed, my sometime borrowed houseman, watched me with a little suspicion. Mohamed likes to take his role very seriously; the last time I had a party he arrived with an ice bucket because I didn’t have one. He has a distinguished moustache and makes a point of wearing a waistcoat and bow tie to serve guests. On this occasion I had told him that a photographer would be coming and he insisted on wearing a red tarboosh for orientalist effect.
I made a macaroni salad with fresh chopped tomato, and basil and then added preserved lemon, which zinged it in a more middle eastern direction. I mixed the basturma with the chickpeas and plenty of olive oil, lemon juice, parsley and chives. I fried aubergine slices and used them as a bed for a simple lentil salad: finely chopped red onion, walnut oil, a little cider vinegar and then dribbled tahini over the top for an indefinable nutty touch. I made a chicken broth and cooked the rice in it and stirred in, just at the end, the soft curds of fresh yoghurt and a handful of dill and coriander. I pan-fried the vermicelli, in a dim memory of a riceless paella, then added a sludge of leeks cooked down with some garlic and a little wine, the roasted little green peppers and a handful of small Mediterranean clams and shrimps. I then poured in a scant cupful of broth and put a lid on the pan to steam everything through.
Ali and his second cousin, Hussein, a doctor, regarded my koshari transformed into summer salads with interest. “What is this? Shrimps? This is elite koshari!” Hussein laughed and they piled their plates, mixing everything up again. Mohamed was happy too, despite my Balkanisation of the national dish. “Is vergood,” he pronounced of the macaroni salad.
Then the phone rang. It was a friend of mine at a demonstration against the Military Council that is now running the country. I wondered if I should go. Ali spooned a slice of molten aubergine and lentils onto my plate. “Go tomorrow,” he said, “There are demonstrations every day!” The revolution, he reminded me, was ongoing.
In the early days of the Egyptian revolution, the Mubarak regime denounced the protestors on Tahrir Square as “Kentucky Fried Chicken eaters”—foreign agents with laptops and fresh $50 bills in their pockets. In fact the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet on Tahrir Square was, like everything else in the vicinity, boarded up. Later its frontage became a gallery for political cartoons: Mubarak strangling his people, Mubarak with devil horns and blood-red eyes.
The hundreds of thousands of protestors who ended up urban camping in flower beds and gutters laughed at the “Kentucky” slur and waved their improvised sandwiches of lowly, gritty subsidised bread and Laughing Cow cheese triangles. This was the Egyptian revolutionary mix of defiance and satire—Mubarak, if you squint, has a passing resemblance to the eponymous laughing cow on the packet. As momentum and crowds gathered, every-one shared their bread and bottled water. But the most popular fare on the square was the great staple Egyptian dish koshari.
Koshari, as one activist friend of mine accurately described, is “a carbo bomb.” It is a mash of macaroni, vermicelli, rice, lentils and chickpeas. A dollop of watery tomato sauce is ladled on top together with a big pinch of fried onions. Some people like to add a sour vinegary sauce and some chilli oil. It is everyone’s easy lunch: cheap, filling, and I can attest, strangely more-ish.
It is served, usually as takeout, from dedicated koshari restaurants. The two most famous in Cairo, Koshary El Tahrir and Abou Tarek, are within blocks of Tahrir, and both kept open during the scariest days of the revolution. People would buy dozens of portions and hand them out. One afternoon I talked to some protesters who were staging a sit-in under several tanks. They sat amid the blankets and plastic bags of supplies that had been hung up between the wheels of the tank tread housing, happily refusing to move and spooning koshari into their mouths. I turned to an Egyptian friend, a pharmacist who was tending the wounded. “Perhaps we should call it the koshari revolution,” I joked.
I am now living full-time in Cairo, and had the idea to pay homage to the koshari that fuelled the revolution. “I think I want to deconstruct it,” I told Ali, a friend of mine, a lawyer who went through the revolution on Tahrir and is now active in one of the new liberal parties. He looked at me quizzically, but then said. “OK. I’m in!”
We rounded up a few friends and I bought packets of macaroni, vermicelli, brown lentils, dried chickpeas and a box of basmati rice. Then I went looking in a neighbourhood market for ordinary Egyptian ingredients that would hopefully spark an idea or two. I found tomatoes, red onions, little green peppers that to me looked like Spanish padron peppers, a fat purple aubergine, parsley and garlic. I asked where I could buy yoghurt and was pointed to an unassuming storefront with a stainless steel vat of slowly churning milk. The proprietor nodded and brought out a tub for me, “Yes. Yoghurt. Fresh.”
I spied a bucket of lemons preserved in salty tomato gloop and bought three. Then I suddenly had a left-field notion about basturma—a pungent Armenian cured beef, pressed, air dried and rolled in a mix of cumin garlic and chilli, that I have found in all the places Armenians have settled from Tbilisi to Cairo. I remembered once discovering it crumbled on top of hummus in an Armenian restaurant in Beirut, a very happy combination of salty, gamey salami and creamy, bland legume. “Basturma?” I asked the yoghurt man. He pointed me left and I navigated the mazy alleys until I found the basturma man, who kindly offered me a chair and a glass of fenugreek tea as he shaved off a few purpley slices.
At home I set about soaking and boiling the main ingredients of koshari separately. Mohamed, my sometime borrowed houseman, watched me with a little suspicion. Mohamed likes to take his role very seriously; the last time I had a party he arrived with an ice bucket because I didn’t have one. He has a distinguished moustache and makes a point of wearing a waistcoat and bow tie to serve guests. On this occasion I had told him that a photographer would be coming and he insisted on wearing a red tarboosh for orientalist effect.
I made a macaroni salad with fresh chopped tomato, and basil and then added preserved lemon, which zinged it in a more middle eastern direction. I mixed the basturma with the chickpeas and plenty of olive oil, lemon juice, parsley and chives. I fried aubergine slices and used them as a bed for a simple lentil salad: finely chopped red onion, walnut oil, a little cider vinegar and then dribbled tahini over the top for an indefinable nutty touch. I made a chicken broth and cooked the rice in it and stirred in, just at the end, the soft curds of fresh yoghurt and a handful of dill and coriander. I pan-fried the vermicelli, in a dim memory of a riceless paella, then added a sludge of leeks cooked down with some garlic and a little wine, the roasted little green peppers and a handful of small Mediterranean clams and shrimps. I then poured in a scant cupful of broth and put a lid on the pan to steam everything through.
Ali and his second cousin, Hussein, a doctor, regarded my koshari transformed into summer salads with interest. “What is this? Shrimps? This is elite koshari!” Hussein laughed and they piled their plates, mixing everything up again. Mohamed was happy too, despite my Balkanisation of the national dish. “Is vergood,” he pronounced of the macaroni salad.
Then the phone rang. It was a friend of mine at a demonstration against the Military Council that is now running the country. I wondered if I should go. Ali spooned a slice of molten aubergine and lentils onto my plate. “Go tomorrow,” he said, “There are demonstrations every day!” The revolution, he reminded me, was ongoing.
