Anny Gaul on Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato

Dr. Anny is an associate professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato (University of California Press, 2025) and co-editor of Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean (University of Texas Press, 2021). She is the recipient of the Global Food History Prize for an Emerging Historian (2021) and a James Beard Media Award (2026). Anny blogs at Cooking with Gaul. 

In today’s conversation, we explore her book Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato which traces how the tomato shaped Egypt’s modern national identity through food system modernization and the everyday cooking practices of women, whose recipes and culinary traditions helped define what it meant to be Egyptian.

What is Conversations in Atlantic Theory?

These conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.