Apricots On The Nile A Memoir With Recipes

Cairo, 1937: French-born Colette Rossant is waiting out World War II among her father's Egyptian-Jewish relatives. From the moment she arrives at her grandparents' belle époque mansion by the Nile, the five-year-old Colette finds companionship and comfort among the other "outsiders" in her home away from home -- the cooks and servants in the kitchen. The chef, Ahmet, lets Colette taste the ful; she learns how to make sambusaks for her new friends; and she shops for semits and other treats in the Khan-al-Khalili market. Colette is beginning to understand how her family's culture is linked to the kitchen...and soon she will claim Egypt's food, landscape, and people as her own. Apricots on the Nile is a loving testament to Colette's adopted homeland. With dozens of original recipes and family photographs, Colette's coming-of-age memoir is a splendid exploration of old Cairo in all its flavor, variety, and wide-eyed wonder..

1947 and Paris is recovering from the war. Abandoned by her mother, lonely, frightened and terribly homesick, Colette finds solace in her love for French food - roasted lamb stuffed with garlic, springtime strawberries bathed in creme fraiche, the first taste of truffle in a Left Bank restaurant..

It is 1955, and Colette Rossant, newly married, has just arrived in America with her husband Jimmy. She is twenty-two, a Frenchwoman in New York, bemused by American customs and most importantly by the food- the limp sandwiches, the ubiquitous mayonnaise, the iceberg lettuce. But post-war New York is humming and Colette and Jimmy discover a whole new world in Greenwich Village- theatre and avant-garde cinema, farmer's markets and Jewish delis. Colette slowly falls in love with her adopted country, relishing the brisket sandwiches at Katz's, the exquisite dim sum in Chinatown and the Italian pastries in Mulberry Street. Madeleines in Manhattan is the story of Rossant's journey from young housewife and passionate cook to acclaimed food writer, from the romantic early days of marriage to grandmotherhood, told with her unique ability to conjure up her memories through food..

"We are on our way to Le Havre. The train is going so fast that the landscape is all but a blur. From time to time, I can see a farm in the mist surrounded by a sea of green fields. I am excited but also scared. It is 1955, and we are on our way to New York." So begins the marvelous journey of Colette Rossant, just married to an American architect and about to leave France for a new life in the heart of New York City. At first, Colette finds Americans' manners to be as mystifying as their cuisine, but before long, she discovers the myriad charms of her adopted country. Between taking on an astoundingly diverse series of jobs, raising four children, and renovating a Soho town house, Colette develops her own flair for food -- and for superb food writing. In this spirited and deliciously entertaining memoir, Colette shares the unforgettable stories of her forty tumultuous years at the heart of American and international cuisine. The children's cooking school she starts for her daughter's friends turns into a starring role on a PBS television series. As New York magazine's "Underground Gourmet," she hails the city's staggering array of outstanding ethnic cuisine. Either with her husband and children, or on her own, she travels to Africa, China, Japan, and South America, exploring cuisine and culture around the globe. She rides camels through the Australian outback, barters lipstick for fresh vegetables in Tanzania, and is almost arrested as a spy by the Chinese secret police -- just because she is trying to eat like a local. Charming, indomitable, endlessly curious and adventurous, Colette Rossant inspires us to savor every meal -- and every day. With a wonderful array of mouth-watering recipes, The World in My Kitchen is an irresistible celebration of family, food, and life..

Food Lit: A Reader's Guide to Epicurean Nonfiction provides a much-needed resource for librarians assisting adult readers interested in the topic of food—a group that is continuing to grow rapidly. Containing annotations of hundreds of nonfiction titles about food that are arranged into genre and subject interest categories for easy reference, the book addresses a diversity of reading experiences by covering everything from foodie memoirs and histories of food to extreme cuisine and food exposés. Author Melissa Stoeger has organized and described hundreds of nonfiction titles centered on the themes of food and eating, including life stories, history, science, and investigative nonfiction. The work emphasizes titles published in the past decade without overlooking significant benchmark and classic titles. It also provides lists of suggested read-alikes for those titles, and includes several helpful appendices of fiction titles featuring food, food magazines, and food blogs..

Diasporic Tastescapes seeks to explore the culinary metaphors present in a selection of Asian American narratives written by a variety of contemporary authors. The intricate web of culinary motifs featured in these texts offers a fertile ground for the study of the real and imaginary [hi]stories of the Asian American community, an ethnic minority that has been persistently racialized through its eating habits. Thus, this book examines those literary contexts in which the presence of food images becomes especially meaningful as an indicator of the nostalgia of the immigrant, the sense of community of the diasporic family, the clash between generations, and the shocks of arrival and return. The reading of Asian American "edible metaphors" from these perspectives will prove particularly revealing in relation to the notions of home, identity, and belonging-all of them mainstays of the diasporic consciousness. (Series: Contributions to Asian American Literary Studies, Vol. 8) [Subject: Asian American Literature, Literary Criticism]~~.

Paris, 1947: Colette Rossant returns to Paris after waiting out World War II in Cairo among her father's Egyptian-Jewish relatives. Initially, the City of Light seems gray and forbidding to the teenage Colette, especially after her thrill-seeking mother leaves her in the care of her bitter, malaisé grandmother. Yet Paris will prove the place where Colette awakens to her senses. Taken under the wing of Mademoiselle Georgette, the family chef, she develops a taste and talent for French cooking. The streets of Paris soon become Colette's own as she navigates the outdoor markets and café menus and emerges into her new, gastronomical self. Return to Paris is an extraordinary coming-of-age story that charts the course of Colette's culinary adventures -- replete with expertly crafted recipes and family photographs. An exploration of passion in all its flavor and texture, Colette's memoir will live in the hearts and palates of readers for years to come..

Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in America includes academics, artists, writers, and civic and religious leaders who contributed chapters focusing on the Sephardi and Mizrahi experience in America. Topics will address language, literature, art, diaspora identity, and civic and political engagement. When discussing identity in America, one contributor will review and explore the distinct philosophy and culture of classic Sephardic Judaism, and how that philosophy and culture represents a viable option for American Jews who seek a rich and meaningful medium through which to balance Jewish tradition and modernity. Another chapter will provide a historical perspective of Sephardi/Ashkenazi Diasporic tensions. Additionally, contributors will address the term "Sephardi" as a self-imposed, collective, "ethnic" designation that had to be learned and naturalized--and its parameters defined and negotiated--in the new context of the United States and in conversation with discussions about Sephardic identity across the globe. This volume also will look at the theme of literature, focusing on Egyptian and Iranian writers in the United States. Continuing with the Iranian Jewish community, contributors will discuss the historical and social genesis of Iranian-American Jewish participation and leadership in American civic, political, and Jewish affairs. Another chapter reviews how art is used to express Iranian Diaspora identity and nostalgia. The significance of language among Sephardi and Mizrahi communities is discussed. One chapter looks at the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jewish population of Seattle, while another confronts the experience of Judeo-Spanish speakers in the United States and how they negotiate identity via the use of language. In addition, scholars will explore how Judeo-Spanish speakers engage in dialogue with one another from a century ago, and furthermore, how they use and modify their language when they find themselves in Spanish-speaking areas today..

The streets of Cairo make strange music. The echoing calls to prayer; the raging insults hurled between drivers; the steady crescendo of horns honking; the shouts of street vendors; the television sets and radios blaring from every sidewalk. Nadia Wassef knows this song by heart. In 2002, with her sister, Hind, and their friend, Nihal, she founded Diwan, a fiercely independent bookstore. They were three young women with no business degrees, no formal training, and nothing to lose. At the time, nothing like Diwan existed in Egypt. Culture was languishing under government mismanagement, and books were considered a luxury, not a necessity. Ten years later, Diwan had become a rousing success, with ten locations, 150 employees, and a fervent fan base. Frank, fresh, and very funny, Nadia Wassef's memoir tells the story of this journey. Its eclectic cast of characters features Diwan's impassioned regulars, like the demanding Dr. Medhat; Samir, the driver with CEO aspirations; meditative and mythical Nihal; silent but deadly Hind; dictatorial and exacting Nadia, a self-proclaimed bitch to work with-and the many people, mostly men, who said Diwan would never work. Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller is a portrait of a country hurtling toward revolution, a feminist rallying cry, and an unapologetic crash course in running a business under the law of entropy. Above all, it is a celebration of the power of words to bring us home..

By one of the finest English writers of our time, a luminous memoir that travels from southern Italy to the banks of the Nile, capturing a lost past both personal and historical. Marina Warner’s father, Esmond, met her mother, Ilia, while serving as an officer in the British Army during the Second World War. As Allied forces fought their way north through Italy, Esmond found himself in the southern town of Bari, where Ilia had grown up, one of four girls of a widowed mother. The Englishman approaching middle age and the twenty-one-year-old Italian were soon married. Before the war had come to an end, Ilia was on her way alone to London to wait for her husband’s return and to learn how to be Mrs. Esmond Warner, an Englishwoman. Ilia begins to learn the world of cricket, riding, canned food, and distant relations she has landed in, while Esmond, in spite of his connections, struggles to support his wife and young daughter. He comes up with the idea of opening a bookshop, a branch of W.H. Smith’s, in Cairo, where he had spent happy times during the North African campaign. In Egypt, however, nationalists are challenging foreign influences, especially British ones, and before long Cairo is on fire. Deeply felt, closely observed, rich with strange lore, Esmond and Ilia is a picture of vanished worlds, a portrait of two people struggling to know each other and themselves, a daughter’s story of trying to come to terms with a past that is both hers and unknowable to her. It is an “unreliable memoir”—what memoir isn’t?—and a lasting work of literature, lyrical, sorrowful, shaped by love and wonder..

"Tracks the interplay of creativity, competition, desire, and nostalgia in the discrete ways people relate to food and cuisine in different societies"--.

This collection of essays brings together a decade of writings on translation by leading international translation studies expert, Susan Bassnett. The essays cover a range of topics and will be useful to anyone with an interest in how different cultures communicate..

Selves in Dialogue: A Transethnic Approach to American Life Writing constitutes an explicit answer to the urgent call for a comparative study of American autobiography. This collection of essays ostensibly intends to cut across cultural, “racial” and/or “ethnic” boundaries, introducing the concept of “transethnicity” and arguing for its increasing validity in the ever-changing field of American Studies. Accordingly, the comparative analysis in Selves in Dialogue is implemented not by juxtaposing essays that pay “separate but equal” attention to specific “monoethnic” or “monocultural” traditions—as has been the usual strategy in book-length publications of this sort—, but by critically engaging with two or more different traditions in every single essay. Mixing rather than segregating. The transethnic approach proposed in this collection does not imply erasing the very difference and diversity that makes American autobiographies all the more thrilling to read and study. Group-specific research of an “intra-ethnic” nature should and will continue to thrive. And yet, the field of American Studies is now ready to indulge more freely, and more knowledgeably, in transethnic explorations of life writing, in an attempt to delineate both the divergences and the similarities between the different autobiographies written in the US. Because of its unusual perspective, Selves in Dialogue can be of interest not only for specialists in life writing, but also for those working in the larger fields of American Literature, Ethnic Studies or American Studies..

“As a bookseller, I loved Shelf Life for the chance to peer behind the curtain of Diwan, Nadia Wassef’s Egyptian bookstore—the way that the personal is inextricable from the professional, the way that failure and success are often lovers, the relationship between neighborhoods and books and life. Nadia’s story is for every business owner who has ever jumped without a net, and for every reader who has found solace in the aisles of a bookstore.” —Emma Straub, author of All Adults Here “Shelf Life is such a unique memoir about career, life, love, friendship, motherhood, and the impossibility of succeeding at all of them at the same time. It is the story of Diwan, the first modern bookstore in Cairo, which was opened by three women, one of whom penned this book. As a bookstore owner I found this fascinating. As a reader I found it fascinating. Blunt, honest, funny.” —Jenny Lawson, author of Broken (in the best possible way) The warm and winning story of opening a modern bookstore where there were none, Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller recounts Nadia Wassef’s troubles and triumphs as a founder and manager of Cairo-based Diwan The streets of Cairo make strange music. The echoing calls to prayer; the raging insults hurled between drivers; the steady crescendo of horns honking; the shouts of street vendors; the television sets and radios blaring from every sidewalk. Nadia Wassef knows this song by heart. In 2002, with her sister, Hind, and their friend, Nihal, she founded Diwan, a fiercely independent bookstore. They were three young women with no business degrees, no formal training, and nothing to lose. At the time, nothing like Diwan existed in Egypt. Culture was languishing under government mismanagement, and books were considered a luxury, not a necessity. Ten years later, Diwan had become a rousing success, with ten locations, 150 employees, and a fervent fan base. Frank, fresh, and very funny, Nadia Wassef’s memoir tells the story of this journey. Its eclectic cast of characters features Diwan’s impassioned regulars, like the demanding Dr. Medhat; Samir, the driver with CEO aspirations; meditative and mythical Nihal; silent but deadly Hind; dictatorial and exacting Nadia, a self-proclaimed bitch to work with—and the many people, mostly men, who said Diwan would never work. Shelf Life is a portrait of a country hurtling toward revolution, a feminist rallying cry, and an unapologetic crash course in running a business under the law of entropy. Above all, it is a celebration of the power of words to bring us home..

Insight Guides Egypt Travel made easy. Ask local experts. Comprehensive travel guide packed with inspirational photography and fascinating cultural insights. From deciding when to go, to choosing what to see when you arrive, this guide to Egypt is all you need to plan your perfect trip, with insider information on must-see, top attractions like the Pyramids of Giza, the Red Sea and the Thebes Necropolis, and cultural gems like cruising the Nile, discovering Aswan and exploring the Temple of Karnak. Features of this travel guide to Egypt: - Inspirational colour photography: discover the best destinations, sights and excursions, and be inspired by stunning imagery - Historical and cultural insights: immerse yourself in Egypt's rich history and culture, and learn all about its people, art and traditions - Practical full-colour maps: with every major sight and listing highlighted, the full-colour maps make on-the-ground navigation easy - Editor's Choice: uncover the best of Egypt with our pick of the region's top destinations - Key tips and essential information: packed full of important travel information, from transport and tipping to etiquette and hours of operation - Covers: Cairo; Giza, Memphis and Saqqara; the Oases of Egypt's Western Desert; Middle Egypt; Upper Egypt; Abu Simbel and Nubia; Alexandria; the Suez Canal; the Sinai; the Red Sea Looking for an easy way to get around? Check out Insight Guides Flexi Map Egypt for a clear and comprehensive trip around the country. About Insight Guides: Insight Guides is a pioneer of full-colour guide books, with almost 50 years' experience of publishing high-quality, visual travel guides with user-friendly, modern design. We produce around 400 full-colour print guide books and maps, as well as phrase books, picture-packed eBooks and apps to meet different travellers' needs. Insight Guides' unique combination of beautiful travel photography and focus on history and culture create a unique visual reference and planning tool to inspire your next adventure..

A Sephardi Sea tells the story of Jews from the southern shore of the Mediterranean who, between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, migrated from their country of birth for Europe, Israel, and beyond. It is a story that explores their contrasting memories of and feelings for a Sephardi Jewish world in North Africa and Egypt that is lost forever but whose echoes many still hear. Surely, some of these Jewish migrants were already familiar with their new countries of residence because of colonial ties or of Zionism, and often spoke the language. Why, then, was the act of leaving so painful and why, more than fifty years afterward, is its memory still so tangible? Dario Miccoli examines how the memories of a bygone Sephardi Mediterranean world became preserved in three national contexts—Israel, France, and Italy—where the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa and their descendants migrated and nowadays live. A Sephardi Sea explores how practices of memory- and heritage-making—from the writing of novels and memoirs to the opening of museums and memorials, the activities of heritage associations and state-led celebrations—has filled an identity vacuum in the three countries and helps the Jews from North Africa and Egypt to define their Jewishness in Europe and Israel today but also reinforce their connection to a vanished world now remembered with nostalgia, affection, and sadness..

In recent times, ethnicity and issues of origin have become a hotly debated topic among Jews both in Israel and in the Diaspora. This is particularly true both of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, who for years had remained at the margins of the Israeli national narrative, as well as the Israeli Palestinian minority. Much the same may be said of Diaspora Jews. Among the public spaces where ethnicity has become more visible are museums, together with heritage centres, art galleries, and the Internet. The aim of Memory and Ethnicity is to investigate how ethnicity is represented and narrated in such spaces. How have groups of Jews from such different backgrounds as Morocco, Egypt, India or the US elaborated their past legacies and traditions vis-à-vis a variety of national narratives and cultural or political ideologies? This volume describes the emergence of a new museological scene – that mirrors a multi-vocal Jewish and Israeli public sphere in which ethnicity has become central to a nation’s cultural imagination. By considering museums as “places of memory” where an ethnic/communal identity is displayed, Memory and Ethnicity analyses which memories are preserved, and which suppressed. This study sets out to enrich the understanding of Israeli and Jewish cultural history, and also to deepen the field of museum studies from little investigated perspectives..