Egyptian cookbook by Suzanne Zeidy and Rawah Badrawi is a Gourmand Awards finalist

Egypt: Recipes and Stories from an Ancient Land, the 420-page cookbook by Suzanne Zeidy and Rawah Badrawi, has been named a finalist at the 32nd Gourmand Awards 2026. It is shortlisted in the C19 category, for books about Africa published outside Africa in English. The book is published by Nourish Books.

It gathers more than 150 recipes from 14 Egyptian cities and towns, with food photography, illustrations and the stories of the people behind each dish. The two authors spent three years travelling the country and cooking with home cooks and communities whose recipes had been passed down by word of mouth and never written. Zeidy has described the method simply: nobody hands her a written recipe, so the cooks show her the dish, and she goes home, writes it down and tests it.

The book started as an argument. When the pair first looked for an international publisher, they kept being told that readers did not think of Egypt as a food country. They answered with a longer book than they were asked for: 120 pages more than commissioned, and they still left another 200 recipes out of the final edition.

The chapters travel. In Minya, the team spent hours with four women baking bataw, a local bread, and wrote down the work and the company that goes with it. In St Catherine's, they looked at Bedouin cooking shaped by the old mountain gardens of Sinai. The Cairo chapter brings together heirloom recipes from families of different backgrounds. Each dish is shown as one person's version from one place, not as the single correct way to make it.

The shortlist puts an Egyptian home-cooking book on an international stage at a time when Cairo's own food scene is busier than ever, from new restaurants in New Cairo and Zayed to food festivals downtown.

The book is in English. The winners will be announced at a ceremony planned for the last ten days of May 2027. A price for copies in Egypt has not been published.