The $2 Bowl With An 800-Year Paper Trail

Egypt's Most Beloved Dish Has Roots in India

A Note From Anela

Every place we travel has layers that don’t show up in a guide. There are limits to what an outsider can see.

So I’ve started commissioning writers who actually live there. People whose relationship to a place is longer and more complicated than our short itineraries when we visit.

From is born from that. Stories about food, culture, and everyday life, told by people who know these places better than we do. It’ll show up intermittently throughout the year, built around the places we travel together.

This first piece is about koshary. Consider it the everyman’s food. But when it’s done right, it’s one of those bowls that lights up your taste buds. If you’re joining me in Egypt this fall, we’ll eat it at the famed Koshary Abou Tarek, which is featured in this piece, on both trips.

One more thing: this work is paid. Writers are compensated for their reporting, their time, and their photography. That’s only possible because of paid subscribers.

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The $2 Bowl With An 800-Year Paper Trail

By Nadine Tag

A Dish in Motion

A queue of customers climbs the narrow stairs of Koshary Abou Tarek, a famed restaurant with its own building in Downtown Cairo known for its namesake dish, as Ahmed Sadeq smoothly takes the familiar steps he has taken since 2005. He started working there as an assistant and, over the years, learned how to cook the restaurant’s signature dish. Now a chef, he prepares bowls of koshary with choreographed movements born of repetition, layering rice tangled with vermicelli, lentils, pasta, chickpeas, and fried onions, before finishing it with a sharp tomato sauce cut with garlic and vinegar.

“Each component complements the other, and changing anything could ruin the dish,” he says, noting that the restaurant gathers people of all ages, foreigners and Egyptians alike.

Ahmed Sadeq, chef at Abou Tarek, poses with a plate of Koshary

Recognition

On December 10, 2024, UNESCO added Egyptian koshary to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognizing it as an affordable staple embraced across generations and street corners alike. “Although the basic recipe remains consistent, regional variations exist,” UNESCO wrote, noting that it is embraced by people from rural villages, coastal towns, and dense urban neighborhoods. The recognition honors the cooks who passed down the dish and the culture that has grown around it, and raises a question: Where did this national icon come from?

A Plate of Koshary from Zooba 6

Where It Actually Came From

For Anny Gaul, assistant professor of Arabic studies at the University of Maryland, the answer lies in a story as layered as the bowl itself, rooted in centuries of exchange.

The cultural historian, whose work focuses on the intersections of food, gender, and culture in Arabic-speaking societies, traces koshary’s roots to the Indian dish kitchari, a mixture of rice and mung beans or lentils. The word kichari roughly translates to “mixture” in Hindi.

“The dish traveled along trade and pilgrimage routes that once connected India, the Arabian Peninsula, the Red Sea region, and Egypt,” she says.

In a 13th-century Arabic travelogue from the port of Aden, in present-day Yemen, a dish of rice and mung beans appears under the name ‘kijri’. The mixture shows up again in the 14th century, when Ibn Battuta — the Moroccan explorer whose travels across Asia and Africa remain among the most extensive ever recorded — documented eating it in India. “He documented it in Arabic as ‘k-sh-r-y,’” Gaul says. “That is the first time we see something like kitchari being described as koshary in Arabic.”

The first printed recipe Gaul found was in a 1934 cookbook, and it included a mix of lentils and rice called Koshary. A few years later, in 1941, a cookbook by Nazira Nicola included two versions: one made of lentils and rice, and one that closely resembles the koshary we know today, with brown lentils, fried onions, vinegar, and tomato sauce.

Gaul suspects that the addition of pasta in modern koshary hints at Mediterranean influence. By the 1900s, Italian and Greek communities were well established in Egypt’s urban food culture, dried pasta was widely available, and tomatoes were cultivated along the Nile. “Perhaps it was added because it was cheaper at certain points, or people just liked having different textures,” she says.

“Koshary truly is an incredible microcosm of all the different influences that have impacted Egypt’s modern food culture,” Gaul says. “It brings together the history of Mediterranean exchange, ingredients indigenous to Egyptian cooking, like vinegar and garlic, and the deep connections between Egypt and the Indian Ocean world. It’s a representation of all these layers.”

The Craft Behind the Bowl

Those layers feel alive inside Baba Abdo, a busy koshary and pasta restaurant that has operated in downtown Cairo for almost 60 years. It started as a pasta sandwich street cart in the 1960s and was passed down through generations before becoming a destination for customers from Cairo and beyond.

Baba Abdou Street Cart in the _60s, when it sold pasta sandwiches

Ahmed Roshdy, Baba Abdo’s administrative manager, explains their koshary recipe the way a craftsman explains a trade secret, with love and without giving too much away. “The secret is mainly in the sauce’s preparation,” he says. “Anyone can make koshary at home, but it’s hard to replicate the rich, balanced flavors of a restaurant.” Their method: boil whole tomatoes to remove impurities, strain them, crush the flesh, boil again, then juice.

Roshdy has spent 22 years at the restaurant, starting as a high schooler sweeping floors, then rising to chef and eventually manager, a trajectory driven entirely by devotion to the craft.

Every Table

That devotion is mirrored in the people who return again and again for Koshary. Mohamed Abdulmagid, a driver living in Giza, remembers eating at Abou Tarek in 1978, when a bowl cost three Egyptian piasters and the restaurant was still a cart. He was 14. In his youth, he ate koshary several times a week, long before diabetes reshaped his diet.

“It is a daily meal for many Egyptians, especially among the lower and middle classes,” he says, likening it to foul, slow-cooked fava beans, and taamia, Egyptian falafel also made from fava beans, as the country’s foundational everyday foods.

For Ahmed Gamal, a software developer from Cairo, koshary is less a staple than a timeline. “Eating koshary is an experience for me,” he says. “It’s connected to different stages of my life and memories.” He ate it after school as a child, through his university years, and now with colleagues on workday afternoons.

Koshary has long since crossed neighborhoods and borders. Koshary restaurants now operate in Zamalek, one of Cairo’s most expensive neighborhoods, and in gated developments like Madinaty in New Cairo. Mido Barsoum, a food photographer and cook known as Mido Eats, has watched the transformation closely. “Most restaurants in Egypt and abroad now follow a standardized recipe that leaves little room for variation,” he notes, though the dish itself still shifts with circumstance. Sometimes it has spaghetti pasta, other times ditalini pasta. Sometimes the dish comes with toasted bread on the side. When prices climb, the chickpeas disappear.

Standardization has also carried it outward: Koshary El Tahrir has a branch in London; Zooba has one in New York. Meanwhile, Koshary is still sold across Egypt at prices ranging from EGP 20 ($0.40) to EGP 120 ($2.39).

Back at Baba Abdo, Roshdy isn’t surprised. “Koshary became popular among the young and old, Egyptians and foreigners, people from all walks of life,” he says. “And after all these years, the taste remains unchanged.”