The Wandering Kitchen

The Cairo of my childhood had two faces. One looked like Paris, thanks to the dream of the Khedive Ismail who, as the ruler of Egypt in the mid-nineteenth century, invited European architects so that they would cast Western charm upon the city. Across on the other side was the eastern city with its narrow, meandering streets, mausoleums, Coptic churches, and mosques whose turrets rose to the sky. Cairo was a cosmopolitan city where French was the lingua franca. Its Jewish inhabitants, made up from a mosaic of communities from different parts of the Jewish world, also spoke Italian, English, and Judeo-Spanish.