Dialogues of Naguib Mahfouz: A taste of Ramadan By Mohamed Salmawy I asked Naguib Mahfouz once about his favourite meal in Ramadan. He replied without hesitation. "There is no doubt in my mind. Beans ( fuul ), of course." Then he told me his story with Ramadan fuul. "As a child sitting at the Ramadan Iftar [breaking of the fast] table, my problem was fuul. I didn't want to eat anything else; so much so that my father decreed that fuul should be the last dish to come to the table. He wouldn't let me eat fuul until I had eaten from all the other dishes. So I would only take a small bite from each of the plates, and leave enough room for my favourite dish, the plate of fuul that I was eyeing all the time. My family made an art of fuul cooking. They would prepare it with olive oil, lemon and parsley, or with tomato sauce, or with coriander and garlic." "So did you eat fuul only in Ramadan?" "No, I ate fuul all year round. Fuul is one of my most favourite meals. I used to have it for dinner every day," Mahfouz said. The following story was told to me by Um Kolthoum, Mahfouz's eldest daughter. She accompanied the novelist to London in 1991, where he underwent a heart operation. After the surgery, he wasn't eating as well as the doctors expected him to. A delightful tray looking, as she said, like a still life portrait, would appear in meal times by his bed, but Mahfouz wasn't eating much. The doctors were concerned, so they asked him what he wanted for food. "My favourite meal is not to be found in London. It is fuul," he said. The doctors started ordering his meals from an Egyptian restaurant in Piccadilly Square: fuul, taameya (falafel), lentil soup, and molukhiya (spinach-like soup). So he started eating well again. A few years before he died, Mahfouz told me that he was eating fuul only rarely, because of medical reasons. For dinner, he would have a small piece of cheese or yoghurt. "I miss fuul now more than any other dish, especially in Ramadan. I also miss molukhiya, which I used to eat with bread, but I had to cut back on bread because I've been diabetic since the early 1960s. Since then, I've been eating molukhiya with a spoon, like a soup, without the brown baladi bread that I love." "Just like the rest of us. The old brown bread you speak of no longer exists. We all miss it," I said. As for pastries, Mahfouz liked to eat qatayif, baqlawa, and basbusa in Ramadan, all sugary delicacies. But his favourite was konafa (a cheese based sweet). "My family wouldn't dream of buying konafa ready-made, never. We always prepared it at home. The first time I had ready-made konafa I was so shocked. It didn't taste the same at all," Mahfouz remarked.
