‘A Menu and its Leftovers: Finding the Voices in Jeddah’s Food Histories’

Food researcher Salma Serry leads a series of workshops, between December 8th and 20th, that look into the unique voice of Jeddah’s food culture, looking at the unique voice of Jeddah’s food culture as materialised in family recipes, generational cookbooks and ephemera, as well as the collective cultural appreciation for the act and ritual of convening and cooking.

The program calls for researchers, artists, writers, chefs, and individuals with interest in food history to take part in a series of workshops that aim to research, document, and reflect on the untold histories of food in Jeddah and Saudi Arabia at large.

The workshops take the form and sequence of a five-course menu: the welcoming coffee and dates, then the appetizer, the soup and salad, followed by a main course, and finally – dessert.

The programme culminates with a collaborative published work, conceived as the “leftovers,” i.e. testaments to the research conducted during the workshops.

For any questions, please send an email to salmaserry@aucegypt.edu

About Salma Serry

Salma Serry is a food researcher, writer and filmmaker. Her work focuses on reinterpreting history and reapproaching culture through the lens of the food culture in Egypt and the Arab Gulf. She documents and archives historical cookbooks, menus, and ephemera on @sufra_kitchen, inviting others to her everyday research journey.