When I first moved to Cairo, I encountered tomatoes everywhere—in street foods, cookbooks, family recipes, and local markets. In subsequent years, when I returned to conduct research on (and in) Egyptian kitchens, I watched home cooks use them for garnishes and stuffings, in salads, to stew meats and vegetables, and even as a seasoning—grated into a dish for a bright punch of acidity. Despite tomatoes’ ubiquity today, their popularity in Egypt is a recent phenomenon. Native to the Americas,