"Then, as now, the Egyptians were temperate and frugal, but always hospitable. They welcomed strangers as well as kin to their meals, where men and women ate together, and where, for the most part, the lowest fellahin and members of the royal family ate much the same simple food.
It was in the tools for eating, and the dining-rooms, that caste difference most clearly showed itself. The peasants and the artisans used pottery, glazed blue or red, perhaps, but always simple, and they sat on benches in their low mud houses.
The palaces of the wealthy people, the nobles and scientists, were airy and beautiful, surrounded by pools and arboured gardens, and built with carved painted columns to hold the canopies that made their walls.
Everywhere, on the stone pillars and the embroidered linens, and in the faïence, and the gold that was "plentiful as dust," the sacred lotus and the date frond curved and lifted.
At feasts guests sat upon wooden armchairs, heavily inlaid with gold and stones, and made more comfortable by soft cushions of leather and silky Egyptian linen. They ate from delicate spoons of carved wood or ivory, and drank from lotus-cups of blue glaze or, later, of iridescent glass. Bowls, no matter how simple their contents, were of the common gold, or rarer silver, or the most valuable bronze.
Unlike the Greeks and Romans, who barred women from all banqueting, and only invited the hetæræ to come in with the final wines for philosophic dalliance, the Egyptians dined easily together. While the lords and ladies tarried over their cool courses of melons and sweet wine, dancers entertained them with slow gay rhythms, or more highly educated singers, usually women, chanted the ancient plaintive sounds of lutes and pipes.
At more vulgar feasts, girls or young men in female dress performed much the same obscene dances that can still be seen in Cairo or any Egyptian port, but they were rare. In general, the amusement of the Nile people was like their nourishment -- delicate, fresh, wholesome."
M.F.K. Fisher, Serve It Forth (1937)
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