Dinner and a book is supported by the Rex and Alice, A. Martin Foundation of Elkhart, celebrating the spirit of Alice Martin and her love of good food and good friends.

Let's look at a woman whose courage never faltered.

Whether she was facing Nazi interrogators, back stabbing colleagues, or the imminent destruction of the Egyptian monuments she held most dear.

Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt led the international effort to save ancient Egyptian temples from the floodwaters of the new Egyptian Aswan Dam.

In today's book, Empress of the Nile with my guest, Grace Fortune Hopkins.

This is quite a book, isn't it?

It is.

It's a it's a remarkable story.

Just about the lady and also the historical events around her life.

She lived to be 97 years old.

And during her lifetime, so many things happened.

And so the book is great.

It is great.

And if you have never studied or been interested in Egyptian art, this is the book for you, because it's not a professor talking to you.

It's a woman living the art experience.

Yes.

Yes.

Egypt.

Yes.

And it is excellent.

And have your daughters read it, too?

Yes.

So I really liked this book.

I in fact, I I've read it several times.

You know, we talked about she's such a strong person, strong spine.

She was interrogated by the Nazis during World War Two.

She was.

And what did she say to them when they had their feet up on the desk?

She said, that's no way to speak to a lady.

If you're going to speak to me, take your feet off the desk and address me properly.

She was adamant that she not be treated disrespectfully and they complied.

They did.

They did.

I couldn't believe it.

And in any case, that's she had a presence about her and everybody fell under her spell.

But, you know, she didn't have a typical French girl's life.

How was her life so different that caused her to become such a strong woman?

Her parents were progressive and they were both well-educated.

Her mother had gone to college, which was quite unusual at that period in time.

Her father was an attorney.

Her mother was also an opera singer, not professionally, but at home.

And her father was a musician as well.

And he would lock himself in his study and actually read sheet music on Sundays.

She and her brother, who was several years older, were brought up to believe they could accomplish and do anything.

So she never felt like she was a young girl who was supposed to comply with the French norm of being a wife and a mother and at home she went to school and her parents were fully supportive.

She went to school.

She went to the School of the Louvre to study archeology.

She whatever she decided to do, they supported her.

And when she joined this group after studying, she went to Egypt and her parents said, maybe you should do this.

Women don't do this.

But did she?

She just said, Well, I'm going to do it.

She was given an opportunity by her archeology professor at the Louvre to go when she was 20, 21 years old, to be a female part of this excavation.

And so she hopped on a ship and she went over there and she cried tears of joy when she left the port because she finally felt like she had freedom to go immersed herself in the study that she was just passionate about.

She loved Egyptian artifacts, statuary, jewelry.

She was just drawn to it from the time she was a child.

Well, I was impressed by her.

She was determined.

She we have to remember that she didn't have to work.

Her family was wealthy.

Yes.

And they were progressive.

So she had support.

She had not only financial, but she had kind of like moral support for what she wanted to do.

And that's the thing that held a lot of girls back.

They didn't have this or they had to immediately go to work to help the family.

So she started off with the right family.

And I think, you know, a lot of girls did things later on, didn't have all those attributes or those gifts, and they did well, too.

But she is such a strong woman and she made friends wherever she went.

The first thing that the men said, the Frenchmen on these digs she went to, they just were horrified that a woman is here.

I mean, you know, it's like we were we were on.

But she was there.

She knew what she was doing.

She she wasn't just saying, these are beautiful.

She had reasons to like them and to preserve them.

And so it is a very good book about the strength of someone who is absolutely charmed and more than charmed, bedazzled.

So let's talk about what we're making the I, I just get away from the whole thing, the cooking thing, because this book is so good.

You're going to make.

I'm going to make a disco dish called Shakshuka, which is this is an Egyptian version.

It's made all around the Mediterranean and Italy.

They call it eggs in Purgatory.

So people may have had it, but this is the Egyptian version, Shakshuka Shakshuka.

And it's going to be interesting if you just put some eggs in the nest and bake them for a while.

Yes.

And so you're going to get started.

All you've been chopping.

I've been chopping peppers and onions and garlic and all.

And some parsley and.

And is that did that go on?

Yes, it did.

And you have another offering, too?

I brought a honey cake called the bass.

Bass Moussa, which is a very sweet cake made with semolina flour and honey and it's typically eaten all again, all around the Middle East with dates and tea.

So I've brought that and enjoyed that.

Later to some dates, too.

It's just it's just a lovely setting.

I am going to make two dishes.

One is called Macaroni in Béchamel Macaroni.

A lot of Americans and British called it macaroni.

It is not a macaroni dish, but it's macaroni with marshmallow.

And if you like making sausage, you know that the béchamel is one of the easiest to make.

In this sense, it's it's a combination of 1 to 1 of flour and butter.

And then you add milk, stir it up, and I put some nutmeg in to give it a certain flavor.

I think it's an English additive.

And of course, the English were in Egypt and during the Second World War they were actually running the place.

So there is a lot of British influence.

Those Brits were everywhere, weren't they?

They were.

Napoleon had gone into the Middle East in the late 1700s, and then the Brits and the French had a battle and Napoleon had taken a lot of archeologists with him.

And they had uncovered so many treasures, including the Rosetta Stone and when the British defeated the French, the British took two of the treasures, including the Rosetta Stone, which is now in the British Museum.

And I think that's a little bit why the Brits and the French don't always get along.

They were.

Very competitive.

Yes.

How is this going?

This is going to get hot.

So you might want to check it.

it's perfect.

I always worry about these things burning because I have burned many things in my first little dish.

Here I am doing some.

It calls for beef, but I prefer turkey or chicken.

And I chopped it up and I have some tomatoes and it looks like it's chili, but it's going to have a little twist.

We're going to put some garlic in here.

And I went off and my knife walked away.

Let's see it.

Wait for my here's one.

I can try it.

Woo!

A pink knife.

This is something.

I'll chop it up and put it in here.

And then I also have the best of my life starters in here.

And we will use that as a topping.

This is a little bit like lasagna.

So if you use béchamel instead of a tomato sauce.

So it's not that difficult and then the other dish I have to look at my paper to pronounce it correctly.

It is starts with a k koshyari and it is layers of chickpeas, tomatoes, onions, and you can put a layer of rice in just whatever you want to do in there.

Typical meals that the Egyptians would have and very healthy actually.

I'm going to put this garlic.

I knew it needed something garlic.

And so you have the root.

I can smell the red peppers and the onions.

So red peppers and onions just get sauteed till they're translucent.

And then about 5 minutes usually.

And then I'll add some garlic to it and a can of tomatoes.

You can do whole and chop them up in the pan.

I just went ahead and got diced up.

Okay.

Sure.

With some Cuban and paprika and chili powder that is.

Keep my eye on this.

So it.

Does.

And that cooks down for a bit and Manuel will crack the eggs.

This is a great dish.

It can be breakfast, lunch or dinner.

It's simple, easy to make.

It's full of protein and vitamins.

And you could have it with the French bread and tossed salad for a lunch.

You can could.

Even be a first course if you're that kind of person that likes courses.

And this smells wonderful.

Now she decides that she is going to be helpful and help restore some of these old temples that are along the Nile River and and restage some of them because the Ashland Dam is being built by Nasser.

He did.

Nasser decided when they did the coup in Egypt that the Egyptian people needed to have a better source of water and power in order to industrialize their country, which is what he was trying to accomplish.

So there had been a lower Aswan Dam that was built in 1902 by the British, and this dam was going to be considerably higher and was going to create a big lake so that they could manage the water throughout the year.

And so this dam, he approached the west Western world to actually have them help him finance it and politics, it was declined.

So he actually had the Soviets, Russia, help him finance.

This and America didn't like that, did they?

No, they didn't.

And so that created some problems.

When you read about Nasser, he's that bad guy.

But it was because he was working with the Russians to get some money for this dam.

We're going to continue cooking.

We're going to take a little break and remember the name Christiane surname de Roche.

De Roche, no broker.

That's her husband's name.

No broker is his name.

All right.

So we'll take a break and we'll be right back.

Well, I want to say that our book is.

Empress of the Night by Lynne Olson.

And my guest is Grace Fortune Hopkins.

Hopkins.

See, I bring her in on everything here, so I'm going to make my first dish here.

I've got some pasta.

It's already cooked, and it calls for Pammy pasta.

So I followed the rules, and I did penny pasta, and I'm doing the béchamel here.

The first dish Egyptian dish is going to be in it.

It will.

You'll say, Well, that's just lasagna.

So you see, some foods are very similar in this world.

This is tomato.

And I want to put some cayenne pepper in here.

This gives it a little old.

How is your shakshuka going there?

It's great.

I've got the vegetables cooked and the spices added and I'm going to add the tomatoes and let them simmer.

We have a similar kind of recipe here using fresh vegetables.

And I just think these are amazing, the way they use vegetables and I just I just love it.

All right.

This is going to have this layer of the meat, tomato, garlic, See how simple is that on a bed of already cooked?

And I did already cook them because I was afraid to wait to cook this all at the very end here and then talk at the same time, but then will add the béchamel over it and that will go in the oven and see.

It's so simple.

It's like it's almost it's easier than a lasagna.

I'm going to.

Yes.

Yes.

You have the layers of.

here.

Yes, you're layering and layering.

Thank goodness they have those those noodles that you just put in and you don't have to worry about, you know, cooking them ahead of time.

All right.

This is going to go in the oven.

Then I will continue with my Koshyari, which is another Egyptian dish.

Thing I thought was pretty interesting about Christiane is that she was only five feet tall.

She was a tiny woman, and yet she was very intimidating to most people because she was an authority.

She had a very outspoken manner about her.

She was very confident in her abilities.

And so when at that point in time, women were considered to be quiet and meek and not part of the conversation, she was very outspoken.

Very strong, very strong in comparison to another woman who was Jacqueline Kennedy.

Describe what she was like compared to Christiane.

Well, Jacqueline Kennedy interest the story because in 1938, when Christiane was allowed to go to the Middle East at the suggestion of her professor and at the Louvre, she at the conclusion of her excavation, her archeology archeological dig, she and some of the people had become very good friends.

And so they went up the Nile on a houseboat for several weeks.

And at that point, she saw Abu Simbel monument carved into the side of this mountain for the first time.

And she was just enthralled with it, as so many people who had been up the Nile and seen it were.

So when the Nasser Aswan High Dam was being built and she then worked at UNESCO's, she was working with UNESCO's, in addition to being a professor at the Louvre, and she said she was sent by UNESCO over to Egypt to catalog, along with several other people, the monuments that are going to be lost when they knew that the waters of the day and we're going to be too high.

So she knew that these monuments, these thousand year old monuments were going to be lost, and she decided that she couldn't allow that to happen.

So she became sort of the outspoken person who said, we must save these monuments, we must move them.

We must do something to not allow them to be buried under this water.

And it became a global effort.

50 countries with $1,000,000,000 at that just so.

Expensive that would do that today.

And I don't I don't really remember this.

I wish I was little, but I wish I had known.

But why would I have known about it?

But to me, it was fascinating how she she the leader of this troupe, Christiane, she got these countries.

She used her friends to help get the money and she turned to the Kennedys when she needed the most money, the biggest chunk of money.

And what did Jackie do to get.

So John Kennedy was a very she learned French and school.

She was very enamored of the French culture.

And when she heard through NASCO about these monuments being destroyed by the CIA, she decided to write Jack Kennedy, her husband, a memo saying we must save these stamps.

And again, it was a political situation because America was not and they were not part of the Egyptian.

There wasn't an agreement with them at that point.

Well, they were still smarting over Egypt turning to Russia.

Yes.

For the of the dam.

So she wrote this she wrote this letter to him and it sort of set the wheels in motion that the United States became the largest supporter of relocating these some these monuments, especially the Abu Simbel.

And that is a phenomenal story about these enormous monuments that had been carved into a mountain.

They weren't built.

There was a sandstone mountain.

They actually carved these monuments and the interior of temple walls into the mountain.

So trying to move that became this.

How do we do it?

Do we build a cofferdam and let it flood and we look at it through the water?

Do we try to find some crane that can lift a 350,000 ton building and move it?

And it was just but she unknowingly, she and Jackie Kennedy each approached this from a different side to get the money to actually move the abuse.

Some they were buddies, they weren't friends.

They didn't know each other.

They really they didn't even know that the other one was part of the discussion.

They had no idea.

Well, and Christy, Christiane probably wasn't that impressed with Jackie.

Jackie was very quiet, very shy and reserved.

She didn't leave.

She was a beautiful woman.

But she didn't impress Christiane at all.

No.

And yet, Jackie Kennedy was an intellectual.

She was very soft spoken, but she would speak and people would lean in to her in order to hear what she had to say.

Yes, she was very smart.

So practice of secret works.

That was a very different as opposed to Christiane, who was very vocal, very outgoing, very communicative.

Right there.

Totally different personalities.

And yet between the two of them and their efforts, they were able to say this.

There's another story about Christiane.

There's a temple of Amada, which was intact.

This beautiful little temple.

And when she heard it was going to be flooded, she decided that she couldn't allow that to happen.

So she, without any authority, committed to the funds for France to move this temple, which had to be moved intact, which was going to be an incredible engineering feat.

And when she got back to Paris, she was called in to Charles de Gaulle's office and he was trying to read her the riot act about how she could ever commit.

And here's this little five foot woman with this cigaret.

And looking down at her.

And she read mine.

He said, How could you do that?

And she reminded him of when he had been in Rwanda during the war and had rallied the French people to not submit to the Nazis, which is how she ended up being part of the resistance during the war.

So he started laughing.

He was so enchanted by her and he said, We'll pay for it.

So the French paid that six Noel.

She she was so smart.

She knew something he had done to remind him how how he did it.

And she she could dazzle anybody with her.

With her.

She was good looking.

But she was strong and she was smart and quick and witty.

And I just I was just totally amazed by what she accomplished in this whole project.

Just think of all you think about the the Nile River with all these temples going to be washed away, these women save these.

And they did.

And they said, don't say this is good for your country.

This is good for the world.

We've got to save this history for the world to remember how this was happening.

And because of the trust she had with the Egyptian government and the Egyptian antiquities officers, because they really did rely on her expertise, she was able to the Tutankhamen exhibition went to Paris first and she was instrumental in that.

And I brought a book which she actually wrote.

At the end of her life.

She's finally 63, and it's just an incredible book which uses the first color photographs from a British photographer named Cornette who actually photographed them.

And then she wrote the text Gorgeous book.

And it had he had to get permission.

The photographer from the archeologists.

I mean, we all take pictures and you know what?

Call in.

Anyway, it's a good book and I'm going to read it next.

I do think that it I don't know.

This is just swept me away, this book.

I just I, I just think it was an amazing feat what she did to get all these people to come together.

The first big project of working on something like that with all these countries, 50 countries involved, and you're putting your eggs in there, you're putting your all your eggs in one pan.

And one pan and little tiny deep wells that I pressed into the tomato sauce.

Yes.

Now, these little eggs will cook.

And we have just a few minutes left in.

Just take take a break in a minute here, Grace, we want to show you the menu so you'll see the menu up on the screen.

And we will return for the end of our show here.

We enjoyed this book and I'm so glad you could do it.

You just got into it.

And you are now an authority on Gyptian temples.

it's just a remarkable book.

And I can't even point to a part of it that I like more than the other.

The story of Christian de novel core sort of as this highlight.

But then all the little stories of things she did along the way for her 97 year life.

It was just a remarkable woman, just.

Brilliant and assertive.

And and she she, I have to say, kind of she must have been kind.

She was an expert.

As she got older, she had a little ornery.

You know, it's hard to let go and it's hard to not be the expert in everything.

But her commitment to the Egyptian people.

She taught herself Arabic so that she could communicate with her workers on her site because she didn't want anyone else to be her interface.

She wanted to have the relationships with them.

And they would discuss every day what they were accomplishing.

She became friends with them because she knew that's the way to get work done.

I just want to say your sugar looks wonderful and tell us about the cake.

This is the honey cake.

She mentioned this in the book because the Nubian people that had to be relocated when the dam was built and their villages were being flooded, she she became very friendly.

And so when she would go back to see them, they would have honey cake dates and tea and tea would be Egyptian red, which is hibiscus tea.

So that's what this is.

And I think it's marvelous.

And you are like an RPO, just yourself.

You dig up all this information.

Here we go.

Thank you for joining us.

I just wanted to say I made two dishes here.

They're both with some tomato sauce and they're made just a little differently in different spices, but they are authentic Egyptian dishes.

So we are so glad you joined us.

And Grace, thank you for coming.

My pleasure.

My pleasure.

It's always fun.

It is always fun.

And we want to say is remember good food, good friends, good books, make for a great life.

Keep reading.

And when you read you, you are just surprised and amazed where you end up in life.

I am going to go to Egypt and see these monuments, these just precious these.

And for giving monuments and we're going to enjoy them today.

So good food, good friends, good books Make for a Wonderful Life.

Thank you for joining us and thank you.

My pleasure.

Mine to see you next time.

This WNIT local production has been made.

Possible in part by viewers.

Like you.

Thank you.

Dinner and a book is supported by the Rex and Alice, A. Martin Foundation of Elkhart, celebrating the spirit of Alice Martin and her love of good food and good friends.