Cookbooks · 2023
From Mama's Kitchen — Cookbook
Hoda Sherif & Diwan Publishing · Cookbook Photography & Styling
From Mama's Kitchen is a 248-page Egyptian home-cooking cookbook by Hoda Sherif, published by Diwan. It contains seventy-eight recipes drawn from Hoda's grandmother's handwritten notebooks — molokheya, fatta, mahshi, the full repertoire — most of which had never been photographed for print.
The publisher wanted images that felt like documents, not advertisements. No slick cover-shot polish. The photography had to read as something her grandmother might have approved of had she been alive to flip through the proofs.
We were asked for one full-page image per recipe, plus a tight set of process shots, ingredient portraits, and chapter-opening location work in three real Egyptian kitchens — Cairo, Alexandria, Aswan.
We shot for nineteen days over three months. Every dish was cooked by Hoda herself in working domestic kitchens — never a studio set. Magy styled within the rhythm of how Hoda cooked: when she pulled a tray of mahshi out of the oven, that was the shot.
Lighting was almost entirely available-window light, supplemented only with a 4x4 silk and a single LED panel for late-afternoon situations. The book has a deliberate, slightly under-exposed quality — more like a memory than a magazine.
The chapter-opening images live a step away from the food: a tea kettle on a stove, a rolling pin on flour, hands cracking eggs. They give the book a sense of place that no studio shoot could have built.
Project closes
Hoda Sherif & Diwan Publishing
Cookbook Photography & Styling, 2023
Working on something similar? We respond to every brief within twenty-four hours, with a written response and a fixed quote.
Submit a briefPrevious
ZAD Granola — Packaging Photography
Next
Moringa Bites — Brand Launch