During Ramadan, people come from all over Cairo to El Gahsh, on Abdel Meguid Al-Labban Street, to eat fuul medames, hot mashed broad beans. The ancient owner, Abdou, who does not know his exact age, has been making fuul on this spot for fifty years and is one of Cairo's pushcart pashas. He wears a white djellaba and a black overcoat and reigns over a two-story establishment supervising teams of his sons and grandchildren. They stew broad beans overnight in copper vats, mash them with a secret recipe of garlic and other seasonings, and dish up creamy fuul with sweet or spicy oil, served with rounds of whole wheat flatbread, fried eggs, white cheese, green onion stalks, vegetable pickles, and peppery arugula. A nationalist at heart, Abdou uses only Nile Delta beans, which he swears are tastier, if more expensive, than the imported Chinese beans used by other fuul vendors to save money.

The restaurant, grown from the single pushcart of Abdou's youth, has a rooftop patio decorated with caricatures of mules and donkeys (gahsh is Arabic for mule). In a world where frustrated drivers hurl the insult ya humar—"you donkey"—at one another, the cartoons about young wives screaming at husbands for spending too much money and older men courting equally elderly sweethearts offer jokes that lighten the day. Neighborhood kids stop to grab a fuul sandwich on the way to school, businessmen in suits pop in for breakfast meetings, and old men pass mornings reminiscing with Abdou, who sits in a wheelchair drinking tea and making change out of a tin ghee can.

The neighborhood, between the nineteenth-century Abdin Palace and the far older Saidna Zeinab Mosque, is considered one of Cairo's most solid, full of hardworking families with relatively little unemployment. But Abdou, from his long vantage point, is pessimistic. "Before, everyone was happy," he told me. "Now you see them crying. They have jobs but no money. Before, you could get by for a month on fifty piastres. Now that won't even buy you breakfast."

Fuul, the country's food of the past and present, provides sustenance in a city that is conspicuously failing to live up to its inhabitants' expectations. Cairo is no longer the Arab world's fulcrum. Egypt has never really regained the leadership and legitimacy lost in Arab eyes following President Anwar Sadat's peace treaty with Israel. Television production in Lebanon and the Arab Gulf is supplanting the Egyptian dialect that spread as an Arab lingua franca in the early era of radio and cinema, and the bright skyscraper worlds of Dubai and Doha have become magnets for Arab youngsters with ambition. Like Taha in The Yacoubian Building, many Egyptian job seekers find their path at home blocked by a lack of wasta, or official connections.

The bravest stay, smile, and soldier on, trying to help Cairo survive, not collapse, as youth floods Egypt's desert of leadership and opportunity. "I've given up my dream of experiencing an Orange Revolution, because the best I can hope for is to live through a transition," Hisham Kassim, an independent newspaper publisher and human rights activist, resignedly told me over iced fruit drinks one morning, commenting on how Egyptians yearn to revive their former greatness while envying the political change in Ukraine and other once stagnant Eastern European nations. "Reform is like a dust-covered Cairo house that's been shut for many years and no one remembers the contents."

The sweetness and hope of Cairo life—felucca rides along the Nile, brides in white dresses who pose for photos on river bridges, men who tease chaste girls with such compliments as "Inti Sukkar, Inti Shurbat!" ("You're sugar, you're sherbet!")—is a nostalgic craving, quenched at the end of spring with sugarcane juice. The technology for sugarcane, grown in Upper Egypt, arrived from Persia after the seventh century, and over time sugar became a commodity affordable to all. At the beginning of summer, pickup trucks and horse carts pour into the city carrying bundles of the long cane to drinks stalls, where it is run through presses over ice blocks and sold as a frothy green elixir. In Cairo, I reflected, sweetness can at least be purchased if it cannot always be lived. In the heat of Egypt's epic city, a refreshing drink seems like a miracle.