Mansaf

Mansaf (Arabic: منسف) is a traditional Levantine dish featuring lamb cooked in a sauce made from fermented dried yogurt, served with rice or bulgur. It is widely recognized as a cornerstone of Palestinian cuisine, deeply rooted in Palestinian culinary traditions, and is also regarded as Jordan’s national dish. The name derives from the term for "large tray" or "large dish," and the recipe and preparation methods changed significantly between the 1940s and the late 1980s.

A folk belief sometimes identifies the dish Abraham prepared for travelers in Genesis 18 as mansaf, but this is speculative and not a widely accepted scholarly claim; notably, the biblical text describes a calf, not lamb, with no mention of yogurt. While cautioning against projecting modern food customs onto the distant past, some scholars point to Chalcolithic evidence of boiling meat and using dairy and bread at archaeological sites in the region, and note that the high status of meat and bread in Bedouin culture may reflect some biblical norms. There is no established historical or archaeological evidence for the claim that mansaf dates back to the 9th century BCE King Mesha of Moab.

The original Bedouin mansaf was simply meat (camel or lamb), meat broth or ghee, and bread. In the 19th century, orientalist Reinhart Dozy described *mansaf ruzz* (ruzz meaning "rice") as a heap of cooked rice. After rice became popular in northern Transjordan in the 1920s, it was gradually added to the dish, first mixed with bulgur and later on its own, leading to the modern version based on white rice. The jameed sauce is also a recent addition, as Bedouins historically did not use jameed in cooked dishes until they became more settled.

Cooking mansaf follows a master-apprentice tradition and requires hours of preparation. Meat on the bone is cut into sections and simmered for hours in boiling yogurt, which can be made from thin, soured milk (laban imkheedh) or hard, dry yogurt (jameed). Jameed is prepared by boiling sheep or goat’s milk, then letting it dry and ferment. The mixture is kept in fine woven cheesecloth to form a thick yogurt, with salt added daily to thicken it further.