Mansaf is both a dish and an idea

November 19, 2021 9:39 AM

For Many Members of the Arab American Diaspora, Mansaf Offers a Taste of Home. [slNYT] We were Arab at home, mostly, and American in public. On weekends, Arabic music and the scents of cumin and sumac spilled through the windows in our otherwise sedate neighborhood in Syracuse, N.Y. Dad’s dinner parties were outsize, like his cooking, everything studded with garlic and bedded in great piles of rice: mujadara, maqluba, stuffed grape leaves and the most important Jordanian dish, mansaf, named for the big platter upon which it’s served. Ours covered the center of the dining room table. My youngest sister could have gone sledding with it. The bigger the mansaf, the more generous the host.

Archive.org link to article.

posted by Ahmad Khani (9 comments total)

Man do I feel this: It’s too much work, too much hosting. Who has hours to sweat over a stove, stirring oneself into hypnosis? Back then, my parents and their friends seemed to have actual free time. There are so many things I want to make that are of my childhood but there is no time and when we do have time we are so worn out.
posted by toastyk at 10:00 AM on November 19, 2021 [6 favorites]

lovely. it looks and sounds delicious.

I grew up eating very american whitebread (lol) food. nothing more 'exotic' than bad Chinese-American.

my first foray into any other type of cuisine (in college) was Lebanese (large Lebanese community in New Brunswick NJ with lotsa restaurants and food trucks). I completely fell in love and its still one of my favs (I have since expanded my horizons foodwise!). the incredible comfort of warm piles of fragrant delicious food is exceptional well captured in dishes like this (especially when shared at a large table full of delightful people).
posted by supermedusa at 10:02 AM on November 19, 2021

Woot, this is my jam. Many decades ago, I inserted myself in a family with a Lebanese Jiddo who had diaspora'ed himself to the Sahel in West Africa. Jiddo's daughters had a potlatch idea of cooking: tureens of hummous; trays of kibbeh [raw and cooked]; but my compass was set on/by "you may keep your food of kings, give me mujadara any day" . . . rice lentils onions salt blackpepper and alchemy = yum.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:02 AM on November 19, 2021 [6 favorites]

I really enjoyed the piece, it's such an elegant piece that manages to be about a specific set of Arab-American life without being too belaboured or food blog-y even with using mansaf as a framing device.

Much of the food i get here is more typical diner Arab (especially Yemeni), so this specific dish I've never had. I hope to, one day! My relatives in the region are also coastal ppl so i don't think i ever got the chance for more Bedouin food if they ever made some when visiting.
posted by cendawanita at 11:10 AM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

A few decades ago I was staying in a small hotel in Amman. The owner offered to have his mom make us a Mansaf, so we paid for the ingredients and she brought in a platter about 1m in diameter.
We huddled around it on benches, and were instructed to, using our right hand and some flat bread, make balls of rice and meat and pour a very liquid yogurtey sauce over it before bringing it to our mouths.
It was amazing, we sat and ate for a few hours.
The hotel guy was a bit of a D, though that's another story.
posted by signal at 11:59 AM on November 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

Thanks for sharing, a lovely article. My brother in law is Lebanese and with the pandemic we haven’t been able to travel there, really can’t wait.
posted by ellieBOA at 12:18 PM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

Thank you for posting. I've got to eat my way through Detroit in this lifetime.
posted by winesong at 4:51 PM on November 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

It’s too much work, too much hosting. Who has hours to sweat over a stove, stirring oneself into hypnosis? Back then, my parents and their friends seemed to have actual free time.

This speaks to me in a slightly different way: I'm in the process of gathering ingredients for the Thanksgiving dinner I'll make for the small circle of close friends that we'll have over on Tuesday, because that's the national holiday in Japan (which, awesomely, is Labor Thanksgiving, or Japanese Labor Day). Every year, it's absolutely exhausting, preparation spread out over three days, relying on a Japanese style kitchen (2 real burners on the stove, a counter top oven and a toaster oven) to put it together.

Every year, at some point in the process, I wonder why the hell I do it, and corona was the thing that helped me understand. In the last two years, we've had to forgo things that were so ingrained in our lives that they became traditions, and, having skipped them, or missing out on them, we've realized that the world didn't end because we didn't do our traditional things. That's what hit me, is that, largely, we continue traditions because if we don't, if we decide to skip this year, it becomes so much easier to skip the next year. We have our traditions because they are the things we always do. When we stop doing them, they lose their power, their necessity, and we learn we can live without them.

I love articles like this, articles that dive into the food that, as food so often does, ties a community together. Food is such a central part of any concept of community, telling us who we are and where we've come from. These ritual foods, these feasts we prepare are labor, and that labor is as cliched as it sounds, is one that comes from love, and like love, it takes time, it takes work. Sometimes, sometimes we reach a moment, we find ourselves at a point where the work asks too much of us, and we choose to step away, to let this year pass unmarked, and that makes it so much easier to let go of the things that mattered to us.
posted by Ghidorah at 7:35 PM on November 19, 2021 [12 favorites]

BobTheScientist, I love mujadara. But is there a way for it to keep? I find the spices get weak in the fridge + after reheating, and the crispy onions go limp.
posted by doctornemo at 9:25 AM on November 20, 2021