Food

During our time here we have attempted to try most of the traditional local foods, without being fanatical about it. Mostly it's like Lebanese food, which is hardly a surprise, but with strong elements from the Bedouin desert tradition. Most of the stuff we read on-line about the local cuisine is quite accurate.

However, it omitted to tell us how much the locals like fast food, of all types. Foreign brands are extremely plentiful, including ones like KFC that I hadn't imagine would transplant very well. But even more plentiful they have lots of the local pizza (manakish), falafel and kebab (shawerma) outlets, many of which are mere hole-in-the-wall operations.

I was surprised how much they like pickles. Not just olives and gherkins, but all sorts of pickles – carrots and turnips for example. The takeaway kebab I had with pickled turnip (above in pink) alongside chips was very Jordanian (they really like chips).

Yoghurt is plentiful, as we expected, with a lot of traditional recipes using it. Many of them use jameed, which is salty dried yoghurt which is then rehydrated. They also drink shaneeneh, which is thin salty yoghurt common in the Middle East and into India – I quite like it, but it isn't to everyone's taste. A lot of the cheese is salty too – which I presume was because it kept longer that way.

The locals are also very keen on nuts and pastries. There are whole shops selling nothing but nuts in various flavours. We haven't tried many, but the smoked almonds we had were very nice. Quite a few of the local dishes have nuts in them, especially almonds.

Nuts outside a shop in downtown Amman

There are also a lot of pastry shops, and I continued my practice from France of trying one or two of each type. I would have bought more but the locals buy by weight – generally quite a large weight – and I got sick of try to explain that I only wanted one or two. The local pastries tend to be variants on flaky pastry, nuts (almonds and pistachios, generally) and a generous smothering of honey. The larger shops also have extensive ranges of cheesecakes, cake in general and ice cream. But while they have a fondness for sweet treats, the Jordanians fortunately don't make sweet main dishes.

Dates, figs and apricots have been dried here for many centuries obviously. But they have added many modern varieties, such as kiwifruit. My favourite is candied pomelo peel (pomeloes are like giant green grapefruits, and more or less inedible when fresh) while Alison prefers the dried mango.

In general people here seem to buy in bulk, and you can see someone buying eight lettuce or five kilograms of tomatoes at a time. Mostly this isn't an issue, Alison just buys the small amount we need, except when it comes to bread. We just can't eat a kilogram of unleavened bread before it goes stale and they don't sell it in smaller quantities. There's plenty of leavened bread, but it has been perhaps the most disappointing food type we have had here – tasteless, fluffy and sweet.

The locals drink coffee and tea a lot. The tea is often minted and almost always very sweet. The coffee is strong and often has cardamom or other herbal flavours. They seem to not to mind it cold, judging by how long they take to drink it.

For those at St John's, I have made sure to try a range of the local extruded cheese snacks. Mostly they have been very disappointing. The only nice variety was a pea one Alison found (from Indonesia, I think).

The photo makes them look pale. They were as virulently green as most cheese snacks are orange. 

Finally, you try something new only to find that it's actually something very familiar. I bought a bag of "stone chocolates". They actually look remarkably like stones, which kids must find amusing. They taste exactly like Smarties.