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Jameed

جميد

Specialised

⚠ A PRESERVATION TECHNOLOGY, NOT A CONDIMENT, and one that exists because a pastoral people needed milk to survive a summer. Sheep’s milk — or goat’s — is soured to yogurt, churned to remove the butter, strained in a cloth bag for days, salted heavily, then hand-formed into balls or discs and DRIED HARD IN THE SUN over weeks until it keeps for a year or more without refrigeration. To use it, it is broken, soaked and rubbed back into a thin sauce. The graph is: SHEEP → milk → yogurt → churned → strained → salted → sun-dried → stored → reconstituted → mansaf. KARAK jameed carries the strongest reputation and a geographical association that is commercially asserted. ⚠ IT IS ALSO A WOMEN’S CRAFT and a documented rural income, now partly industrialised into packaged and liquid jameed — which cooks differently and which households argue about. And it is the same family of thing as Syrian and Lebanese KISHK and the dried yogurts of Anatolia and Central Asia, recorded as related rather than as anybody’s invention.

Atlas — where and when

Where in the world

Communities and languages

  • Bedouin community documented

Languages: South Levantine Arabic

What is recorded

  • Jameed is produced by souring sheep or goat milk to yogurt, churning out the butter, straining for days, salting heavily, hand-forming and sun-drying over weeks until it keeps without refrigeration for a year or more, then reconstituting by soaking. It is documented as women’s craft and a rural income, now partly industrialised into packaged and liquid forms that behave differently in cooking. It belongs to the same family as Levantine kishk and the dried yogurts of Anatolia and Central Asia. documented

Related foodways

This foodway relates to

  • related to Levantine Preservation documented

    The same family as Syrian and Lebanese kishk and the dried yogurts of Anatolia and Central Asia.

Recorded as relating to this foodway

  • related to Mansaf documented

    ⚠ The jameed IS the dish. Without dried fermented sheep’s yogurt it is not mansaf.

Recipes

No recipes are filed under this cuisine yet.