Jordanian Landscapes and Culinary Regions

Comparison

⚠ JORDAN IS FOUR LANDSCAPES AND THE FOOD FOLLOWS THEM, not the twelve governorates. THE JORDAN VALLEY (the GHOR) — below sea level, hot, irrigated, and the country’s vegetable garden, cropping through the winter when the highlands cannot. THE HIGHLANDS along the old King’s Highway — Irbid, Ajloun, Jerash, Balqa, Amman, Madaba, Karak, Tafilah — Mediterranean, olive-growing, wheat-growing, and where almost everybody lives. THE BADIA — the eastern steppe and desert, some four-fifths of the territory, pastoral, and the Bedouin heartland. And AQABA on the Red Sea, the single port and the only coast. ⚠ AND JORDAN IS A COUNTRY OF ARRIVALS, which is the other organising fact: Palestinians after 1948 and 1967, Circassians and Chechens from the 1870s, Armenians after 1915, Iraqis after 1990 and 2003, and Syrians since 2011 — a majority of the population is of relatively recent immigrant origin, and the kitchen shows every wave.