When Maria Haddad wanted to honor her grandmothers’ cooking lessons, she didn’t figure on being ahead of international travel trends.
“Cooking together breaks so many barriers,” Haddad explained after we had finished our lesson and eaten the delicious dishes we had learned to prepare. “You are cooking together so at least you have one thing in common. …The idea has always been to create a platform to meet local women … so they can tell you about their lives and you can tell them about yours,” Haddad said, “To celebrate women who have carried their culture through their dishes down through generations with every recipe telling a story of our land and heritage.”
“Everyone thinks it is normal for women to cook,” she continued. “We want to show how much effort and creativity that requires. Arab moms focus on food as a way to show their love.”
(You can Google food tours or cooking classes in the city you are visiting or try Airbnb Experiences or platforms like TInggly, Tours By Locals (try one instead of a shore excursion from a cruise line) or Context Travel. (How about a market tour and cooking class with a local chef in Florence?) Your hotel concierge can be a good resource too.
Haddad, now a mom of three, also noted that besides the women who teach, the school has provided opportunities for many local women to help support their families as they create homemade pantry products—everything from stock mix to spice mixes, bitter orange cordial, date molasses, and more. This is especially important right now as the Gaza war has decimated the important tourism industry here that employs so many people, though Jordan is entirely safe to visit, we found. While close to Gaza and other Middle East hot spots, there is no war here.
Jordan is a “quiet home surrounded by lively neighbors,” one local guide said. “People don’t realize how Jordan is so different from our neighbors,” he added.
While pounding dough into circles to make Arabic bread, we learned that the first loaf of bread was made 14,000 years ago in Jordan when people mixed wild wheat and barley with ground plant roots, added water and baked it.
Bread here is often filled with different foods, including hummus, cheese, tomatoes, olive oil, or fava beans, with the bread serving as the fork and spoon. Jordanians share plates, we learned, communally dipping their bread into eggplant and beet dips and hummus, making the food symbolic of a connection and community.
As my husband Andy chopped eggplant, tomatoes, and cucumber, stirred tahini and spices into dishes and pounded little rounds of dough into Arabic bread, I learned that one of our cooking teachers, Um Rween, immigrated from Iraq some 30 years ago when she married a Jordanian. Our other teacher, Um Muhamad, came from Egypt 25 years ago. (Here, women take their firstborn’s name with “um” in front of it which means “mother of.”
Haddad explained that Jordanian cuisine comes from the mix of cultures here. As those from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt have all made their home here. Her cooking, she said, was influenced by her Lebanese grandmother, her Palestinian aunt and others.
We learned to make Maghluba, a chicken and rice dish, and Mutabal, a roasted eggplant dip with tahini, yoghurt, and falafel, delectable fried balls of chickpeas with onions, garlic, parsley, and spices. The dessert was Qatayef, a crispy, sweet pancake concoction popular during Ramadan.
I loved that later on in our Abercrombie & Kent tour, I was able to identify unfamiliar dishes on the hotel buffets and menus.
Certainly you don’t want to miss the great sites in Jordan, like the ancient city of Petra which is carved out of stone, or the Amman Citadel that dates back to the Bronze Age and towers over the city.
“Come for the experiences,” Haddad urges, “But stay for the food.”
