Yemeni
Saltah: fenugreek-foam stew.
Saltah
A hearty Yemeni stew of lamb, enriched with fenugreek and spices, creating a warming dish with a distinctively bitter edge
View page →Yemen sits at the southern tip of Arabia, and its cooking is sharper, more herbaceous, and more fenugreek-dependent than anywhere else in the Arab world. Saltah is the national dish: a clay pot of slow-cooked lamb-and-vegetable stew topped with hulba — a whipped fenugreek-foam that frothes white and bitter-aromatic, served bubbling so hot it scalds. You scoop it up with malooga flatbread. Mandi is the rice-and-meat tradition: lamb is hung inside a tannour (underground pit oven) over basmati rice, the fat drips down to flavor the grain, and the meat emerges so tender it pulls off the bone. Sahawiq (also spelled zhoug, also borrowed by Israeli-Yemenite cuisine) is the green chili paste — cilantro + green chili + garlic + cardamom — that goes on everything. Bint as-sahn ('daughter of the plate') is the layered yeasted bread soaked in honey, eaten torn with one's hands. The Sana'a old city was a UNESCO site before the war; the cuisine continues in diaspora communities from Detroit to Saudi Arabia.
The Palate
Start Here
Clay-pot lamb-vegetable stew topped with whipped fenugreek foam (hulba), bubbling hot. Yemen's signature — bitter, aromatic, scalding.
Why start here · Saltah is the most-distinctive bowl of soup in the Arab world. The whipped fenugreek foam is a flavor unlike anything else in regional cooking.
Lamb hung in a tannour pit-oven over basmati rice — the fat drips down, the meat falls off the bone, the rice catches the smoke.
Why start here · Mandi is one of the great rice-and-meat dishes of the world. The Hadhramaut pit-roasting technique is now the standard across the Gulf.
The Pantry
See all 73 ingredients›
Vegetables
Herbs & Spices
Three Regions
Three regional kitchens — Sanaa highland (saltah, haneeth, madhbi, madfoon, malooja), Hadhramaut (mandi, sayadieh fish-rice, masoub, date-honey breads), Tihama and Aden coast (zurbiyan, spiced fish stew, Adeni chai). Tap a region to see its table.
Saltah — the volcanic-stone-hot lamb stew frothed with fenugreek hilbah, eaten over lahoh bread — is the defining dish of highland Sanaa.
Mandi — lamb or chicken slow-cooked in a clay-sealed underground pit over fragrant coals, served over spiced rice — is Hadhramaut's gift to the Arabian peninsula and beyond.
Lahoh — the spongy fermented flatbread of the coast, eaten with honey, stews, or ful — reflects the African influence on the Tihama and Aden.
How They Cook
Techniques that define this cuisine
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Kindred Kitchens
Cuisines built on the same signature ingredients
