Knafeh Nabulsiyeh
كنافة نابلسية
Nablus's dessert of salty white cheese under orange pastry, drenched in syrup and cut from a tray the width of a table.
Knafeh nabulsiyeh is built on a contradiction that holds together: a layer of firm, white, salted Nabulsi cheese beneath a layer of pastry, baked in a wide shallow tray and flooded while hot with qatir, sugar syrup scented with rose or orange-blossom water. The pastry is either kadayif — the shredded, noodle-like strands — or a soft semolina dough, and in Nablus itself the soft dough is the more common. The colour comes from the top, which is what the eye reads first when a tray is turned out: an even orange crust, then the pull of the cheese underneath.
The dish takes its name from the city. Nablus’s association with it is old and documented: Khalil Totah wrote in 1923 that knafeh was part of a Nabulsi’s life, and by 1950 Abd al-Wahhab Azzam’s book recorded that Nablus was famous for its knafeh. Scholars today describe the city as the modern knafeh capital, and the Nabulsiyeh variety is the standard version across Palestine and Jordan. The cheese is the reason: Nabulsi cheese, brined and pressed, is a Nablus product, and the dessert is inseparable from the dairy economy of the surrounding hills.
It is a public sweet rather than a domestic one. Knafeh is made in shops with wide ovens and long-handled trays, sold by weight, cut in front of the customer and eaten standing up in the old city’s alleys — a food of the street, of the hour after Friday prayers, and of celebration. In 2009 bakers in Nablus made a knafeh 74 metres long, weighing 1,765 kilograms and using 600 kilograms of Nabulsi cheese, 300 kilograms of sugar, and 35 kilograms of pistachios, and set a Guinness World Record with it.