Exploring My Ethiopian Roots

I’m not entirely sure why, but I have been thinking about my Ethiopian roots lately. No, not my genetic roots. I’m talking about my time as a line cook in a restaurant called The Horn of Africa in Madison, Wisconsin.

This was my first restaurant job. I started as a dishwasher. I was in Madison studying African history for an advanced degree, and I needed money, so I reckoned working among Africans couldn’t hurt. Besides, I liked to cook.

The kitchen was tiny and thick with the aroma of the spices so vital to the region’s cuisine: chiles, fenugreek, cardamom, turmeric, ginger and garlic. A sour-smelling bucket of grayish batter rested in one corner, bubbling quietly. In the other corner, next to the stoves, was a huge plastic tub of  clarified butter; this is what we cooked with.

My boss, a tiny, chain-smoking woman named Meselesh Ayele, was not Ethiopian. She was Eritrean, which is to Ethiopia what Scotland is to the United Kingdom; similar yet distinct. How this made her cooking different from the Amharas or Oromos, I don’t know. Even though I was hired as a dishwasher, Meselesh put me to work breaking down a whole lamb on my first day. It was the first time I’d ever seen a whole carcass.

“Cut off the fat, then cut this into cubes this big,” she said, separating by about two inches her thumb from her forefinger — which was firmly wedging her cigarette between it and her middle finger. So I proceeded to reduce an entire lamb into stewing cubes. This would happen about every other week.

I got better instruction on how to separate the chicken legs and thighs for a spicy stew called doro wat, considered the national dish of Ethiopia. Meselesh was fearless: She’d bend the leg-thigh at the joint and jam a knife through a thin line of fat that ran over the “knee” that marked the joint, separating the two pieces effortlessly — without splitting her hand in two. I was not so lucky, cutting myself several times.

During service, my first job that did not involve washing dishes was to make the injera, a spongy, fermented flat bread that everyone eats with instead of cutlery. This was the bubbling batter in the corner. We made it with a cheap, electric pancake maker: Ladle in the center, tilt the maker so the batter covers the whole surface, then wait 30 seconds for the bubbles to stop, then use a wide, flat spatula to flip out the bread. I made thousands of them.

* * *

That was many years ago. I have not made Ethiopian food more than a dozen times since then. I don’t know why. I like the food: Ethiopian cuisine is exotic, heavily spiced and elaborate — yet remains rustic and cleansing at the same time. Not an easy trick to pull off.

I tried again last weekend. I had been reading the charming book Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, and it had a recipe for niter kebbeh; this was the spiced, clarified butter we used at Horn of Africa. Christ, I thought. How long has it been? Sixteen years? Maybe it was time to do this again, just to see if I could.

Besides, these spices and stews would fit wild game perfectly: Venison and wild boar and pheasant are perfect ingredients for Ethiopian dishes, although the Ethiopians would never cook with them; many have a cultural issue about eating wild animals.

When I got to the kitchen, I realized that Meselesh never gave me the exact recipes for her niter kebbeh, nor for the fiery spice paste berbere that is the hallmark of Ethiopian cooking. I knew what went into them, just not the exact proportions. Hmmm. I thought about it a bit, consulted the Interwebs (you know, the series of tubes…) to jog my memory and gave it a go.

This is my berbere recipe, and this is what I came up with for Meselesh’s niter kebbeh. Both are good, although not exactly the way she made them. Sadly I can no longer tap her knowledge: The cigarettes killed Meselesh in 2000, at the age of 60. A shame, as she was a good boss and a skilled teacher.

My original thought for a meal with my new Ethiopian staples was doro wat, as I have some of the roosters remaining from my adventure with Dominic. But then I realized I had a small rack of lamb in the freezer that needed eating, so I decided to make it with the lamb instead.

* * *

Back in Meselesh’s kitchen, standard procedure was to ladle some butter into a pan, bring it to heat, then add onions, some chile peppers, a dollop (or two) of berbere and swirl and cook. Add lamb, chicken or beef and cook it until it was finished, then serve. Not terribly difficult cooking, as all the spice mixtures had been worked out beforehand.

This is how I learned my berbere was not as good as Meselesh’s. I had too much cardamom, plus my cardamom and fenugreek were too old and not as fragrant as they should be. When I toasted the spices I went a touch too far and there was a slight bitter burnt taste going on. Still, it was not bad for a 16-year hiatus.

Then there was the injera. The bread is a combination of wheat flour and teff, which is the World’s Smallest Grain and is the sine qua non of injera-making. Many Ethiopian cooks use only teff, so I bought some from a health food store. Problem is, teff has no gluten, so the flatbreads wouldn’t stay together when I made them. I punted, making large, ugly “breads” and cutting a circle out of them as a base for the meal.

As for the lamb, I’d probably go back to using stewing cubes, as the chops were hard to eat once they were covered in sauce. At least the hard-boiled eggs were as I remembered them.

How was it? Good. Good enough to make again. But I haven’t nailed Meselesh’s recipes yet, and I doubt I ever will.

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Photo by Holly A. Heyser

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 45 minutes[/cookime]

• 12 small lamb chops or venison chops, or venison backstrap medallions
• Juice of a lemon (Meyer if possible)
• 2 sliced onions
• 4 hard-boiled eggs
• 6 tablespoons niter kebbeh or butter
• 2 chopped shallots
• 4 chopped garlic cloves
• 1 inch of minced fresh ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
• 1 teaspoon ground fenugreek
• 2 cups beef stock
• 2 tablespoonsberbereor to taste
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• 4 sheets of injera