So what is an Abyssinian?

Abyssinia is what Europeans used to call the old empire in the highlands of the Horn of Africa. The word comes from Habesha, which is what people from those highlands call themselves. Strictly it means the Amharic and Tigrinya speakers; loosely it means everyone from there, and especially the food and the way we carry on at dinner.

Africa on a globe, with a dot for Massawa on the Red Sea — The Horn of Africa. The dot is Massawa, where our family is from.

Aksum, the alphabet and a calendar with thirteen months

The kingdom of Aksum, in the northern highlands, traded with Rome and India in the first century, and its stone obelisks stand there today. Aksum took up Christianity in the 300s, so the highland church is among the oldest anywhere. It also took in the first followers of Muhammad when they needed somewhere safe, so Islam has been at home in the highlands for about fourteen hundred years.

The alphabet on the beer labels is Ge'ez, the old language of Aksum. The church uses it, and Amharic and Tigrinya are both written in its letters. It is one of the very few alphabets worked out in Africa itself. The calendar at home has twelve months of thirty days and a short thirteenth one. It runs about seven years behind, with New Year in September and Christmas on 7 January.

ሀ ሁ ሂ ሃ ሄ ህ ሆ

ha, hu, hi, haa, hee, h, ho: one letter in its seven vowels. Every sign is a whole syllable, so the words on the labels look short.

ሓበሻ: Habesha
ጣይታ: taita, injera
ጸብሒ: tsebhi
በርበረ: berbere
ሽሮ: shiro
ዝግኒ: zighini
መሶብ: mesob
ቡን: bun, coffee

Injera, tsebhi and eating together

Injera looks like a big, soft, spongy pancake and tastes a little sour, because the batter sits and ferments for a few days. Back home it is made from teff, a grain so small it looks like sand. Ours comes fresh each day from a specialist injera bakery near us, made from rice, red sorghum and corn flours with some wheat, which makes it a little lighter and milder. Teff injera is darker, earthier and more sour, the taste of home for us, and it happens to be gluten-free. Tell us when you book and we will have one ready for you.

Tsebhi is our word for the dishes that go on top: vegetables, lentils, chickpeas or meat, cooked slowly with a serious amount of onion and our house-made vegan ghee of olive oil and spices. The red ones are made with berbere and the yellow ones with turmeric and garlic.

Three dishes on a round of injera: lamb, salad and red lentils — Tsebhi on injera.

It all comes out on one platter and everyone eats from it with their hands, using bits of injera to pick up the tsebhi. At home the platter sits on a mesob, a tall woven basket with a lid, and everyone sits around it on low stools. The right hand is the eating hand, here as at home.

It has always been a table that Christians, Muslims and Jews could share, and all our meat is halal. There is a lot of vegan food because the Orthodox year has about 180 fasting days with no meat, eggs or dairy, including every Wednesday and Friday and the eight weeks before Easter. The Jews of the highlands, the Beta Israel, ate this same food for a thousand years, keeping meat and dairy apart and fasting on their own days.

Berbere, the red spice

Berbere is the taste people ask us about. It is dried chilli ground fine with a couple of dozen other spices, among them fenugreek, which gives it a little bitterness, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, garlic and korarima, a big wild cardamom from the highlands. Cooked slowly into the onions and our olive-oil ghee it turns dark and glossy, and the heat comes on late and stays.

A wooden scoop resting in a deep red heap of ground berbere — Berbere, ground fine. Photo: Catalina Miron, Pexels.

Pepper and ginger came from India through the port of Adulis while Aksum was trading with Rome, the chilli came up the Red Sea on Portuguese ships in the 1500s, and the cardamom and fenugreek were here all along. Every family has its own proportions, ground once a year after the harvest and handed from mother to daughter, and when someone flies out to visit relatives a good part of the suitcase is berbere. Ours is sent by family at home. People there say the chilli gets the blood moving and the fenugreek and ginger settle a full stomach.

What each dish is for

Injera

The oldest thing on the table. Teff was first farmed in the highlands around three thousand years ago, and at home the batter is started with a little kept back from the last batch, the way sourdough bakers do it. It is the plate and the cutlery as well as the bread.

Dorho zighini and zighini

Dorho zighini, the chicken in berbere with a whole boiled egg, is the feast-day dish. At home it is cooked for Christmas and Easter and for a guest you want to honour, and it takes most of a day, because the onions cook down slowly before anything else goes in. The eggs are counted so each guest gets one, and a wedding without it would be talked about. Zighini with lamb is the same idea for an ordinary Sunday. The goat, cooked in lemon, cardamom, cloves and cinnamon, is for when there is something to celebrate and an animal has been bought for it.

Tumtummo, red lentils topped with sliced green chilli, with a bowl of berbere on injera

Shiro, tumtummo and ades

Shiro is the everyday dish, the one people cook on fasting days and as students: ground chickpeas simmered with garlic and olive oil into a thick sauce. Every household keeps a tin of the spiced flour, so dinner is twenty minutes away. It is the taste people mention when they talk about home, and a spoon of zighini on top is how most people end up eating it. Tumtummo, red lentils, and ades, green lentils, keep it company through the fasting seasons.

Aletcha, hoswas and dubba

Aletcha is cooked without berbere. At home it is cooked for children, new mothers, anyone unwell and guests who did not grow up with chilli, and it is good manners to put a yellow dish beside the red ones. Hoswas is whatever vegetables are in season, and dubba is pumpkin in berbere.

Kulwha

Kulwha is cooked fast in a hot pan with onion, the dish you order out or make when people turn up unexpectedly. Massawa is a fishing port, and the coast has always cooked the day's catch with berbere and onion while the highlands ate lamb.

Foul medames, whole fava beans topped with chopped onion in a clay dish

Foul, sisly and the Italian names

Foul medames, the fava beans, came from Egypt and Sudan and became breakfast in every town back home, eaten with bread. We serve it hot from the pan. Sisly, which is silsi at home, is the everyday sauce of onion, berbere and tomato that goes on anything. Melanzany and zucchini carry Italian names because the Italians brought the vegetables and we kept them.

Same dish, different name

Most of what we cook has two names, one in Amharic, the language of Addis Ababa, and one in Tigrinya, spoken in Asmara and the northern highlands. Our menu uses the Tigrinya names, so the doro wat you may have had in Footscray is our dorho zighini, and tibs is kulwha.

Relief map of the Red Sea coast, the Abyssinian highlands and Yemen, with Massawa, Asmara, Aksum, Lalibela, Addis Ababa and Mocha marked — Massawa and Asmara speak Tigrinya, Addis Ababa speaks Amharic, and Mocha, across the water, is where the coffee went next.

On our menu (Tigrinya)	Amharic name	What it is
Injera	Injera	The sourdough flatbread everything is served on; in Tigrinya also taita
Tsebhi	Wat	The general word for a slow-cooked dish that goes on injera
Zighini	Key wat	Meat cooked slowly in berbere; on our menu the lamb version
Dorho zighini	Doro wat	The chicken version, served with a whole boiled egg
Kulwha	Tibs	Meat or fish cut small and cooked quickly in a hot pan; dorho kulwha is chicken, asa kulwha is fish with berbere and green chilli
Aletcha	Alicha	Cooked without berbere, with vegetables or lamb
Shiro	Shiro	Ground spiced chickpeas simmered into a thick sauce
Tumtummo	Misir wat	Red lentils cooked in a spiced sauce
Ades	Misir	Green lentils, slightly hot; the word is Arabic and came in from Sudan
Hoswas	Atkilt wat	Mixed vegetables
Dubba	Duba wat	Pumpkin in berbere sauce
Foul medames	Ful	Slow-cooked fava beans, a Sudanese and Egyptian dish that is breakfast back home
Berbere	Berbere	The red chilli and spice blend
Tesmi	Niter kibbeh	Spiced clarified butter; we make our own vegan ghee from olive oil and spices so the food stays dairy-free
Mesob	Mesob	The woven basket-table the platter sits on

The Horn of Africa has more than eighty languages. Around Massawa, where Tigre, Saho, Afar and Arabic are all spoken, the table borrowed from Arabic, so foul medames is an Arabic name, and so are bun, our word for coffee, and shahi for tea.

Coffee, which started here

Coffee grows wild in the highlands of south-western Ethiopia, and the story we all tell is that a goatherd noticed his goats were a bit lively after eating the red berries and gave them a go himself. From there it crossed the Red Sea to Yemen and went out to the world through the port of Mocha.

A small patterned cup of black coffee beside a woven basket — Our coffee, with cinnamon and ginger, in the little cup.

At home, coffee for guests takes the best part of an hour. The green beans are roasted over charcoal with incense on the coals, ground by hand and brewed in a round clay pot called a jebena, and everyone drinks three rounds from little cups, the third of them the bereka, the blessing. People sit around it and talk through their problems and their happiness, and the coffee takes as long as the talking does.

We don't have an hour to spare on a Saturday night, so we make ours in a plunger, strong like a Turkish coffee, with cinnamon and ginger. It takes about five minutes and tastes good. There is kammam chai too, a spiced tea, and the usual espresso coffees, and you are welcome to sit as long as you like.

Maps: the globe is drawn from Natural Earth data, public domain, with a still by Martin23230, Rei-artur and Sémhur (CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, recoloured) while it loads; the relief map is by M.Bitton (CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped).

Abyssinia, the Habesha and the table