Abyssinia, the Habesha and the table

So what is an Abyssinian?

Abyssinia is what Europeans used to call the old empire up in the highlands where Ethiopia and Eritrea are now, and the word comes from Habesha, which is what people from those highlands call themselves. People use it narrowly for the Amharic and Tigrinya speakers of northern Ethiopia and central Eritrea, and loosely for Ethiopians and Eritreans in general, and especially for the food, the music and the way we carry on at dinner. The border between the two countries is a great deal younger than the cooking, and we wanted a name that sits on both sides of it.

Aksum, the alphabet and a calendar with thirteen months

The kingdom of Aksum, in the highlands where Ethiopia and Eritrea meet, was trading with Rome and India in the first century, and its stone obelisks are standing. Aksum took up Christianity in the 300s, so the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches are among the oldest anywhere, and it also took in the first followers of Muhammad when they needed somewhere safe, so Christians and Muslims have been neighbours up there for about fourteen hundred years. The churches carved out of solid rock at Lalibela came about nine hundred years after that, and they are worth a look if you are ever passing.

The alphabet on the beer labels is Ge'ez, the old language of Aksum, which the church uses and which Amharic and Tigrinya are both written in. It is one of the very few alphabets worked out in Africa itself. We also run a different calendar at home: twelve months of thirty days plus a short thirteenth one, about seven years behind yours, 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, seven vowels. Every sign in Ge'ez is a whole syllable, so the words on the labels look compact.

ሓበሻ

Habesha

ጣይታ

taita, injera

ጸብሒ

tsebhi

በርበረ

berbere

ሽሮ

shiro

ዝግኒ

zighini

መሶብ

mesob

ቡን

bun, coffee

Injera, tsebhi and eating together

There is injera, which looks like a big, soft, spongy pancake and tastes slightly sour, made from a batter that 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, because teff is hard to get here at a sensible price.

Then there is the tsebhi, which 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 have berbere in them, which is mostly dried chilli with a couple of dozen other spices ground in, and the yellow ones use turmeric and garlic instead, so there is always something on the platter for the person who ordered mild.

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 on low stools around it. The right hand is the eating hand, at home and here. If it is your first time, the three steps are on the About page, and the questions page has the short answers on halal, gluten, spice and the rest.

The table has always been one that Christians, Muslims and Jews could share, so all our meat is halal without anything having to change. And there is a lot of vegan food, because the Orthodox church has about 180 fasting days a year with no meat, eggs or dairy, including every Wednesday and Friday and the eight weeks before Easter, so any Habesha kitchen that can't feed a table well without meat doesn't last long. 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, so the platter in front of you is very close to what their grandmothers served too.

Berbere, the red spice

Berbere is the reason the red dishes are red, and it is the taste people ask us about. Dried chilli, ground fine, carries a couple of dozen spices with it: fenugreek for a little bitterness, cardamom and cloves for warmth, cinnamon and nutmeg for sweetness, ginger and garlic for bite, and korarima, the big wild cardamom that grows only in the highlands. Cooked slowly into onions and our olive-oil ghee it turns deep, dark and glossy, and the heat comes on late and stays warm.

Pepper and ginger came up from India through the port of Adulis while Aksum was trading with Rome, the chilli arrived on Portuguese ships up the Red Sea in the 1500s and made itself at home, and the cardamom and the 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 still comes that way, sent by family at home, so the red dishes here taste the way they do there.

At home people say the chilli gets the blood moving and the fenugreek and ginger settle a full stomach, and a red tsebhi with injera and lentils is a whole meal in one round. If you want the flavour without the fire, the yellow dishes are made with turmeric and cooked just as slowly, and the green chilli on the table is for anyone who wants to go the other way.

What each dish is for

Same dish, different name

Most of what we cook exists on both sides of the border under two names, one in Amharic, spoken in Addis Ababa, the capital, and across most of Ethiopia, and one in Tigrinya, the main language in Eritrea and in Tigray, the highlands just over the border. Our menu uses the Tigrinya names, so if you have eaten Ethiopian food in Footscray and nothing on our menu rings a bell, this table should sort you out.

Red Sea Sudan Eritrea Yemen Gulf of Aden Djibouti Ethiopia Somalia Massawa Dahlak islands Asmara Adulis Aksum Lalibela Addis Ababa Mocha

Ethiopia and Eritrea have more than eighty languages between them, and the food has a name in every one. In Afaan Oromo, the most spoken language in Ethiopia, injera is buddeena, a tsebhi is ittoo and coffee is buna. 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.

At home, making coffee for guests is a ceremony that takes the best part of an hour: green beans roasted in a pan over charcoal, incense on the coals, the beans ground by hand, brewed in a round clay pot called a jebena, poured into little cups and drunk in three rounds, and the third round, the bereka, is the blessing. At home coffee is made in the house, not bought, so people sat around it and talked through their problems and their happiness, and the coffee took as long as the talking did.

We don't have an hour to spare on a Saturday night, so at the restaurant we make our own coffee in a plunger, strong, closer to a Turkish coffee than anything else, with cinnamon and ginger in it, which takes about five minutes and tastes good. There is also a kammam chai with cinnamon, ginger, cloves, mint, cardamom, lemon and honey, and the usual espresso coffees if you would rather. Either way, you are welcome to sit as long as you like.

The coast all of this comes from, Massawa, its beaches and the islands off it, has a page of its own, mostly photographs.