Vegetarian recipes from Ethiopia

Ethiopian cooking is built on teff, a local grain fermented and cooked into a wide, pliable flatbread: injera is plate, bread and utensil at once. Pulses carry most of the protein, in the form of long simmered purees: ground spiced chickpeas in shiro wat, red lentils with berbere chilli in misir wot, split peas with turmeric and no heat in kik alicha. The fat is spiced clarified butter, swapped for oil during the Orthodox fasts, which cover close to two hundred days a year and shaped an entirely plant based repertoire. On those days butter, milk and eggs leave the table without the structure of the meal changing at all.

A meal is not a sequence of courses: several preparations are set side by side on the same flatbread, and each person tears off a piece with the right hand. There is usually a vegetable stew such as atakilt wat, a bitter green like gomen, a cold chickpea puree such as buticha, and a sharp counterpoint, either timatim salata or azifa, made with green lentils and mustard. The balance sits between chilli heat, the sourness of the fermented bread and the softness of the purees. The berbere blend, the spices in the flavoured butter and fresh garlic return from one dish to the next and hold the whole tray together, however varied the textures on it.