Food As It Illustrates Culture
Image courtesy of Gail At Large.
[Or, that time I took Dovey for his first taste of Ethiopian food.]
“Eating with my hands is weird,” Dov proclaims as we and a third friend enter the 24-seat space, lush with faux foliage peppered with signs for North American beers. “I never eat with my hands in public.”
My best friend grew up in an observant Jewish family not remotely food-oriented, so Ethiopia’s porous, teff-based injera bread and intoxicatingly piquant wats (stews) eluded his radar. “The food I grew up eating was very safe,” he says. “My mother’s cooking consisted of a lot of standard chicken and Jewish comfort food.” As a result, he approaches our meal with trepidation and excitement, the latter thanks to the bone-warming cocktail of aromas that strike Nazareth visitors on arrival.
We order beef tibs and a vegetarian platter, which arrive on one piece of briny, greyish injera loaded with wots of fiery red lentil, sweet carrot, smooth chickpea, earthy spinach, plus the melt-in-your-mouth morsels of beef. Using additional pieces of the dense, spongy sourdough bread, we dive in. Since Ethiopian food generally takes 30 minutes to migrate to the table after an order is placed, there is an urgency with which multicultural diners in the Babel-like restaurant attack their massive communal platters.
Dov becomes increasingly agitated as the meal progresses, despite enjoying the heady blend of flavours – familiar garlic, tongue-tingling chili, unexpected ginger, salty white cheese. “I’d much rather have a fork,” he says, and debates requesting one for the rest of the meal. He laments not being able to delicately construct the varied bites he would want, combining, say, the plate’s fiery beef with spice-humbling chickpea wot for increased variety. He is limited by the pinching act of eating with a dough utensil. Blending flavours is something we do often at Friday night dinners, smothering potato kugel in brisket gravy, for example.
As we become progressively more full, he also notes that he doesn’t like having to have bread with ever bite, a cheap fill that distracts from the meaty morsels at hand.
Though now relegated to the background, Ethiopian beats like the ones on our first visit form the soundtrack of our conversation as we pay the meager $25 bill. Our party of three is almost unbearably stuffed. Dov gazes at the platter and, summing up the flavours of the tender tibs, chickpeas and lentils, he muses, “It’s like deconstructed cholent,” a traditional Jewish stew of meat, potatoes, beans, lentils, spices and barley slow-cooked overnight.
And though he’d never eat cholent with his hands, it seems my pal’s found a way to frame this new experience through the lens of Shabbat dinner.