Teff love

Ethiopia, where the earliest human fossils have been found, has one of the oldest cultures on Earth. Their history of monarchy dwarfs that of the British, being almost 4,000 years old, until the 1974 revolution when emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown.

Chef and owner Sefanit Sophie Sirak-Kebede was a mere schoolgirl when this happened, studying at an English boarding school. While her husband Menyahill, Meny for short, was training at Sandhurst, for his job as part of the Imperial Guard.

Sophie, who possesses the dark-eyed glamour of a 1920s film star, and her husband didn’t return to Ethiopia after the revolution. After a long career in hospitality, Sophie set up the award-winning company Tobia Teff  from a workshop in Wembley, selling ingredients including Teff flour. Teff itself is ancient, farmed for the last six thousand years.

I visited Sophie in Wembley to find out more about Ethiopian cuisine and watch her make injera. She explained that the majority of the Ethiopian diet is vegan due to the Orthodox adhesion to fasting, which they do every Wednesday and Friday as well as the traditional Advent and Lent; in fact, the Amharic word for fasting is identical to the word for vegan.

Ethiopian teff, the world’s smallest grain, it’s gluten-free and iron-rich. It forms the basic diet of Ethiopia in the form of injera, a fermented, pancake-style flatbread. Eating is a communal activity in Ethiopia, in the literal sense that people don’t have their own plates but eat a series of sauces, known as ‘wot’, placed on top of a huge injera bread, like a vast edible tablecloth.

As Sophie says, “He who is alone will die alone. He who is with the family will die with the family. There is no individual plate, you share.”

The culture of hospitality is so important that if people are eating when you enter a room or a restaurant, you will always be invited to join.

Likewise coffee, an important Ethiopian export, which is a ritual.  The raw green beans are roasted, then using a special coffee set, the decoction is brewed three times. This used to be accompanied by toasted barley and burning incense, but today, in the cafes of Addis Ababa, you will see young people munching on popcorn with their coffee.

I’d love to visit Ethiopia.