Doro wat Period AOrigin theory BVerified

Doro wat is a feast dish of the Ethiopian highlands: mounds of onion slowly dry-cooked down and simmered at length, with chicken turned deep red by berbere, a chili-forward spice blend. What makes the dish both red and hot is the chili at berbere's core. Yet the chili was not originally an African plant at all. It is native to the Americas, and it reached Ethiopia only after the great exchange of crops across the Atlantic that followed Columbus.

Chili came into these highlands at some point between the sixteenth century and the late eighteenth. Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher, a researcher who studied the New World crops that entered Ethiopia, placed its introduction within the two and a half centuries between 1520 and 1770. The ancestor of the Mareko pepper used in Ethiopia today is said to have arrived around the beginning of the seventeenth century, by way of Goa in India. Only once chili had spread through the kitchens did the dish we call doro wat, stained red by chili, have a place to exist.

The coming of chili marks only the earliest date at which such a dish could have been cooked. The earliest known Ethiopian cookbook, The Empress Menen School Cook Book, published in Addis Ababa in 1948, already sets out a good number of wat recipes: five meat wats and twelve legume wats. Whether doro wat appears in it by name has not been confirmed. Nor has any earlier Amharic manuscript recording that name come to light so far.

Only the chili that brings the redness and the heat came across the sea; the rest belongs to the land. The chicken, the grain teff from which the flatbread injera is made, the clarified butter niter kibbeh — all of these have long been part of this highland kitchen. Doro wat is a dish of hospitality, served to family and community on the day a religious fast is broken and at times of celebration, shared by hand together with injera.

There is a way of telling the story of doro wat and injera that traces their origin all the way back to the kingdom of Aksum, which flourished from about AD 100 to 940. The craft of fermenting grain, the practice of gathering around a single shared platter, the influence of Christianity — these are indeed old, and there is no falsehood in that. Some who tell it this way locate the source of doro wat in this deep older stratum.

But a slippage of dates hides here. In an age when chili did not yet exist, the very wat we know now — stained red by chili — cannot have existed. The clues lie in what travellers wrote down. Francisco Álvares, the Portuguese envoy who visited the Ethiopian court in the 1520s, names black pepper as the most prized gift there, and he records that the heat in wat came from linseed and cress seed. Neither chili nor berbere appears in his account. Some two and a half centuries later, the Scottish traveller James Bruce, who journeyed through the country between 1769 and 1771, wrote of cayenne pepper. Chili arrived somewhere in the span between these two records.

The antiquity of the stew as a form and the moment when today's red doro wat took shape are two different matters. That the tradition of fermentation and shared eating leading to wat and injera reaches back to Aksum is not itself denied. What is old is the earlier stratum; the present-day doro wat, finished red with chili, can only date from the sixteenth century onward, once chili had crossed the sea.

Wat reaches the pages of a cookbook much later still. The earliest known Ethiopian cookbook, The Empress Menen School Cook Book, published in 1948, already gathers a number of meat and legume wats. Whether the name doro wat itself appears in it has yet to be confirmed. The proud pedigree stretching back to antiquity was a story told after the fact, one that folded the age of a dish category and the making of its present form into a single line.