Kitfo Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Kitfo is an Ethiopian dish of finely chopped beef, raw or lightly warmed, dressed with a spiced clarified butter (niter kibbeh) and a chili spice blend (mitmita), and served at feasts and when guests are welcomed. The name goes back to the Ethio-Semitic root k-t-f, "to chop finely": the act of chopping became the dish's name.

Cattle, the heart of the dish, are a long-established native animal of the Ethiopian highlands. Eating beef raw is an old custom here too. Meat cut into chunks or strips and eaten raw, in the ways known as tere siga and gored gored, was part of highland meals from early on.

The red heat of mitmita belongs to a later age. Chili is a New World crop, and it reached the East African highlands only from the sixteenth century on. Until chili crossed the sea, a kitfo reddened with mitmita had no way of coming into being.

That does not mean today's kitfo appeared as soon as the chili arrived. Opinion divides in two over when the dish took shape: chopped beef dressed with spiced butter and mitmita, and called by the name kitfo. The widely accepted view is that it is a dish the Gurage people of southern Ethiopia have made for a long time. The other view is that it is a comparatively new urban dish, born in the capital, Addis Ababa, in the mid-twentieth century.

Kitfo comes with an unforgettable origin story. When Abyssinia was invaded during the Adal war of the sixteenth century, the tale goes, the Gurage began eating their meat raw so that the fire and smoke of cooking would not give them away to the enemy, and that was how this raw-meat dish began. Food journalism tells it again and again, and it sounds suitably venerable.

Yet before that war, eating raw meat was already part of everyday life here. Francisco Álvares, a Portuguese priest who went to Ethiopia in the 1520s, wrote that the food of the people of this country was raw meat. His account comes from before 1529, the year the Adal war began, so raw-meat eating was no stopgap born of a wartime emergency but a custom already rooted before it.

No chili or berbere appears in Álvares's account, incidentally; the most prized spice offered as a gift in his day was black pepper. It is testimony from a time when the New World chili had not yet reached the highlands.

With the smoke story gone, a question about kitfo's beginnings still remains. Kitfo is widely known as a dish of the Gurage people of southern Ethiopia, and has been seen as part of the highlands' old tradition of eating raw meat. James McCann, who studies the history of African food, has challenged that view. McCann separates the old custom of eating meat raw in chunks from kitfo, finely chopped and dressed with spiced butter, treating them as different dishes. Kitfo, he argues, is a comparatively new urban dish that spread from the eating habits of the elite and upper middle class of Addis Ababa in the mid-twentieth century. McCann also regards the account that the Gurage have eaten it since long ago as an origin story told among Ethiopians living abroad.

Neither the view that kitfo is an old Gurage dish nor McCann's view has so far displaced the other. The tale of the smoke of war is gone, but whether kitfo is a dish long made in the highlands or one that took its name in the twentieth-century capital remains unsettled.