Injera Period COrigin theory CVerified

Injera is a staple made by naturally fermenting teff, an indigenous grain of the Ethiopian highlands, and baking it thin on a dedicated griddle called a mitad. Shared around the family table, it has been eaten widely across every rank of society.

Teff, its foundation, is an ancient grain rooted in the highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea, brought under cultivation somewhere between the fourth and first millennia BC. At the Mezber site in the Tigray region, microscopic plant remains (phytoliths and starch grains) together with traces of large seeds point to cultivation around 3,500 years ago, that is, around 1600 BC. By the first millennium BC teff had crossed the Red Sea as far as Hajar bin Humeid in Yemen. That the grain's foundation reaches far back is well established by the study of agricultural history.

The antiquity of the grain, however, must be kept apart as a separate question from when injera as a fermented flatbread came into being. That teff's history as a grain reaches back to around 1600 BC and when today's fermented injera took its form are not answered by the same sources. The grain may be ancient, but when the method of fermenting it with wild yeast and baking it thin on a dedicated griddle came together is a different matter.

The origins of injera carry a piece of lore that reaches back 'to around 100 BC.' In speaking of Ethiopia's staple, this antiquity has often been invoked.

Trace the date, though, and it never arrives at a historical record that sets it down. The English-language Wikipedia names a 1962 paper on injera by the botanists Stewart and Getachew as the source of the lore, but how that paper itself treats the date of 100 BC remains unconfirmed. No other contemporary record supports the tale. To be pulled along by the antiquity of the underlying grain and declare the fermented bread just as old would make it a rootless invention.

Another source often brought forward is the travel writing that Europeans left behind in Ethiopia in the age of exploration. It is widely said that Portuguese records of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describe injera. Go to the earliest eyewitness account, though, and what it sets down looks different. Francisco Álvares, who stayed in Ethiopia from 1520 to 1527 and published his account in 1540, writes of the meals at the monastery of Bizan that the bread is made of barley and of a small black grain they call toffo. Bread of toffo, that is, of teff, is indeed recorded here. But the same passage goes on to say that the bread is made round, the size and roundness of a citron. It is a small round loaf, not a thin fermented crêpe spread across the whole griddle. Ludolf's New History of Ethiopia, translated into English at the end of the seventeenth century, likewise records only that a very good bread is made from a strange grain they call Tef, and says nothing of its shape. The record of people eating teff bread reaches back to 1540. Whether that record points to injera as it is today, however, cannot be said for certain.

What is clear is the antiquity of the grain. The plant remains at Mezber and the teff carried across the Red Sea as far as Yemen both show that this grain stood in the life of the highlands from a very early age. Charred teff grains dated to the mid-to-late fourth century have also been recovered from the Ona Nagast site at Aksum.

By contrast, the clues pointing to the fermented flatbread itself are thin. Harry Kloman, who has long written about Ethiopian food, reports on his blog that the archaeologist Richard Wilding identified mitads among the pottery from Chittick's excavations at Aksum (1972–74) and placed them in the late fifth or sixth century. In Wilding's own words, as the same blog quotes them, unless a metal tray was used in the early period and later replaced by pottery, teff was not used for injera until the late fifth or sixth century. The English-language Wikipedia likewise says that mitads have been found at archaeological sites dating back as far as around 600 AD. These finds tell of griddles in use, but they cannot be taken as direct evidence that a fermented flatbread was baked on them.

An ethnoarchaeological study of how bread is baked in the highlands today links the choice between oven and griddle to whether a grain contains gluten; ovens suit gluten-bearing cereals. From the evidence for griddle use and the character of African cereals, the study concludes that native grains were used in the highlands before wheat, barley and the other Near Eastern cereals arrived. It also argues that griddle cooking leaves Near Eastern cereals more likely to survive as remains, which may be why African grains are so scarce in the early archaeological plant record. That griddles were in use speaks to an old practice of baking native grains, but not to whether those grains were fermented and baked thin.

The foundation of teff as a grain is indeed very old. Yet the record that would fix when the style of fermented injera itself came together has not yet been found.