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.

The spread of chili across these highlands was witnessed by people of the time. The Jesuit Pedro Páez, who lived in Ethiopia, recorded in his account that chili seed had arrived from India two years earlier and was now abundant and enjoyed by everyone. The ancestor of the Mareko pepper used in Ethiopia today likewise came in around the beginning of the seventeenth century, by way of Goa. Later the Scottish traveller James Bruce, between 1769 and 1771, would see and describe a wat that was truly fiery red. Only once chili had spread through the kitchens in this way 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 first record in which the dish itself is written down under the name doro wat comes much later: 1948, in The Empress Menen School Cook Book, published in Addis Ababa and taken to be the oldest cookbook from Ethiopia. It already sets out several wat recipes built around chili. No earlier Amharic manuscript recording the name has yet come to light.

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 age of Aksum, roughly the first to the tenth century. 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 evidence is left by contemporary records. Francisco Álvares, the Portuguese envoy who visited Ethiopia in the first half of the sixteenth century, names black pepper as the most prized gift at court, yet says not a word about chili or berbere. Páez, writing afterward, sets down as an event before his own eyes that chili seed had arrived from India two years earlier and was now abundant. The boundary between the age without chili and the age when it had spread stands out sharply 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 late sixteenth to the seventeenth century onward, once chili had crossed the sea.

That, however, tells us only how early such a dish could have been cooked, not when anyone set it down on paper. The name doro wat first appears in writing later still — in 1948, in The Empress Menen School Cook Book, the oldest cookbook from Ethiopia, where recipe after wat recipe already takes chili for granted. More than three centuries separate the arrival of the chili from that first appearance of the name on a printed page. 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.