Wat (pre-chili Ethiopian stew, pre-history) Period COrigin theory CVerified

What is treated here is not the red doro wat of today, but the older stew that must have come before it — the earlier form cooked in these highlands before the American chili reached them. Its date and its shape, however, are thinly attested, and much of it remains conjecture.

The ingredients that support this earlier history are all long-established local ones. Teff, the grain behind injera, has been grown in the highlands for a very long time, and archaeological work has found fragments of the griddles (mitad) and baking plates used to cook teff in layers from the Aksumite period, the second to fifth centuries (Lyons & D'Andrea 2003). Chicken, too, and the native herbs used for aroma, were long at hand in this highland kitchen. Mild seasoning drew on the local cress and on scarce black pepper — the sort of gentle, unhot stew known as alicha.

What sustained this was the food culture of the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition and the customs of its festivals. Onion is simmered patiently, layered with the flavor of clarified niter kibbeh, and heaped onto freshly baked injera to be shared by all. The injera made from teff had been honored since the age of Aksum as the grain of the highest rank (McCann 2009). The form of hospitality — heaping stew onto injera and sharing it — rests on this old ground.

Two views stand facing each other, side by side, over this old stew. Both are now supported by scholarly sources.

One holds that the older layer runs continuously into the wat of today. Since the age of Aksum — third-century royal inscriptions record meat, mead, and butter — a stratum of eating that heaped stew onto injera and served it has carried on. This view has material backing. The fragments of injera griddles and baking plates found in Aksumite layers attest that a food culture of baking teff already existed in the second to fifth centuries (Lyons & D'Andrea 2003). That teff was the grain of highest prestige at Aksum (McCann 2009) likewise shows the antiquity of the ground on which injera and stew were eaten together. Yet whether the concrete form of that stew ran straight into the red version of today is something even the written record cannot state plainly; it does not rise above conjecture.

The other view holds that a break lies between the old layer and the present form. The red stew we call wat, it argues, came into being only once the New World chili was available — a form of the early modern period and after. Chili crossed to Ethiopia over the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, and by the eighteenth century James Bruce was recording Capsicum (Tewolde 1984). Until chili took root in the highlands and the spice blend berbere was assembled, the red wat had no way of taking shape. So the mild stew of the Aksumite age and the red stew of today, this view says, cannot be treated as one unbroken line.

The two views are not quarreling over whether an old stew existed. The point in dispute is the single question of whether that older layer continues into the red form of today. Those who see continuity stop short of asserting the concrete form of the old layer, and those who see it as separate do not deny the old layer itself. What remains unsettled is the line connecting the mild forerunner to the red present form. Keeping this earlier history set apart on its own is also a way of not confusing the antiquity of a dish with the moment its present manner of making took shape.