Shiro Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Shiro is made from chickpeas, broad beans, grass peas, and field peas that are dried, ground into flour, and simmered into a stew. Across the northern Ethiopian highlands and southern Eritrea it has long been anchored in home kitchens and churches as food for the fasting days set by the Orthodox calendar. During the fasts, when meat and dairy are given up, pulse flour carried the burden of nourishment on people's tables.

The pulses at the heart of the dish are old crops, deeply rooted in this land. From the pre-Aksumite through the Aksumite periods, the highlands are known to have practiced grain and legume farming alongside livestock keeping, and chickpeas and broad beans were on hand from early on. Simmering ground pulses into something thick and smooth grew out of these native beans, the grinding stone, and the fire. As a genre, shiro belongs within that long history.

What defines shiro today, though, is the presence of a red spice blend called berbere. Built around chili peppers combined with several other spices, berbere dissolves into the stew to give it that deep red color and heat. The chili is a New World crop, carried to Ethiopia through trade. Until the pepper took root in these highlands, the red, fiery shiro of the present day had no way of coming into being. The old pulse stew and the red, fiery modern style overlap under a single name across a span of centuries.

It is tempting, when talking about shiro, to lump it together as a dish unchanged for thousands of years since Aksum. Travel and cooking blogs widely paint the red, fiery shiro as an ancient, unaltered plate. The skeleton of a fasting food made by grinding and simmering pulses is indeed old. But telling the story so that today's red, fiery shiro reaches straight back into antiquity runs against the sources.

The clue is the chili pepper. Francisco Alvares, who recorded Ethiopia in the early sixteenth century (published 1540), mentions black pepper as a pungent seasoning but makes no reference at all to berbere or chili. The Portuguese missionary Pedro Páez, in the manuscript of his History of Ethiopia completed in 1622 (English translation 2011), sets down as a first-hand record that seeds of lettuce, cabbage, and chili had arrived from India 'just two years ago' and that chili was already plentiful and well-liked — around 1618. The botanist Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher likewise places the introduction of chili between the sixteenth century and 1770.

The sources point the same way. The contemporary first-hand records from the Aksumite period through the Middle Ages carry no mention of chili or berbere. Records of the red spice appear only from the seventeenth century onward, once Páez noted the pepper's arrival. A New World crop like chili could not have been on the tables of the Aksumite kingdom. What runs back to antiquity is the line of ground, simmered pulses; the red, fiery shiro appeared only after it took in the newcomer ingredient. Within one name lie two folded layers — the old fasting stew, and the layer that came after chili joined it.