The Cuppa and the Cold Veranda: Addis Ababa, 1972 - The Spicekeeper's Almanac, Issue Ten
- michel1492
- 1 day ago
- 17 min read
"Every time, somehow, we ended up talking about Africa."
Welcome
"I never went to Ethiopia. I only ever went as far as the kitchen table, with the kettle on and Bridget across from me, her face changing the moment the talk turned to the food."
Welcome, my friend. Put the kettle on. This is a story that was only ever told to me over tea, so it seems right to tell it to you the same way.
When I married into the family, there was a great deal I did not understand about the man I had married, and the surest way to understand him, I decided, was to understand the people who made him. So I would sit his youngest sister down, make us both a cuppa, and ask her to tell me about her brother.
She would start there, dutifully. But it never lasted. Within a few minutes the talk would drift, the way a good conversation drifts, away from her brother and toward the place that had shaped them all. Bridget would set down her cup, and her whole face would change, and she would be nine years old again, eight thousand feet up in the cold clean air of Addis Ababa, watching green coffee beans turn dark in a pan over coals.
I learned not to interrupt. If I simply kept the tea warm, the stories always found their own way home.
I will tell you about Bridget, because I think you would have liked her. She was the wild one, the youngest of four, with red hair, a face full of freckles, and a way of remembering Africa that lit her up from the inside. Her family lived the way some families lived in those years, moving where the work moved them, between England and Wales, the African postings, and her mother's Oregon, packing everything they owned into oil cans once a year and shipping their whole lives ahead to wherever they were going next. They were thrifty in a way that already looked old-fashioned to me by the time I knew them, juice cans pressed into service as hair curlers, freezer bags washed out and hung to dry until they finally gave up entirely. It was the tenderness of a family that had learned to carry its home on its back and waste nothing along the way.
And the part of home Bridget carried longest, and most gladly, was the food.
So pour yourself one as well, and let me hand you the afternoons she handed me. The kettle is on. She is across the table. The talk is already drifting toward Africa.
The Family That Traveled Light
Before the veranda, you should know a little of what this family carried, because it is part of why the bright things shone as brightly as they did.
The father flew. His work moved the family the way weather moves, and they moved with it, from England to Africa, to Wales and back again, with long stretches in the American West where Bridget's mother had grown up. The children became a kind of child the world once made in great numbers and now rarely does: at home almost everywhere and from nowhere in particular, fluent in airports and goodbyes, their accents and loyalties scattered across three continents.
Life had taught them early that home was something you carried rather than somewhere you stayed.
They had also known fear of the close, bodily kind. Bridget's eldest sister had polio. There was a season, before Bridget was old enough to understand all of it but old enough to feel it, when that single word settled over the family like weather that would not move on. A child they loved lay inside one of the great steel breathing machines that kept her alive when her own muscles could not. Bridget remembered the fear without dwelling on it, the way children often remember the shape of a hard thing more clearly than its details.
I'll tell you now what the family themselves could not yet know, so you can carry the rest of this story lightly, as it deserves.
The sister lived.
She recovered. She married a man from Madagascar, built a lovely home in London, and lived a full life. The fear was real, but it passed. What remained was a family that held the bright days a little closer because they had learned how quickly the hard ones could come.
That is the family that arrived in Addis Ababa.
The veranda, the coffee, the fruit, the laughter, none of them happened because life had been easy. They happened because life had not been. Brightness is often easier to recognize after you've known its opposite.
Hold that thought as we step onto the veranda.
The Veranda in the Cold Air
Now let me hand the afternoon to Bridget, just as she handed it to me across a kitchen table with the tea growing cold between us. These are her words as faithfully as memory allows, a grown woman remembering the Africa of her nine-year-old self, polished bright by fifty years of loving it.
Pour your cup. Pull up a chair. Listen.
We came to Addis with the red dust of Kampala still in the trunks.
We had left Uganda the way people left things in those years, quickly, and nobody had told us the new place would be cold.
That was the first thing, the cold. Eight thousand feet up, and the evenings came down sharp off the hills, and we went digging through the trunks for cardigans we had packed away as if we would never need wool again. A different rain came at the windows sideways. I remember being astonished by it. I had thought Africa was one thing, and here it was being another, with its own cold and its own rain and its own everything, and not asking my permission.
The food was the thing. The food was always the thing.
In Uganda we had eaten around the edges of a place, on verandas, food we loved made by a cook whose language we never learned, and we had never had to understand it. Here there was no eating around the edges. The injera came to the table sour and pale and enormous, a great soft round the size of the table itself, and the stews sat on top of it in pools of red and gold and rust. No plates. The bread was the plate. You tore it with your right hand, only ever the right, and you scooped, and you ate the plate along with the meal. I got it wrong constantly. I would reach with the wrong hand or tear too much. I watched the grown-ups who knew how to do it properly, easy as breathing, and I would try again and get it wrong again. The getting wrong was half the joy of it.
There was one stew we had nearly every day, smooth and thick and the color of rust, and we called it curry, because curry was the only word any of us had been given for warmth and spice in a bowl. Everything unfamiliar seemed to become "curry" to English children in those days. It was not curry. I know that now. It was shiro, and it was the quiet center of every table in that country, ground chickpea cooked down with spice and onion and oil until it turned to velvet. I have spent a good part of my life since trying to find it again, and be nine years old eating it.
And the spice. There was a spice in the lamb and in the stews that made everything taste of heat and incense at the same time, a thing I had never met before and could not have brought with me if I had tried. I never learned its name as a child. I only knew it was the taste of that whole country, and that nothing in our trunks could make it.
The juice is what I would go back for, I think, if I could only have one thing.
We children were given juice, and it seemed like a kind of wealth. Mango and papaya and guava, and the tall layered glasses the city loved, avocado and orange poured in bright bands so they sat in stripes inside the glass. Fruit so ripe it seemed almost unfair, almost rude, that anything could be that sweet.
We drank it on the veranda while our parents lingered over their coffee, the cold clean air around us and the hills stretching away beyond the garden. For one quiet hour every morning, the whole family was perfectly content in a country that had not asked us to understand it, and did not need us to.
The coffee was its own ceremony, and even as a child I could tell it mattered.
Nothing in England had prepared my parents for coffee that began as a fire and a smell. The beans came green, and someone would roast them right there in a pan over the coals, and the smoke would go up sharp before turning sweet, filling the whole house before a single cup was poured. It was not quick. It was not meant to be quick. There was incense and there were small cups and there was a clay pot with a long neck, and the grown-ups would settle into it the way you settle into something you respect. I did not have words then for what I was watching. I know now that I was watching one of the oldest things in the world, in the place where it began.
That is the Africa I carry. The cold air and the bright juice and the rust-colored stew and the smell of coffee beginning as a fire.
We were only passing through. We were always only passing through. But some places give you more in the passing than other places give you in a lifetime of staying, and that one gave me enough to be telling you about it now, with the tea gone cold, all these years later.
A Note on the Table
Bridget never learned, as a child, the names of the things she loved most at that table. Let me name them now, as the grown woman she became would have wanted them named, with respect for the country that made them and the people who placed them before a foreign family without ever being thanked in a language they would have understood.
The spice she could never have named was berbere. It is not one spice but a chorus. At its heart are dried red chiles, but what makes berbere unmistakable is everything folded around the heat: fenugreek with its faint maple bitterness, ginger and garlic, the warmth of allspice, cardamom, clove, cinnamon, and coriander, and often Ethiopian aromatics such as korarima and ajwain, whose flavors had no real equivalent in a European pantry. Berbere is toasted, ground, and kept always within reach because it is not a finishing touch. It is the foundation of a cuisine.
The smooth rust-colored stew the children called curry was shiro. Made from chickpea or broad-bean flour simmered with berbere, onion, garlic, and oil until it turns to velvet, it is one of Ethiopia's most beloved everyday dishes. It was easy to understand why English children reached for the word curry, but shiro is something entirely its own. It has long been a faithful companion to the fasting calendar of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, naturally free of meat and dairy, yet cherished just as much on ordinary days. It is quiet food, comforting food, the kind that appears so often you scarcely notice how much you would miss it if it were gone.
Nearly everything arrived on injera, the great sour flatbread fermented from teff, a tiny grain native to the Ethiopian highlands. Injera is plate, utensil, and staple all at once. Cooked in a single broad round on a clay griddle called a mitad, it is torn with the right hand, used to gather the stew, and eaten along with the meal itself. Bridget fumbled with it, as newcomers always do, and loved it anyway.
And then there was the coffee.
Ethiopia is where coffee began. The plant is native to these highlands, and the ceremony Bridget remembered remains one of the country's most enduring expressions of hospitality. Green beans are roasted over glowing coals, ground by hand, brewed in a long-necked clay jebena, and served in three rounds, each one an invitation to stay a little longer. What Bridget's parents experienced as an extraordinary way to prepare coffee was, in truth, one of the oldest coffee traditions on earth.
It would be dishonest to leave you only with the brightness.
The family sat on that cool veranda in 1972, during what would become the final quiet years of imperial Ethiopia. They had come from a Uganda that was, that same year, expelling tens of thousands of its people. In Ethiopia, famine was already taking lives in the north while an order that had endured for decades was beginning to fracture. Within two years the emperor would be gone.
None of this was the family's to fix, or even, as children, fully to understand.
But it was the world in which that generous table existed.
That is worth remembering.
The brightness was real. So was everything that surrounded it. A child carries home the sweetness. It is the privilege, and perhaps the responsibility, of the grown reader to carry both.
The Spicekeeper's Kitchen
History tells us what people ate. Technique helps us understand why it tasted the way it did.
If you want to stand, even for a moment, where Bridget stood, don't begin with the feast.
Begin with the everyday bowl.
Shiro was never meant to impress anyone. It was the quiet heart of the Ethiopian table, the stew that appeared so often it became almost invisible until someone was far away and found themselves longing for it. Bridget spent a lifetime remembering what she had called "curry," only to discover years later that it had a name of its own.
Like so many humble dishes, shiro asks very little of the cook.
It asks only patience.
Everything depends on a single moment, when berbere meets warm fat before the liquid is added. Miss that moment and the stew will still feed you. Honor it, and the flavor settles into every spoonful instead of floating on top.
That is why this recipe begins, as so many good ones do, with the bloom.
THE DAILY HEART
Shiro: Ethiopian Spiced Chickpea Stew
The everyday stew Bridget remembered for the rest of her life. Chickpea flour, onion, garlic, and berbere simmer together into something smooth, deeply comforting, and quietly extraordinary. Naturally free of meat and dairy, shiro has nourished Ethiopian tables for generations, whether during the fasting season or an ordinary family meal.
Featured Blend: Oak City Spice Blends Berbere Ethiopian
Bloom Classification: Medium Bloom
Bloom Medium: Oil
Why the Bloom Works
Berbere contains aromatic spices that release their fullest flavor when briefly warmed in fat. Blooming the blend before adding liquid softens the raw edges of the spices, deepens their sweetness, and allows every spoonful of the finished stew to carry the same rich, balanced flavor.
Ingredients
1 cup chickpea flour (besan or gram flour) (120 g)
1 large onion, very finely chopped (200 g)
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tbsp Oak City Spice Blends Berbere (16 g)
3 Tbsp oil or niter kibbeh (45 ml)
3 cups water, plus more as needed (700 ml)
1 Tbsp tomato paste (15 ml)
Salt to taste
Method
Warm the oil over medium heat. Add the onion and cook slowly, stirring often, until deeply golden and very soft, about 12 to 15 minutes. This patient onion is the foundation of the dish.
Stir in the garlic and berbere. Bloom the spice in the hot fat for about one minute, stirring constantly, until fragrant.
Add the tomato paste and cook for another minute to deepen its flavor.
Slowly whisk in the water. Gradually whisk in the chickpea flour until completely smooth.
Simmer gently for 15 to 20 minutes, stirring often, until the stew thickens to the consistency of soft velvet. Add a little more water if needed.
Season with salt and serve over injera, warm flatbread, or rice.
Best With - Fresh injera whenever possible. Otherwise serve with warm flatbread and a simple tomato and onion salad to balance the richness of the stew.
Blooming Notes - Blooming is the difference between tasting berbere and experiencing it. Without the bloom, the spices remain separate from the stew. With it, the warmth of the berbere settles into the onions and oil before the liquid arrives, creating the deep, rounded flavor Bridget remembered decades later.
Historical Notes - There is no anachronism here. Shiro, berbere, and injera belong together at the Ethiopian table. Traditional cooks often prepare the dish with niter kibbeh, Ethiopia's beautifully spiced clarified butter. Plain oil creates a version suitable for the many fasting days observed in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, making the recipe naturally vegan while remaining entirely authentic.
THE CEREMONY
A Word on Coffee
I will not give you a recipe for the Ethiopian coffee ceremony, because it is not a recipe. It is a way of welcoming someone, and it deserves far more than a page in a spice almanac.
Bridget remembered the smell long before she remembered the names.
Green coffee beans were poured into a pan and held over glowing coals until they began to crack and darken. The smoke rose sharp at first, then sweet, filling the house before a single cup had been poured. The beans were ground by hand, brewed in a long-necked clay jebena, and served in three rounds called abol, tona, and baraka. Each cup grew a little gentler than the last, but the point was never the strength of the coffee.
The point was that no one hurried.
The ceremony asks something unusual of us today. It asks us to believe that conversation is worthy of time. Between the roasting, the grinding, the brewing, and the pouring, people talk. They ask after one another's families. They tell stories.
Children listen. Guests become friends. The coffee is simply what gives everyone permission to remain at the table a little longer.
That, I think, is what Bridget carried home as much as the flavor itself. She remembered the smoke, the little cups, and the quiet patience of it all. Even as a child she understood that this was something to be respected, though she could not yet have explained why.
If you are ever invited to sit through an Ethiopian coffee ceremony, accept the invitation. Do not glance at your watch. Let the coffee take the time it needs, and let the conversation do the same.
Some traditions exist to make a drink.
This one exists to make a community.
From Michel's Notebook
The spice in Bridget's story was berbere, and she was quite right that she could not have brought it. But the deeper thing she gave me across those kitchen tables was not a spice. It was a way of remembering a place with your whole face.
I used to make the tea so she would keep talking. That was the trick of it. As long as there was a warm cup in front of her, the stories kept coming, and they always took the same road: they would start with her brother, dutiful, and then some small thing, a smell, a color, the word injera, would catch, and she would be gone, back to the cold veranda and the bright juice and the rust-colored stew, and I would sit there making more tea and falling a little in love with a country I had never seen, through the eyes of a woman who had only passed through it as a child.
That is what good food does, I think, and good spice with it. It is not only flavor. It is a door that stays open long after you have left the room.
Bridget left Ethiopia as a girl and carried it her whole life, and then she handed it to me over a cuppa, and now I am handing it to you, with the name of the spice she never knew, and the recipe for the stew she called curry, and the blend in a jar so you can set your own bright table in your own cold air.
That was always the point. To hand you the whole of it, the history and the blend and the method, and let the door stay open.
What the Tea Remembers
I never did fully understand her brother, if I am honest. But I came to understand something better.
I came to understand a family that traveled light and held each other close, that shipped its whole life in oil cans and wasted nothing and feared the hard things and survived them. I came to understand a wild red-haired girl who watched her sister come through the worst of it and grew up to carry not the fear but the brightness, the juice and the coffee smoke and the great pale round of sour bread that served as a plate.
The kettle would click off. The tea would go cold between us, because she was too busy remembering to drink it and I was too busy listening to remind her. And her face, every single time the talk reached Africa, would light up from somewhere deep, the way the high cold morning lights up before the valley does.
I do not know what your own cold verandas were, or which bright thing you would go back for if you could only have one. But I know you have one. Everyone does. And I know that the surest way to find your way back to it is through the table, through a smell that catches and a flavor that opens a door you thought had closed.
So put the kettle on. Make someone you love a cuppa. Ask them about the place that made them, and then get out of the way, and let them light up.
That, in the end, is all the Spicekeeper has ever been trying to teach.
Until our next table, may your jars stay fragrant, may the door stay open, and may there always be someone across the kitchen table with a story and a cup gone cold beside them.
Until then,
Michel
The Spicekeeper
"The tea is cold and the kettle wants filling again, but she is still talking, and the veranda is still bright, and somewhere the coffee is just beginning to catch in the pan."
The Spicekeeper's Bookshelf
If Bridget's Ethiopia has left you wishing you could linger on that veranda a little longer, these are the three books I would place beside your teacup. One will teach you the table. One will explain the world beyond it. One will remind you what childhood remembers, and what it quietly leaves for adulthood to understand.
Exotic Ethiopian Cooking: Society, Culture, Hospitality, and Traditions - Daniel J. Mesfin
If you cook only one book after reading this issue, let it be this one. More than a collection of recipes, it is an invitation into Ethiopian hospitality itself. Here you'll find berbere, shiro, injera, the coffee ceremony, and the rhythms of a table that has welcomed families for centuries. Read it not simply to learn how to cook Ethiopian food, but to understand why those dishes are still cherished today.
ISBN: 978-0961634520
A History of Ethiopia - Harold G. Marcus
Bridget remembered a bright veranda. History remembers the wider world beyond it.
Marcus provides that larger view, tracing Ethiopia from its earliest kingdoms through the reign of Haile Selassie and the revolution that followed. It is the book that explains the history standing just beyond the garden wall while one family drank fruit juice in the cool mountain air.
ISBN: 978-0520224797
The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood - Elspeth Huxley
This memoir unfolds in Kenya rather than Ethiopia, and in an earlier generation, but it captures something remarkably familiar: the experience of seeing Africa through the wondering eyes of a European child. Read it not as a history of Ethiopia, but as a companion to Bridget's memories, another reminder that childhood often preserves feelings more faithfully than facts.
ISBN: 978-0141183787
Read the cookbook with an apron nearby.
Read the history with a map beside you.
Read the memoir with a cup of tea.
Together they tell the same story from three different directions.
A child remembers the brightness.
History remembers the world around it.
The table, somehow, remembers both.
A Note on This Issue
The question I am asked most often is simple:
"How much of this really happened?"
The answer is: almost all of it.
Bridget was real. The afternoons were real. I married into her family, put the kettle on, and listened while she remembered. I have changed her name to protect her privacy, but the wild red-haired girl, the four children, the oil cans packed with a family's life, the thrift, the laughter, the fear, and the fierce affection they carried for one another are all as true as I know how to tell them.
Her eldest sister's struggle with polio was real, and so was her recovery. She grew up, married, built a happy life, and remained one of the quiet proofs that hope sometimes wins.
The food is equally real. Berbere, shiro, injera, and the Ethiopian coffee ceremony are described from the historical and culinary record. So too are the wider events surrounding Bridget's memories: the Uganda expulsions of 1972, the famine already unfolding in northern Ethiopia, and the final years of Emperor Haile Selassie's reign.
Where this issue becomes something more than history is in Bridget's voice.
She never sat down and dictated these memories. They came a little at a time, over many cups of tea, across many years. Like all memories, they have been softened by time, shaped by affection, and polished by retelling. What you have read is my attempt to preserve not only what she remembered, but how she remembered it.
That distinction matters.
This is not a documentary of Ethiopia.
It is one woman's childhood, placed carefully beside the historical record so that each may help illuminate the other.
Children remember the brightness.
Historians remember the chronology.
The Spicekeeper has always tried to set a place at the table for both.
That is the spirit in which Bridget, her family, and her bright cold veranda have been remembered.
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