Meal 59: Ethiopia
What makes Ethiopian food so delicious and rich? For sure, the classic berbere mix, that blend of chilies and roughly half your spice cabinet, lends a complexity of flavor uncommon in most cuisines. And there’s something to be said for eating with your hands, grabbing bite-sized morsels with strands of the tangy injera flatbread. But what I learned from this meal is that it’s an ingredient common to virtually every cuisine, cooked in a simple but rare way, that provides ...
Meal 56: Equatorial Guinea
Despite its name, none of the country lies on the Equator. Most of its land mass is on the African mainland, but the capital’s on an island. Its colonial language is Spanish, but French and Portuguese are official languages too. It’s the richest country per capita in the continent, thanks to a recent oil discovery, but most of the population lives in poverty. That’s a lot of contradiction for a very small country — its population is barely 700,000. But ...
Meal 55: Eritrea
This wedge-shaped country on the Red Sea has seen a tumultuous history, especially in the past decade and a half: colonization by Italy after the opening of the Suez Canal, being stapled to its larger neighbor Ethiopia in the 1930s when the Italians invaded there too; a thirty-year war for independence that finally ended in 1991; and since then a highly autocratic government that is intolerant of any dissent. (Oh, and a border war with Ethiopia for good measure in ...
Meal 50: Dominica
Dominica is a tiny little island country, in the middle of that north-south string of Caribbean islands. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s the Spanish-speaking half of Hispaniola, but no, that’s the Dominican Republic. They both use the adjective Dominican; to assert that you mean this beautiful, actively volcanic, lush-in-parts island, place the stress on the third syllable, domiNIcan. The national Dominican dish is the so-called Mountain Chicken, which is actually a species of giant frog, so tasty and easy to ...
Meal 47: Democratic Republic of the Congo
What a special night! 75 guests, most of whom had never been to a Nosh before, gathered in the beautiful ballroom at Hostelling International on the Upper West Side, for a meal of classic Congolese dishes. The idea came from Ari, the community engagement manager at the hostel, who saw our email on The Listserve and reached out to see if we might want to do a Nosh with them. With a big venue and kitchen, we decided to align ...
Meal 41: Côte D’Ivoire
Am I getting better at cooking African food, or is Ivorian cuisine just that good? Probably more the latter, but still, this was probably our best sub-Saharan meal yet. The flavors were so well-balanced, the spice delightful and not overwhelming, and the textures pleasant. What’s more, with the exception of a few ingredients that you could probably cleverly work your way around, you can find these ingredients in a standard Western supermarket, so if you’ve been looking to try cooking ...
Meal 31: Cameroon
For our first Nosh in DC, we teamed up with WFP USA to host the biggest yet, with over 25 people — just about none of whom Laura or I had ever met! — coming to experience a Cameroonean feast meal. It was quite the affair, with a buffet line, speeches before and after, a Q&A with our guests, a slideshow of prior Noshes, and a really powerful video about the amazing work WFP does that we hope to put ...
Meal 23: Botswana
We were super fortunate to have a Botswanan on hand! Ssebbaale, from the north of this large but sparsely populated country in southern Africa, is a colleague of previous nosher Jessica. Not only did he share recipes before coming — which was very helpful since there’s precious little online in the way of Botswanan recipes — but he also brought spices he’d recently picked up back home. And those spices made all the difference in giving the dishes a lovely, ...
Week 20: Benin
Benin, on the West African coast next to Nigeria, was formerly known as Dahomey, after a fearsome warrior kingdom that for a few centuries would sell captives to European slave traders. The countless souls passing through on their way to the Americas brought many foods with them, such as yams, okra, and peanuts, and many people from the Caribbean islands where they landed now live in Brooklyn. Thus, due to a long, strange path of history, I didn’t have to ...
Week 18: Belize
Belize navidad! In our last feast of the year in Brooklyn, we head to the small yet super-diverse country of Belize. From the creoles in the towns, to the inland Mayans, to the Afro-Caribbean Garifuna in the south, there are several culinary traditions to follow in a country of a third of a million people. So I did my best to incorporate some of all of them, and as I discovered, what ties them all together is coconut milk — ...