Ethiopian cuisine

Ethiopian cooking is built on injera, a sour teff flatbread that is plate, cutlery and bread at once.

The injera is spread over a platter and the wots — thick stews — are ladled onto it. Eating is done by hand, tearing off a piece of bread to grip the food; the plate itself is eaten at the end.

For more than two hundred days a year the Orthodox calendar prescribes fasting, so the vegetarian half of Ethiopian cooking is developed no less than the meat half. Fasting wots use vegetable oil in place of spiced butter.