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Recettes
Parcourez les archives par pays, par plat et par temps de cuisson.
Dawa means medicine in Swahili, and the name is a joke that stuck. The drink is lime muddled with sugar, poured over ice with vodka and finished with honey on a stirring stick, and Kenyans order it as their dawa in the way people elsewhere claim a drink is medicinal.
Its origin is unusually well documented for a cocktail. It was created at the Carnivore restaurant in the Langata suburb of Nairobi, adapted from the Brazilian caipirinha after bartenders found the cane spirit cachaça gave them headaches and switched to vodka. One regular, who happened to be the restaurant's landlord, began asking for another dose of his dawa, and the name spread with the drink. It is now found across Kenya.
The honey stick is the detail that makes it. A wooden stirrer is dipped in honey and left in the glass, so the drinker sweetens the drink themselves, controlling it rather than receiving it pre sweetened. There is also a non alcoholic version made as a hot tea with ginger, lemon, honey, cloves and cinnamon, drunk for sore throats and colds, which is dawa in the more literal sense and is what many Kenyan households mean by the word.
Shiro wat is ground chickpea stew, and it is among the most eaten dishes in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Onion, garlic, tomato and berbere are cooked down in oil, chickpea flour is whisked in, and the result thickens to something between a thick gravy and a puree, smooth enough to spread and eaten with injera.
Its position has a great deal to do with the religious calendar. Ethiopian Orthodox practice includes a very large number of fasting days, on which no meat, eggs or dairy are eaten, and shiro contains none of them. It is standard on Wednesdays and Fridays, through the eight weeks of Tsom, the Great Lent, and it is eaten during Ramadan by Ethiopian and Eritrean Muslims too. That is a dish serving two religions in one country without modification.
It is also cheap and quick, which explains the rest of its reach. Shiro powder, sold ready mixed with the spices already in it, is available across Ethiopia and increasingly abroad, in two kinds: mitten shiro, which is red and carries berbere, and netch shiro, which is white and mild. The dish takes different forms by consistency and name: shiro fessess is runny and served over injera with chillies, shiro tegamino is thick and cooked in an earthenware pot until it bubbles and caramelises at the base, and shiro fit fit shreds injera through it for breakfast.
Kenyan biryani is a Swahili coast dish, and the coast is where the Indian Ocean has been depositing influences on East Africa for more than a thousand years. Arab, Persian and Indian traders working the monsoon routes brought rice, spices and techniques to Mombasa, Lamu and Zanzibar, and what developed there is neither Indian nor Arab but Swahili.
The biryani method itself is unmistakably South Asian: meat cooked in a spiced yoghurt gravy, rice parboiled separately with whole spices, the two layered and steamed together so the rice finishes in the gravy's steam. The Kenyan version keeps that structure. What it does differently is in the details, with fried onions used in quantity, tomato leaning heavier than in most Indian versions, and fried potatoes worked through the meat rather than served alongside.
It is occasion food. Biryani appears at Kenyan weddings, at Eid, and at the large family meals where the effort is justified by the number of people eating. The orange food colouring streaked through part of the rice, which purists elsewhere would query, is standard in Kenya and is part of what a Kenyan expects a biryani to look like. Served with kachumbari, the raw tomato and onion salad, it is one of the clearest expressions of what the coast is.
Ugali is white maize meal cooked with water into a firm, smooth mass, and it is the staple of Kenya, Tanzania and much of East and Southern Africa. It is not a flavoured dish and does not try to be. Its role is to anchor and complete a plate, and everything else is arranged in relation to it.
Making it is a physical skill rather than a recipe. The cook works flour into boiling water over heat, stirring continuously against real resistance, until the mass pulls away from the sides of the pot and holds its shape. The ability to make good ugali is a basic domestic competence in Kenyan households, and a poorly made one is noticed and remarked on.
It is eaten by hand. A portion is broken off, pressed between the fingers into a scoop, and used to lift stew, greens or fish. Ugali alone is not a meal; it is the constant against which the rest of the plate is judged. The same preparation runs across the region under other names: nsima and nshima in Malawi and Zambia, sadza in Zimbabwe, posho in Uganda, pap in South Africa. Sorghum, millet and cassava flour are all used in place of maize in different areas, and in Kenya nyama choma with kachumbari is the pairing most associated with it.