Yes, Chef (29 page)

One of my favorite discoveries was the Merkato, the largest open-air market on the African continent, so big that an entire lane is dedicated to butter merchants, an entire city block set aside for sellers of traditional clothing, woven white cotton with embellished hems. Donkeys were everywhere, standing in for pickup trucks, for dollies,
for forklifts. I spent hours in the spice aisles, fingering nuggets of frankincense, buying packets of black cumin or deep orange
mitmita
, just so I could smell them later in the filtered air of my hotel room. Our guide translated, and showed great patience as I pointed at one bin after another after another, hungry to know the names of everything. I saw one chili powder blend everywhere and quickly came to recognize the Amharic characters that represented it.

“Berbere,”
explained the guide, whose name was Fiseha.
Bayr-beray
. “We use it in everything.”

In my room that night, I poured out some
berbere
onto a coffee saucer. The blend was finely ground, so I could only rely on nose and tongue, not sight, to parse out the herbs and spices that had gone into it. I wrote a list of the spices in my journal, and the next day I checked with Fiseha to see how I’d done. I’d guessed nine of the dozen ingredients. The base ingredients were obvious: chili pepper, black pepper, and salt. After that, I came up with a list I knew well from Swedish cooking—cardamom, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, cumin, and coriander. Fiseha helped me with the last handful. I don’t know how I missed the allspice and the fenugreek, and what I could have sworn was thyme turned out to be
ajowan
seed, also known as bishop’s weed, which layered in another fiery kick on top of the peppers.

“Sometimes there’s garlic,” Fiseha told me. “Also cinnamon.”

How can I describe the result of this blend? It was both masculine and feminine, shouting for attention and whispering at me to come closer. In one sniff it was bright and crisp; in the next, earthy and slow. I couldn’t wait to take it back to Aquavit’s kitchen and start experimenting.

F
ROM TIME TO TIME
, Lolis would ask if I recognized any smells or sights or sensations. If my sister Linda were with us, she might have answered differently, but as much as I would have liked to say yes, I recognized nothing. That first trip to Ethiopia was less a reunion than a whirlwind romance. I felt welcomed wherever I went, even when
people realized I couldn’t speak Amharic. I certainly dressed and acted like a
ferengi
, their word for “foreigner,” but they often called out “Habesha” to me, claiming me as their own. I spent one afternoon in a teff terra, a small, poorly lit hut where a five-woman cooperative produced round after round of injera, the spongy bread that Ethiopians eat at every meal, using it as both plate and utensil. I watched as they pulverized the teff with a stone, then sifted it into powder. They mixed this with a sourdough starter and water, then set it aside for a couple of days. At the center of the hut was a broad metal griddle that looked a bit like a barstool, a wide drum for a top and set on long legs, but underneath was a small coal fire, which choked the air of the hut. These fires are everywhere, and in Addis, when I’d get up early to take a morning run, I’d see a blanket of coal smoke hovering above the city’s homes, a signal that breakfast was being prepared.

As a chef, it’s impossible to be in a place where serious cooking is going down and not want to try your hand at it. One morning, I watched a woman pour fermented injera batter onto the grill in a perfect, smooth spiral, starting at the outer edge of the hot surface, and I smiled and nodded at her until she handed over the dented can she used for a ladle. It looked so simple when she did it, but that’s how deceptive expertise can be. My attempts were lumpy and misshapen, and her words of encouragement were delivered with the patient tone you take with a not-so-gifted child. Nothing wrong with being humbled now and then.

The first time I made
doro wat
, my teacher was a seventy-five-year-old woman named Abrihet. Mutual friends had set up my tutoring session, and we met at Habesha, the restaurant Abrihet cooked for that was right off Bole, Addis Ababa’s main drag. In the Habesha kitchen, we started from the very beginning by killing a chicken, plucking it, and then gutting it just as I’d learned to do in France. We cut it into a dozen pieces, not the eight or ten I was accustomed to, and submerged those in lemon, water, and salt, a brine that may have evolved as much for food safety reasons as for flavoring. As the meat marinated, Abrihet plunked down a sack of red onions in front of me.
I felt like I’d gone right back to my
commis
days. While Abrihet washed the collards that would be an accompaniment, I chopped all the onions myself, pounds and pounds and pounds of them, finely, finely chopped. All I had was a bad knife and a horrible cutting board; I realized how spoiled I’d become, and even though I felt clumsy trying to navigate the divots and dull edge, I figured if Abrihet could do it with these tools, I could, too.

Abrihet looked slightly embarrassed and said something to our interpreter in Amharic.

“What?” I asked him. “What is she saying?” The interpreter looked a little reluctant. “Tell me,” I prodded.

“She’s embarrassed,” he said. “She says it’s not the Ethiopian way to have a man in the kitchen. But she says you are not from here, you are a
ferengi
, so it’s OK.”

We chopped up a little garlic and ginger and divided that, along with the onion and some butter, into two pots.

“She says this must cook for forty-five minutes,” the interpreter explained. “With very little heat.”

That gave us enough time to get a shot of Ethiopian coffee, espresso style. Nothing tastes better than Ethiopian coffee; almost everywhere you go, it is roasted right before it’s brewed. In the United States, we think it’s a big deal if you wait to grind the beans before you make coffee. Here, the benchmark for freshness is miles higher.

Our next step was to dry off the chicken parts and add them into the onion mixture in two batches. First the dark meat, which takes longer to cook, and then, twenty minutes later, the light meat. Thirty minutes after that, the stew liquid had turned a rich brown. Abrihet put on two more pots of water, one for the greens and one for boiling some eggs. When the greens were ready and the eggs were done and peeled, we ladled the stew onto the center of a big platter that had been blanketed with a round of injera. The collards and eggs were evenly divided around the perimeter.

We sat down to eat, and after the ritual washing of hands, we ripped off pieces of injera with our right hands and used them to
scoop up mouthfuls of stew. Abrihet made a little packet of food and reached over to me, putting it into my mouth.

“This is
gursha
,” the interpreter said. “This is a sign of hospitality. She will do this two more times and then, if you like, you should do the same to her.” I could barely swallow before my next
gursha
came, and when it was my turn to reciprocate, I probably dropped half of the food out of the injera on my way to Abrihet’s mouth. But she didn’t mind, and I was too happy to mind. After all, I’d just learned a piece of my past. Like so many of the Ethiopian dishes I learned to make over the years,
doro wat
served a dual purpose of expanding my repertoire as a chef while, dish by dish, adding texture and layers to the African heritage I so longed to know.

W
E STAYED AT THE
S
HERATON
A
DDIS
, the most luxurious hotel in the country. It was not like Sheratons in the United States; this was a palace, so opulent it was almost uncomfortable, especially since the moment you left the hotel’s heavily patrolled gates, you stepped into an open-sewered shantytown, patched-together sheets of tin and cardboard that housed huge, extended families, families that lived with no water and no electricity and nothing but tamped-down dirt for a floor. I had never considered myself more than middle class, but in Ethiopia, I was beyond advantaged. Anyone who goes to Africa and experiences this contrast will tell you that it is almost impossible to wrap your mind around it—the gulf is too great. To a certain extent, you have to just push this part of the experience to the side.

I was treated like a prodigal son everywhere I went, pampered and attended to and interviewed by local newspapers and magazines. I could see that our visit meant a lot to the Ethiopians we met, and so, to say thank-you, I felt like I should put on a dinner for our hosts, forty of Addis’s movers and shakers and politicos. The hotel staff loved the idea. We set it for New Year’s Eve—mine, not theirs, since they operate by a calendar that holds its New Year celebration in September—and the Sheraton gave me carte blanche to use its staff
and resources. This was eye-opening. The support team of the kitchen was all Ethiopian, but the chefs were Europeans. Here I was in a black country—the only country in all of Africa that had never been colonized, mind you—and a bunch of white Germans were in charge of the kitchen crew? I knew enough about the hotel industry to know that this imported upper tier was not the first string. In the international hotel business, the A team goes to America, Asia, and Europe. The B team ends up in the Middle East. The C team gets Africa. I might have gotten more pissed off, but how could I, when everyone from Klaus, the executive chef, to Tesfahun, the man who ran errands for the lowest level of
commis
, welcomed me so warmly into their kitchen?

I spent most of the second week putting together my menu and inventorying the hotel pantry. Because most of the hotel guests were foreigners, virtually all of the hotel kitchen’s ingredients were imported. When I suggested using some Ethiopian ingredients in our dinner, I got blank, slightly embarrassed looks. The Sheraton Addis Ababa, I was told, did not serve Ethiopian specialties. Borrowing porters from the hotel, we did several Merkato runs to stock up for the big night, which had somehow gone from forty to sixty.

“Or quite possibly seventy,” the concierge said to me with a broad smile.

My second agenda for the dinner, beyond saying thank-you to the gracious people at the Sheraton, was to inspire the Ethiopian staff by showing them what one could do with traditional Ethiopian ingredients. I began to think of the meal as my homecoming dinner and decided I would also try to bring together pieces of all the cuisines I knew and loved.

My appetizer was smoked salmon crusted with
berbere
. I wasn’t set up to replicate my uncle Torsten’s smokehouse, so instead, I quick-cured the salmon, then put it in a makeshift smoking box along with green coffee beans, a little bit of water, and cinnamon. After fifteen minutes I took out the salmon and was satisfied, even proud of the smell—bright and clear like the ocean. I took
berbere
and rubbed it on
top of the salmon and served it with
ayib
, the local cottage cheese, chopped dill, and wedges of dried injera that could be used as crackers. Out of all the dishes we served that night, this was the biggest hit. Not only because it was delicious but also because people saw for the first time what was possible with Ethiopian ingredients. The rest of the meal carried this theme through. I rubbed duck with
berbere
and served it with figs and foie gras and a honey wine called
tej
. For dessert, we did a hot chocolate cake with warm beets and finished it with coffee-flavored honey syrup. Everywhere we could, we honored Ethiopian ingredients, and we did it at a level no one had ever seen before. The Sheraton Addis had a lot of things to recommend it, but Habesha soul wasn’t one of them.

When I got home, spilling over with stories about what a fantastic time I’d had, friends asked me if it had been hard to leave.

“Not at all,” I said. “Because I know I’m going back.”

I
NEVER HAD THE DESIRE
to go to Ethiopia when I was growing up. Linda did. She talked about going back someday, about visiting our village, about finding our relatives, if we had any left. Part of my ambivalence may have been a son trying to be gallant toward his mother; on some level, I suppose I thought it would hurt Anne Marie’s feelings if I went looking for my birth family. I loved my Samuelsson parents. I had a great childhood. The
negerboll
and
blatte
moments were tiny pebbles on an otherwise smooth and happy road.

As a chef, I’d found a more comfortable way to reconnect to Africa: through its food. Before I went on that trip, I’d been casting about for ideas of what kind of cookbook I wanted to do next. I’d already published one in Sweden called
En Smakresa
(A
Journey of Tastes
), which was a tribute to all the amazing flavors and cultures I’d encountered while traveling on the cruise ships. I’d also just finished up the manuscript for the
Aquavit
cookbook, which was a tribute to the restaurant that had given me my first opportunity to lead a kitchen and had given me my first American home.
Aquavit
was written for Americans, and I made sure to put my recipes and ingredients into a
broader cultural context, so readers would see where each dish’s Swedish roots lay.

One idea that my editors suggested was a “Marcus Cooks at Home” book, but at the time I wasn’t feeling it. For one thing, I never cooked at home. Chefs rarely do. I either grabbed food on the fly at work or ate at restaurants around town to keep up with what the competition was doing. If my meals weren’t research for work, I picked up whatever street food was in reach, whether it was a slice of Ray’s pizza or a gyro with extra
tzatziki
sauce from the guy with a cart near my favorite newsstand. I was a chef who lived and breathed food, but I had no home life. A cookbook that depicted me entertaining in my apartment would have been untrue and inauthentic. What I wanted to do was the book I longed to own but had never seen—a cookbook that could serve as a bridge between my home in Manhattan and my roots in Ethiopia.

I’ve always loved bookstores. They remind me of my father, Lennart, whose greatest pleasure was to sit in the living room at night with a book in his hands and a cup of tea by his side. Bookstores are a giant present waiting to be unwrapped, full of stories and discoveries and lives. For a chef, the best bookstore in New York is Kitchen Arts & Letters, on the Upper East Side. The entire store is dedicated to books about food and wine, and if you can’t find something there, it doesn’t exist.