Mesir Wat: The Unexpected and Unexplained Glory of Ethiopian Lentils

I was first introduced to Ethiopian food at Zemam's in Tucson, a homey little place that, like many of the best Ethiopian experiences I've had, kept its kitchen literally right next to the dining room. My relationship with Zemam's was always somewhat equivocal. The food was usually adequate but occasionally amazing, and when my grandfather invited me there he always claimed to have shown it to me first, like it was some sort of state secret. I always had to point out that I had actually known about it before he showed me, and that I had actually invited him there first, and that I had also invited him to Gandhi's first, though he always denied it. He always paid, so I wasn't too obstinate. 

However, were I to pin down the best experience I've had with Ethiopian food, it was on our Dora trip, when after asking a random African person on the street where to get African food, he took us down a creepy side street and into someone's house. The two Ethiopian ladies who had been sitting and smoking argileh looked at us like we were crazy, but eventually rounded up a table and some chairs and dealt with us as their friends trickled in to listen to Bob Marley, drink giant al-Mazas and eye us suspiciously. Although the kitchen was right next to a smelly, poorly cleaned pit toilet, and although I'm pretty sure I saw at least one Lebanese pimp, the Mesir Wat that she served us was unlike anything I've ever had. I've been working to replicate it ever since, and tonight I may have come as close as I'll get. 

A fun cultural note: Mesir Wat is apparently quite popular during Lent and those times when people are forced to swear off meat. I'm pretty sure I'd eat this even if there was meat around. This is criminally inexpensive to make and goes well with rice if you can't find the spongy, sour teff flour bread, injera. 

So without further ado, here's the recipe (before I forget it). 

**** NOTE****

Before you start, you need to make your berbere paste. Berbere is technically just a delicious spice combination that gives many Ethiopian dishes their distinctive ruddy pepperiness, but it's extra awesome if you mulch it up in the blender into a paste with a bit of wine, onion and garlic. I'd post a recipe, but frankly I've not found it better than the one you can find here. I add extra fenugreek because I like smelling like maple syrup for days. 

Mesir Wat Ingredients

1 cup orange lentils - which are essentially red lentils split and without the skin

1 medium onion, minced

4 cloves garlic, crushed and minced

1 - 1.5 tsp fresh ginger root, minced

1 tomato, seeded, cored and minced (peeled too if you can)

2 tbsp berbere paste (see above)

2-3 tbsp oil or butter

1 tbsp paprika

1 tsp turmeric 

1 tsp fenugreek

1 tbsp tomato paste

1 tsp raw sugar

salt 

lots of water

Step 1: Prep

Soak your lentils in water for about an hour. Mince up your onion, garlic and ginger and throw them into a blender or food processor and spin them until they are pretty pasty. Get your tomato ready to go and set aside. 

Step 2: Onion Paste

Heat the oil in a pot on medium and add the onion paste until the water is cooked off. Then add the bebere paste and cook for about 3-5 minutes, stirring frequently  to prevent it from burning. When the onion is cooked, add the tomato and the spices and continue cooking until the tomato has begun to cook. Add the sugar and tomato paste. 

Step 3: The Lentils

Drain the lentils and toss them into the pot. Immediately cover them with water, bring to a boil, and then reduce the heat to low and simmer covered for about 30-40 minutes. Towards the end, you'll have to stir to keep the lentils from sticking to the bottom. The consistency should be very soft. If the water cooks off too fast, add a bit more and recover. Salt to taste. 

In Praise of Pigflesh: Stepped Italian Pork Shoulder Roast with Mushroom Red Wine Reduction over Creamy Polenta

I've been reading Piero Camporesi's The Magic Harvest, which is essentially a history of food and food culture in Italy. It's alternately appalling and alluring, but it's gotten me hooked on Italian foods that one normally does not encounter in American or Lebanese restaurants.

Like with Mexican food, which encompasses a mind bogglingly broad range of cooking styles, the Italian food that we most associate with Italy is actually a rather limited part of the Italian food culture. No, I don't mean the Olive Garden. But also that. I'm talking about spaghetti in marinara sauce, which was essentially a product of the mid-19th century. As in the Middle East (which received its first tomatoes around 1830), Europe was rather leery of many of the foods from the New World until either government intervention or cultural catalysts pushed them to adopt the new items. Tomatoes were considered suspiciously voluptuous for some time until they were popularized in a ubiquitous cookbook that dominated the food publishing scene in the late 19th century. Potatoes were fed to pigs, in spite of the fact  they made all sorts of sense for the inhabitants of the barren central Apennine mountains of the Italian peninsula, who had barely subsisted for centuries on primarily chestnut flour.

Speaking of pigs... I always feel bad about posting pork recipes or recipes with booze in them (albeit cooked off booze) since one of the only people who actually seems to read these posts (hi Tricia) does not eat either. But if you really wanted to you could swap the pork for a fatty cut of beef and add more broth/drippings to the sauce in lieu of wine. 

Corn, also an American import to Italy, rapidly took off and supplanted millet and even wheat in some areas in the northern regions in importance. This led to a boom of pellagra in the late 19th century, but also the delicious corn polenta which we know and love. Northern Italian cooking had an interesting practice of using leftovers as parts of the next meal. Leftover polenta would either be remelted and made again, pan fried, crumbled up to use as a crust, or whatever the enterprising Italian lady in the kitchen  decided on. 

Pigs were always great peasant food since, unlike cows, they didn't require huge plots of land to feed, they didn't destroy your environment like goats and sheep, and they could sleep in the house with you if needed (his happened a lot in premodern society). Although they stank terribly, they did eat garbage, and, when fattened and slaughtered properly, had the flesh of angels. 

This recipe will take about as long to write as it took to cook, so bear with me. 

The Pig Part

1 pound of pork shoulder, as fatty as you can get it

olive oil

chunky sea salt

3 garlic cloves

pepper

allspice

thyme

rosemary 

Step 1: 

Preheat the oven to 475. Take your shoulder and slice it in 1 inch slabs that will lay flat onto each other. Lightly oil the bottom of a pan (this will be floating in oil by the end, so I'm not sure this is even necessary) and reassemble the chunks to form a roast. 

Step 2: 

Cut the garlic cloves into paper thin slivers and place them and a helping of sea salt between each of the meat slices. 

Step 3: 

Generously salt the top of the meat with sea salt, gently sprinkle on a touch of allspice and thyme and a good amount of rosemary. Crack some fresh pepper on top and put it in the oven. Make your sauce and polenta now. 

Step 4: 

After 15 minutes of high heat, turn the oven down to 350 and cook for another 45 minutes covered in tinfoil. The meat is done when it's shrunk and sitting in a puddle of pig fat. 

To Serve: 

Slice paper thin pieces against the grain of the meat at a 45 degree angle. If you don't know what that looks like... well. Keep the fat attached to the meat, it's the flavor and also should have crisped up nicely and will broadcast the flavors well. 

The Sauce: 

6 -8 crimini mushrooms or whatever

2 tbsp butter

2 shallots minced

3/4 cup red wine

1/2 cup pork drippings or broth

1/4 cup cream 

salt

1 tsp sugar

three pieces of fresh thyme  

This is a pretty standard recipe for a mushroom wine reduction. I add sugar because it makes everything taste better and cuts the sharpness of the wine. 

Step 1: Prep
Mince the shallots finely (look up how to cut them if you need to) and put aside. Slice the mushrooms in half and then in half again and chop them as thinly as possible. 

Step 2: 

Heat the butter on medium heat in the pan and throw in the shallots, cooking them until they're soft, then add the mushrooms and the thyme sprigs and cook for about 5 minutes until the mushrooms are cooked. 

Step 3: 

Add the wine and cook on medium heat until almost completely reduced, then add the drippings/broth and sugar and continue to cook down. Salt to taste at this point. 

Step 4: 

When the liquid is largely evaporated and there's a nice goo in the bottom of the pan, turn off the heat and add the cream to the pan, stir, and cover. 

The Polenta

1 cup polenta/corn meal

4 cups water

1 tbsp butter

1/4 cup milk

1/4 cup cream

1/4 cup Parmesan cheese

1/8 cup honey

salt, lots of salt

Polenta is a pain in the ass. 

Step 1: 

Boil the water. Whisk in the polenta slowly to keep it from clumping. Add the milk, then turn down to very low and cover. 

Step 2: 

Continue stirring every 5  minutes to so to keep it from burning to the bottom of the pan or creating horrid clumps. 

Step 3: 

After about 30 minutes, uncover and stir until the consistency is what you'd like. Mix in the cream, cheese, honey, butter, and salt until it tastes good. Remember, this is not a standalone, but will be the starch to help carry the other flavors. 

Step 4: SERVE IT. 

It will harden quickly, so make sure it's dished out IMMEDIATELY or you'll have polenta clods on plates. 

To Plate: 

Dish out Polenta on small plates, Remove one slice of the pork and shave thin slices of it and artistically arrange on the plate (see above). Spread the sauce over the top and you're done. 

Beef Stroganoff: Not the Stuff You'd Find at the Bottom of an Outhouse, Though It Looks Like It

Beef Stroganoff is one of the most repellent looking dishes you can cook. It's chunky and brownish and roughly the consistency and color of the terrifying pat of feces that always sits immediately below the seat of all National Park pit restrooms.

However, it has all of the makings of an American classic for two reasons: 1. It contains beef and mushrooms as primary ingredients, and 2. It can be cooked from a packet. Because of this, most of us have never actually eaten decent Stroganoff. The prepackaged stuff tastes unremarkably like "brown" until you add sour cream, at which point it tastes kind of like sour cream. 

Stroganoff actually is Russian in origin, (which means it's really French in origin), though there are conflicting stories about exactly how it came to be, both involving members of the countly Stroganov family. The first guess is that it was the brainchild of an anonymous chef who worked for the toothless old Grigory Stroganov in the late 18th century, who created a dish that the old fellow could gum to his satisfaction. The latter theory attributes the dish to Pavel Stroganov's chef, Charles Briere, who won first prize with the dish in a cooking contest  in 1891. As a trained historian, I give far more credence to the first claim for two very good reasons: 

1. The dish itself is atypical of the noble food that was popular at the time, and frankly has the aura of the decrepit about it. The gumming theory  just makes sense. 

2. There is an entry in a cookbook published in in 1871 that refers to a similar, far simpler dish for middle class housewives. Whatever Beiere used was already in circulation - it's possible that he just made it more exciting. 

And Stroganoff can actually be rather exciting. America got its first published taste of it in John MacPhearson's 1934 cookbook Mystery Chef's Own Cookbook, which added Worcestershire sauce to heighten the flavor. As I mentioned elsewhere in this blog, Worcestershire is made using fermented fish sauce, much like the Roman garam. Which, coincidentally, is how they originally synthesized MSG, that magical flavor enhancer. 

I serve my Stroganoff over a plate of buttered noodles, but it occurred to me that it might be good on short grain rice if you were so inclined, or even polenta if we're going to get crazy. 

A fun modification struck me a second ago - why not try using dark, malty beer (like Moose Drool) to deglaze instead of wine? 

Ingredients for Beef Stroganoff

1 pound of beef, cut into thin strips

8 cremini (brown) or white mushrooms 

1 onion

3 cloves garlic

1 tbsp good paprika

2 tbsp tomato paste

2 cups beef broth

1/4 cup red wine for deglazing

1 tsp raw sugar

1 1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce

flour for dredging 

2 tsp fresh parsley

sour cream/creme fraiche/lebneh

oil

1 tbsp butter

salt

pepper

Prep Work: 

1. Chop (I mince for the texture) your onion and put aside. 

2. Destem your mushroom caps, cut them in half and then in half again and chop thinly - add these to your onion pile. 

3. Smash the garlic cloves and mince them up - put them in a bowl to add to the onions when cooking

4. Shave off rather thin strips of beef at a 45 degree angle to the grain and dredge them in flour, salt and pepper.

Step 1: Beef

 Heat oil in a deep flat bottomed pan on medium-high and brown the meat for about a minute, then pull off and set aside

Step 2: Your "veggies"

Ha. Onions are roots and mushrooms are fungi, no veggies here (parsley is a leaf). Anyway, add the butter to the same pan on medium heat now, melt it, and then add your onion and mushrooms. Cook until the onions are soft, then add the garlic and cook for about a minute. 

Step 3: Wine! 

Stir in the paprika and tomato paste, then add the wine and scrape the bottom of the pan to deglaze all of the delicious crud that has accumulated. This will cook off pretty quickly, at which point you add the broth, Worcestershire sauce and meat, then turn down the heat to low and cover. Cook for about 20 minutes, stirring frequently to keep it from sticking to the bottom 

Step 4: Noodles

Make your noodles. I like fetuccini noodles for the texture, but pappardelle would work even better. Butter them up at the end. 

Step 5: Finishing

Turn off the Stroganoff as the noodles start to get soft. Let it cool for a minute and then add the pepper, check the salt and add a dollop of sour cream or creme fraiche (we use lebneh) and stir it in. Let it rest a bit, then serve it next to or on the pasta.