Gursha
On the Intimacy + Discomfort of Feeding Another Human
I made the shiro wat without telling her.
I wanted it to be a surprise. I wanted to please her. My friend Messeret, and I were hosting an Ethiopian-inspired dinner party. She was the chef and I was the sous. This was her native food, the food of her childhood and her heart. We expected about 20 friends, some mine, some hers, some ours.
She made most of the dishes.
But I got it in my head that I wanted to cook something too.
I mean I got super-inspired when we went market shopping. We visited the butcher at Selam Market. He cut us ruby red meat for kit fo. Then to Goolit Mart, to inhale the spices and walk the store with Messeret. She taught me about the texture of the injera, what to look for, how to buy the softer, fluffier, better quality bread, if I’m not making it at home.
“They make it fresh here,” she tells me.
She made me smell spices and told me the uses for each kind. It was exciting and jiggled all my nerdy cooking neurons. She didn’t know this but after our shop together, I went back to Selam secretly.
I picked up a bunch of spices and flours with no idea what I would make. I just went down the aisles, remembering our talk and folding things into my arms, propping the little containers and bigger bags under my chin, carrying them like a kid grabbing up all the presents from under the tree on Christmas morning.
At home, I Googled chickpea flour, one of my purchases. I had been using recipes only from Ethiopians, but I found several recipes online from various respected and unknown sources, Ethiopian and not, with more or less the same instructions. Epicurious.com even offered a recipe for a “quick” shiro wat. But I went with the well-produced YouTube video of an Ethiopian chef.
I sliced and then diced onions, lopped them into a cast-iron pot with oil. I watched them get soft and oily and limp. I chopped and diced roma tomatoes, and added them to the onions. I added fingerfuls of salt. The house smelled like Naples or Santorini or San Fernando in the Philippines. Sauteed onions and garlic belong to everyone.
Then, I added the berbere.
Berbere is the taste of Ethiopia, and its neighbor Eritrea. It’s a blend of smokey chilli peppers, and any combination of garlic, ginger, bishop seeds, fenugreek, basil, rue, carom seeds, nigella seeds, fennel flower and sometimes, radhuni, a celery-tasting spice used in Bengali cuisine. Every incarnation is different. Messeret let me know that she only uses the berbere she brings back in her suitcases from Adis Ababba. She knows berbere the way you know the lines on your face or the sound of your child breathing in the night. It’s part of her.
The berbere made me a tourist.
I let the tomatoes cook down, good and long, until they were liquid, stirring and watching and stirring and watching, my face positioned straight over the pot so I could inhale all the fragrant spices. In another bowl, I added water to the chickpea flour, stirred it until it was a saucy consistency and poured it into the pot. I stirred. I watched. I covered the pan. I came back to it. I watched. I added more water.
This was not cooking, so much, as an act of love. A desire to make something perfect for someone I love. To honor the food of her people. To do it justice. The video told me to let it simmer for 15-20 minutes and serve with injera.
I scraped it all from the pot into a bowl and put out some scraps of injera. Edie was not so sure, but Lucy stepped up to the butcher block, took the soft bread and used it to scoop out some of the shiro wat.
We watched her. Her eyes got wide. A smile. She took more bread and more shiro wat. Then all our kids took the cue and dug in, even the littlest who was still a toddler then, who was unsure of the texture of the bread and mashed it up in her hand to test how much like a sponge it was before popping it into her mouth. The kids used the injera to scoop, sometimes sloppily, and heave the intensely hot stew into their mouths.
It was, like, the best thing we’ve eaten in ages.
David came home from mountain biking in the desert. He was famished and joined in, scooping and eating, grabbing a glass of Pelligrino, and going back for more bread, more scooping. We talked about the berbere and I passed around a tub of the mixture that Messeret brought me from her last trip. I knew it was special, but my tongue hadn’t figured out why it was superior to what I could order on Amazon.
My tongue was a newbie.
We smelled it. We passed the tub. We let that heat prick our noses. We ate more of the shiro wat, more of the injera.
We traveled farther afield.
Eventually, I put the stew and the injera in the fridge for the party. But still, we found ourselves one at time or in little groups, opening the fridge door and dipping a little piece of bread into the bowl and shoveling it into our mouths.
It was that good. And spicy. And comforting.
That night, Meseret came early for the party. She had created a cornucopia, a veritable casino buffet. There was Ethiopian bread with a little bowl of olive oil and berbere for dipping, lentil sambusas (my contribution because Messeret doesn’t like to fry), azifa, a lentil salad with tomatoes, onions, spices and a familiar-tasting mustard vinaigrette, and doro wat, a long-simmering chicken stew with boiled eggs. She had piles of aluminum foil pans filled with the lentil-based dishes, like kik wot and messer wot, a finely-chopped chili pepper-infused collard green dish called gomen, and the traditional tekil gomen with turmeric-spiced potatoes, cabbage and carrots. She had brought her favorite injera made in her favorite shop. She showed me how spongy and moist the bread was.
“Injera is the most important part of the meal,” she said.
“You cannot have inferior bread.”
We set up prep tables, so she could show guests how to make the more quick-cooking dishes, like tibs, and the no-cook dishes, like kitfo, Ethiopia’s answer to steak tartare.
I took the shiro wat out of the fridge. I held it out to her nervously. It was an offering. I explained that I’d made shiro wat, she was surprised and she smiled. She was pleased.
She ripped a piece of the injera, dipped it into the stew.
“Meh, it’s okay,” she murmured.
Not impressed!
I howled with laughter. Messeret is the most kind and loving person I’ve ever known. Good and kind and loving to the bone, to the marrow, the sinew, to the cell. She would never offend or to say anything to hurt someone’s feelings.
That this much disdain for the dish came out of her mouth was a delight.
It was real. Truthful.
I hugged her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, laughing.
“Tell me why it isn’t amazing?” I asked, even though to my family of tourists it was amazing.
“I don’t use tomatoes in my shiro wat,” she explained, “I don’t know who told you to do that.” She said it like this person completely screwed up.
“It was an Ethiopian chef on You Tube,” I explained.
“I have never done that,” she said dismissively.
“Also,” she added, “you need to cook the flour longer, for an hour. It is not a quick dish.”
I told her about the “quick” recipes on the Internet.
“Well, that’s ridiculous,” she scoffed dismissively, waving the thought of these absurd recipes away with her hand.
This made us both laugh again.
She is the least snobby person I know. Listening to her pride and precision about her food brings me joy. Another dimension to our great friendship had popped up. We have laughed about the day Messeret insulted my shiro wat for years now.
We put the inferior shiro wat out and it was eaten straight away. Us “tourists”, the party-goers, who are of various ethnicities and origins, were not Ethiopian. They ate it all, none the wiser. And they ate all of Messeret’s food, until we ran out of injera, and I ran to the fridge to take out a bag I had purchased on my secret trip. When I taste the injera, I know I bought it from the wrong shop. I could tell it was not the same moist, spongy consistency. It was bland. More tasteless.
I was learning.
Messeret took a piece of the inferior injera and explained to our guests how she eats with one hand, forming the injera around a bite of food and popping it neatly into her mouth. She told them about gursha, where you feed the people you love, or the ones you welcome into your home, not once, but several times during the course of the meal.
And then she popped the bite of food into my mouth. Messeret gave me gursha.
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Gursha is the act of feeding another person. Literally, physically. Placing the food in their mouth.
It is an act of love and intimacy. Gursha is showing someone you love them without words. It takes food and love to a whole other level.
Gursha does not happen all the time at every meal. It happens mostly during holidays and festivals when people choose to gather together around a large meal. It’s a gesture filled with meaning. Ethiopian culture often has a hierarchy of eating, so that the head of the table eats first, and gives gursha to his wife as she serves and prepares the food, to keep her from being hungry and to show respect for her work. Also children can be fed bites while they wait for their turn to eat.
“Gursha is given at specific times, not just all the time,” says a dinner guest in Hagar Salamon’s From Hand to Mouth: Reflections on the Multivocality of Gursha in Ethiopia “especially at holidays such as New Year, or Temqat or at Meskel when, you know you normally kill a sheep or an ox, you know in your house, and the first meal will be, you know, between family. . . . so the whole family gathers to eat this meal, so during that time giving gursha is a sign of love, and so people know that it is a happy family.”
Think about weddings. The bride and groom’s families do not know each other well. Gursha helps bring the families together. They are more than strangers. They are caring for one another and their appetites at this beautiful ceremony bringing everyone together.
The focus on the mouth is what creates all the intimacy, according to Salamon’s research. We all have mouths, obviously. Communication, eating, drinking, kissing, sucking is all about the mouth, and so gursha concentrates all the feelings there. It brings the intimate to the collective, it makes mine yours, and yours mine, so that we all might be in it together.
Sometimes gursha has a side that is a little aggressive.
Gursha can be referred to as a ‘cartridge’ in the mouth. Like a gun. Like a bullet. Like a penis. Sometimes gursha can be sexualized as in the story in Salamon’s article where an elderly woman makes a joke of gursha in a crowded coffee shop.
It goes like this:
“The people present, knowing her well, urged her to contribute to the discussion. She snapped back: “Gursha? This is what I tell my husband in bed. . . .” Her remarks drew raucous, prolonged laughter from all participants. As calm was partially restored, my accompanying local friend said: “Finally it came out . . . because there is no special expression for that [meaning intercourse], they are using gursha as an expression.”
Salaman goes on to add that boys and young men sometimes use the word gursha provocatively.
“It is the way to express sexual relations, like between a husband and a wife,” an interview subject says. “They can say, don’t give me gursha fast . . . don’t give me too much gursha.”
Gursha is the definition of “in your face.” It is both beautiful and, like intimacy itself, uncomfortable. To have someone turn right to you, see you eye to eye, and feed you bites with their fingers. It is jarring if you aren’t used to it. An old Amharic wisdom, says that “Gursha ena feker siyaschenik naw”, which means “Gursha, like love, comes with a bit of discomfort.” You cannot have intimacy without vulnerability, and so, gursha feels a little like falling in love and opening yourself up to others in the most unsettling and beautiful of ways.
Sometimes gursha is a game. A way of pushing love onto someone. And having them push it back on you. You feed your guest once and if you don’t do it again, you are ungenerous. There is no game, no repartee, no back and forth. You must offer gursha again. The person, says I’m fine, enough. But you insist. You want to love them. You want them to take your love. They relent and eat and accept it. It happens again, the game, the tug of war ensues. There is resistance, the wave of a hand to surrender, then taking the offering anyway. I loved learning this and it helped me understand why Messeret and I have what I like to call The Fight about money. If she buys the kids ice cream and I try to give her money, we have The Fight, each of us fighting to show our love and appreciation.
“Take this.”
“No, you keep it.”
“I’m serious. Take the money.”
And so it goes. It is our dance. Gursha is the same.
The first time I was given gursha was actually with Messeret’s brother and sister-in-law. Unlike Messeret, who has lived in the States for decades and is as American as she is Ethiopian, her brother Dejen* and his wife Amhara* and their daughter came just last year. The customs and traditions of their home country are strong here. Amhara prepares coffee in a ritual with an altar and on mats on the kitchen floor. She is sitting on a stool. It’s 8 oclock at night and I’m completely worried about drinking coffee in the evening, but there is no refusing. To refuse food and coffee is to refuse love. I know this. So I accept it all in the loving generous spirit in which it is offered.
I drink.
The coffee is dark and intense, just the way I like it.
I decide it is worth staying up all night.
We talk about gursha and to show me, I think, Dejen swaddles some tibs and lentils in a piece of injera, gets up from the table and gives his wife a gursha in the kitchen. She is caught off guard, but she takes the bite in her mouth, giggling and covering her mouth with her hand. They had not done gursha for each other in some time and Amhara is nearly giddy. Messeret translates from amharic that Amhara felt an unexpected rush of love from her husband giving her gursha. She spread that around but giving all of us gursha at the table.
Of course, you don’t give gursha once and stop. It’s in the social contract that you keep giving gursha until you get to The Fight. You want to give your love and have it received and there is joy in watching the person release to you.
Love and discomfort.
What I love about the gursha is how it breaks everyone down. It makes everything feel heady and uncomfortable and awkward and blessed, so that people can feel the joy. From the husband who gives gursha to his wife and lights her up, to the parent who gives to the child with affection, to the host who gives to the guest, out of respect for her labor. To the strangers who become family because this is the way of Gursha.
We don’t have anything quite like it here in the States.
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Messeret taught several of our guests to make kitfo that night.
Kitfo is a beef tartare, mixed with a spice mixture, called mitmita, that has an abundance of thai chillies, making it even hotter than berbere and sometimes includes fenugreek, black cardamom, bishop seed and cumin. She poured in the melted spiced butter, called niter kebbeh. There was a rain of salt. A few chopped jalapenos to make it pretty. She mixed it together with her whole body, her shoulders and arms and torso, moving the meat around vigorously.
She added a handmade cheese alongside the meat. The cheese was similar to ricotta, a farm cheese, and made with buttermilk as the catalyst. The dish was buttery and spicy. The meat was lean and cut into ropy nubs, the small-curd cheese was soft, like a mild, mild, mild feta, and added an unexpected pillowy sensation against the textured meat.
We all gathered around and ate the raw meat and the cheese with pieces of injera. With our fingers. Everything was new. Bold. An adventure. An excursion. I couldn’t stop eating, because when I stopped, the transport stopped.
I wanted more heat set up against that supple meat, more soft broken cheese curds. I wanted more chilli, more fenugreek. I wanted to put fenugreek in everything! I wanted to know every spice that went into the mitmita. More food stall smells. More night market hustle. More mamas in their kitchens cooking for their families. More tej to be passed around and drunk until we are bleary-eyed and begging for sleep. More stories people would tell me. More things I could know about the world.
More connection to my dear, dear friend.
But when Messeret tasted the kitfo, there was nothing new. Just the assuredness of her past. She tinkered, added more salt, mixed more, she preferred less butter, the Americans liked more. She chided them for being unhealthy.
There was no new path to be walked here. She had done this thousands of times at tables here and in Africa. She tasted and tasted again, adding, stirring with her whole body, with her memories, adding, tasting. Until it was how she remembered it.
She tasted.
She smiled.
There it was.
Like childhood. Like family. Like home.
Like roots.
I asked her if she needed me to make more of the kitfo. The bowls were empty. We had more beef and cheese in the fridge. I could do this for her. Easily. I’d been a good student. A dutiful, respectful and curious tourist.
She put her hand lovingly on my arm.
“No, thank you,” she smiled.
“I’ll do it. I want it to be authentic.”
And to make sure I understood that this came from both her love for me, and pride in her culture and her food, she wraps some cheese and raw beef into a piece of injera and slips it into my open mouth.
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This is Messeret, having her photo taken in my kitchen for a piece I wrote a few years ago that profiled four home cooks in Vegas. It was, I think, my favorite piece for the NPR magazine, Desert Companion, because I got to sit at the tables of four incredible humans and cooks and write about them. I don’t think it got a lot of reads - it wasn’t a sexy piece about meth or sex - but it’s still one of my favorite pieces.
This week’s essay is part of that article, but I expanded the sections about gursha and some research to back it all up. And it was a total joy to do that. I learned so much, and made me think about how we might get closer to each other while eating, how our traditions help us get the kind of community we need, and how we can be better at welcoming discomfort to get to the real intimacy and love.
Thank you, as always, for reading. - Kim
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Resources:
From Hand to Mouth: Reflections on the Multivocality of Gursha in Ethiopia by Hagar Salaman.
Gursha: Hands Across the Table by Harry Kloman
Also: *Dejen and Amhara are made up names for privacy.
Lovely read.would love to make the cheese curds.
Beautiful!