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The Horn · Volume 10, The Highland Ferment · Cooked by cue

Birafrat / irgifon

Geta, Gurage zone

Birafrat: a clay dish of golden roasted kocho crumbs, glossy with spiced butter and flecked with mitmita.

Illustration

Birafrat is kocho made into crumbs. It is rubbed dry, crumbled, stirred carefully on the mitad until it is roasted, and then rubbed with butter and mitmita. It is food for the debo, the work parties that scrape and plant the enset and bring in the harvest.

The two Ethiopian sources disagree on what goes in the pan. The Geta woreda says white kocho, with butter and mitmita, at the debo. Dejene Dendena, in The Reporter, says bulla, the refined white fraction of the enset, dried until firm, roasted like enkuro and rubbed with butter, eaten to welcome the New Year and by those at the debo planting; elsewhere in the same piece he names birafrat as the kocho that family and neighbours eat for joy when a woman has given birth. The woreda's method is given here.

The name is unsettled too. The Geta woreda writes birafrat or irgifon as one dish under two names; the Reporter lists the two with a comma between them, and nothing says whether they are one dish or two.

As tradition built it

Work-party food, for the debo and the New Year.

Ingredients

Birafrat is made by cue: no source gives a weight, and the cue is the pan, the crumbs stirred until they are roasted.

  • white kocho
  • butter
  • mitmita

Method

  1. Rub the white kocho dry and crumble it.
  2. Stir the crumbs on the mitad, carefully and without stopping, until they are roasted.
  3. Take them off into a wide dish and rub them with the butter and mitmita.

Notes

The Geta woreda's bulla firfir is the same method on bulla: crumbled, stirred on the mitad, rubbed with mitmita and butter in a large tabat, and eaten when notable people die, when enset is planted, when the field is ploughed, and when close kin meet in council.

What a modern chef changes

The crumbs roasted in a thin layer, and the butter brought in warm

Rungs 4 and 5

Method

  1. Roast in a wide dry cast iron pan, a thin layer at a time. The crumbs toast where they touch the metal, and a crowded pan steams them.
  2. Take them to an even gold, and taste one: toasted, still sour, dry through.
  3. Warm the niter kibbeh and stir the mitmita into it before it meets the crumbs. Rung 4: the chilli goes into the fat, and the fat coats every crumb.
  4. Salt last, against the mitmita. Rung 5.
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