Every Friday morning before the Orthodox church service, my mother's house became the centre of something I cannot name in English. Twenty people — aunts, cousins, neighbours, the elderly woman from two streets away who had nowhere else to go on Fridays — all arriving before seven in the morning, the way you only arrive somewhere when you are certain of your welcome.
The injera was already made. My mother had started the batter fermenting on Wednesday. The teff sourdough smell was part of my childhood, the way certain smells become inseparable from a feeling: in this case, the feeling of a house that knows what it is for.
We ate from one plate. One large round of injera, spread flat on the mesob — the woven basket-table — and covered with doro wat, misir wat, ayib, gomen. Hands from every direction, tearing pieces of injera, scooping, sharing. No cutlery. No individual portions. The act of eating from the same plate is not just practical. It is a statement about who you are to one another.
I have lived in London for eleven years. I have explained injera to more people than I can count: yes, it is fermented, yes it is naturally gluten-free, yes the sourness is deliberate. What I cannot explain so easily is what it means to eat it the right way — not alone, not from your own plate, but from a shared surface with people who you have chosen or who were chosen for you.
I make injera here. I have a mitad — an electric injera pan — that I brought from Addis in an oversized suitcase. Every few weeks I start the batter, and I invite people over. Not twenty. But enough. And I put one large plate in the middle of the table and I watch people's hands reach toward it, uncertain at first, then relaxed, then right.
My daughter was born here. She has never been to Addis. But she eats from the shared plate without being asked. She already knows, without knowing she knows, that food eaten alone is only half of what it could be.
