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Meskel
Ethiopia's festival of the finding of the True Cross, with a bonfire (demera) and feasts of doro wat and tej, flavoured with berbere.
Spices for Meskel
Meskel is celebrated at the end of the rainy season with a great pile of branches, topped with a cross and daisies, lit at dusk. Families prepare doro wat, the festival stew of chicken and boiled eggs, cooked slowly with onion, spiced butter (niter kibbeh) and berbere, a red mix of chilli, fenugreek, ginger, garlic, korarima (Ethiopian cardamom), ajwain and other spices. Injera is the base on which the meal is laid out. Tej, honey wine, is flavoured with the leaves of the gesho shrub.
The spices
Written by the EveryMasala desk with AI assistance. Background: "Meskel" on Wikipedia. Customs differ from place to place and family to family. If this is your tradition and we have it wrong, tell us.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Berbere: Badagnani, CC BY 3.0, source
- Black cumin: AndreHolz at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Fenugreek: Yak, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Korarima: Joe Castleman ( Gyrofrog ), CC BY-SA 3.0, source