Learning to make one of my favorite traditional dishes by trial and fire
When I think back on all the times I’ve had tibs, growing up, warm memories of celebration and communal eating (and feeding) come to mind:
Eating tibs on a plate the size of a small table, pushing my cousins’ hands out of the way as we compete for every bite.
Trying and failing to be delicate as a loved one, my dad or one of the women who had a hand in raising me, stuffs a gursha in my mouth.
Warming myself on a crisp September night, as neighbors cook tibs over an open fire in celebration of the new year.
Gathering around tibs on Christmas and Easter, at weddings and melses, at weekend lunches and on random days when the craving consumes me.
Tibs is a savory lover’s heaven of sautéed meat served wet or dry the Ethiopian/Eritrean way. Celebrating the holidays with this dish is, for me, synonymous with comfort and joy, a way of transcending one’s circumstances by partaking in time-worn traditions with family and friends.
We can’t talk about tibs without talking about celebration and its shadow, abstention. On Wednesdays and Fridays and special fasting seasons like lent, observant Ethiopian Orthodox Christians abstain from meat and other animal products; I was raised Protestant and didn’t grow up with this practice, though I now appreciate it as a spiritual discipline.
When the fasting season ends, meat becomes an even more prized commodity. Major life events, like weddings, tend to be planned around these seasons, in part so that people can celebrate with feasts of meat.
We also can’t talk about tibs without talking about the personal economies of Ethiopians, who still equate celebration with meat, though it is becoming a luxury for more and more people. At holiday lunches, older relatives often talk about the ever-escalating cost of living in our country by comparing how much a chicken or a lamb used to cost.
“I remember when it used to cost this much!” they say, and we all shake our heads in disbelief. How do people manage with the ubiquity of holidays and the high cost of living?
Some pitch in with neighbors and family or strangers to buy parts of a whole cow through the system of kircha. Others draw from community savings like iqub. Still others collect rations from their local government around the holidays, things like live chickens, cooking oil, and onions.
“Some people don’t have to worry about any of this, they have all they need and more,” says one rideshare driver whose services I regularly use. But for many, he says, “it’s depressing when people want to celebrate the holidays but can’t do all the things that are expected.”
“Most people do what they can, even if it means borrowing money or buying half a kilo of meat that day and not eating meat all the other (non-holiday) days. Neighbors and family or friends might also give money or bring meat for the holidays.”
Charity is practiced and preached in religious communities: churches host meals for people who are unhoused and/or can’t afford to celebrate the holidays, in embodiment of the teaching that serving Christ means serving those who are poor and hungry; meanwhile Muslims donate food for Eid al-Fitr and distribute meat to those who can’t afford it on Eid al-Adha, in keeping with these holy days’ themes of fellowship, sacrifice, and generosity.
Speaking about some of the most visibly poor recipients of such charity, my rideshare driver says, “No one gives to yene bitayoch like other Ethiopians.” That word, yene bitay, signals empathy — a euphemism for someone who lives on the street and/or solicits passersby for money, it can be translated to “a person like me.”
It’s a term that evokes the generosity and neighborliness of Ethiopian culture, something I’ve observed not only on holidays and on special occasions but in mundane moments too, when our better selves possess us.
Tibs, doto wot (another holiday specialty) and other meat dishes are most often shared with guests and loved ones. They are the dishes I free associate with kids chasing chaos in the landscaped backyards of my American life and, in a parallel window of my younger years in Ethiopia: praying we get to eat before the food gets cold at overlong prayer luncheons.
At one point in my life, I loved tibs so much I wanted to share it, like the gospel of my proselytizing youth, with everyone I knew.
This resulted in me trying to convert my white American college housemates in Denver, Colorado, into loving tibs as much as I did. In my mind, they were the safest possible audience for my first attempt at making the dish; they’d never had Ethiopian food before and had no idea what to expect.
To my dismay, my (attempted) tibs turned watery with faint notes of flavor that tasted vaguely like apology — nothing like the symphony I heard in my head whenever the dish was in its full glory.
Nursing a Bud Light, one of my housemates innocently raved, “This soup is really good. It goes great with my beer!” Assuming she was being genuine, I thanked her. I didn’t have the heart to confess that something was not right and I didn’t even know where or how things had gone wrong.
Later, I shared the episode with my aunt, whose cooking was my gold standard. She was one of the best cooks I knew and it was her tibs that made my brain sing.
She teased that I had embarrassed her and the culture, then gave me a tip: one way to make a good tibs is to cook it long and low enough for the meat to sweat, and for the juices to thicken and infuse the tibs with those familiar notes of rosemary, tomato, and onion.
Instead of waiting for the juices to thicken and infuse the meat, I had added more water and taken the pan off the stove too early. Explaining the watery blandness and my housemate’s “soup” comment.
More than ten years later, armed with my aunt’s advice, I decided to make tibs for my cousin’s birthday. Now I stood over the stove in my Addis Ababa kitchen and watched closely as the beef began to sweat, the sweat mingling with all the other flavors in the pan and thickening into a nice, velvety sauce.
I served the tibs and my cousin and I took our first bites. My eyes popped: this was it. This was the essence I’d grown up with, not the unfamiliar thing I’d made the first time. Here in beefy matrimony were the rosemary, the onion, the tomato, the pepper!
It was almost perfect, but the meat was a little tough. I had rubbed it with salt and other seasonings overnight to avoid this very thing. Now I was self-conscious, not knowing if I’d overcooked the meat or if it was the nature of the beef itself.
I asked my cousin his opinion. Diplomatically, he said it was delicious and didn’t strike him as that tough, but if it was tough, it might be the kind of meat I’d gotten at the butcher.
I asked how I could do better next time, and he said I should ask for chikina sega (a famously tender cut of meat) and to tell the butcher to “give me your best cut, just like last time!” That way, the man would assume I’d previously loved his selection and try to impress me even more.
“This is how you get anything done here. You don’t come at people directly. You have to flatter and come at them sideways,” my cousin advised. One of his maxims.
Rather than run the risk of offending someone and leaving without the thing you wanted, better to save face and get what you came for.
It’s a small example of how to play the game of life in Ethiopia. My cousin plays it well; with humor and grace, he manages not only to stay sane, but to outwit situations where the logic often escapes me.
Ethiopian cooks are intimate with the rules of traditional cooking — which are not formal, often unspoken, and more spiritual than quantifiable — and baked into these rules is a certain level of freedom and flexibility to get creative.
For some, this means soaking their tibs in wine or beer or even Sprite; for others, it’s marinating the meat in a more savory concoction for twelve or more hours. Many prefer throwing everything in the pan with minimal prep, making magic in a flash. With tibs and in life, there are many paths to the sublime.
I’m still learning the cooking-religion-culture rules. There are many I don’t know, others I don’t care for, but having tibs on Easter Sunday is one tradition I can always count on to ground me in the present, my little plot of paradise on earth.