Injera

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church keeps one of the most demanding fasting calendars of any Christian tradition, with observant members expected to abstain from meat, dairy, eggs and other animal products, and in the strictest fasts from food altogether until a set hour of the day, for roughly two hundred and fifty days across the year when all individual and communal fasts are added together, including the Great Fast before Easter, the Fast of the Apostles, the Fast of the Assumption and every Wednesday and Friday outside the festive seasons.

Injera, made from fermented teff flour batter poured onto a large flat griddle and cooked into a soft, spongy, slightly sour flatbread, contains no animal products in its traditional preparation and requires no adjustment at all to fit a fasting day, unlike almost every dish it is served alongside, which must be reworked into a vegan version for the fast to be kept. Wat, the spiced stew normally built on meat and often finished with butter, becomes a lentil, split pea, chickpea or vegetable stew, misir wat or shiro among the most common, cooked in oil rather than butter, and it is this fasting version of wat, not injera itself, that carries almost the entire weight of observance.

Because injera itself never changes between a fasting day and an ordinary one, the visible marker of a fasting meal in an Ethiopian or Eritrean Orthodox household is almost entirely in what sits on top of the bread rather than in the bread underneath it: the same round of injera, torn by hand and used to scoop up whatever stew is served, might carry a rich meat and butter based wat on a feast day and a vegetable based fasting wat the next, without the base of the meal changing at all. That constancy has a practical side, since a household does not need two different staple foods for its two different modes of eating, and a spiritual one, since it keeps the fast focused on what is added or withheld rather than on the shared act of eating together from a common plate, which is not itself suspended during a fast.

Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Christians who keep the fasting calendar closely will describe entire weeks and months of the year as fasting periods, and restaurants and households alike in these communities commonly prepare a specifically fasting, tsom, menu built around lentils, split peas, chickpeas and vegetables during those stretches, still served the same way, over the same injera, that any other meal would be.