Chef Beejhy Barhany, the proprietor of Tsion Cafe, a kosher and vegan Israeli-Ethiopian restaurant in Harlem, was born in Ethiopia. As a child, she spent three years in Sudan, then lived in Ashkelon in southern Israel until she moved to Kibbutz Alumim, near the Gaza Strip, during her teen years. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces, she traveled the world and, in her early 20s, settled in New York City.
Now, Barhany’s first book, “Gursha: Timeless Recipes for Modern Kitchens, from Ethiopia, Israel, Harlem, and Beyond,” reflects the breadth of her journey.
Its title, “Gursha,” is Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia. The word literally means “mouthful” and refers to the Ethiopian hospitality tradition of feeding one another morsels of food, usually by hand. More broadly, it means the act of feeding and nourishing another as a sign of affection — a major theme of the book.
The word, explains Barhany, describes “what I am trying to do to each individual who buys the book or works on a recipe,” she told the New York Jewish Week. “I am nourishing them with delicious ideas, recipes, stories and traditions.”
The book, filled with photographs and illustrations, is possibly the first Ethiopian Jewish cookbook. It features more than 100 recipes, ranging from berbere, a spice blend widely used in Ethiopian cuisine, to doro wat, a spicy chicken drumstick stew, to beg wot, a holiday lamb stew that Ethiopian Jews, also known as the Beta Israel, often eat on Passover and Rosh Hashanah. There’s also Ethiopian barbecued corn bread, a dish that combines Barhany’s Ethiopian roots and her Harlem influences.
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