Silsi

The Cultural Story

Silsi is Eritrean hot sauce elevated to a dish. At its core it is just tomatoes cooked down with berbere and niter kibbeh, but the combination produces something greater — a glossy, intensely flavored sauce that functions equally as a spread on ategena for breakfast, a dipping sauce for meat at dinner, or a quick weeknight meal over injera with a boiled egg on top. In Asmara households, a pot of silsi is always either on the stove or in the refrigerator. You never need to decide what to eat if you have silsi. The Italian colonial presence in Eritrea (from 1890 to 1941) introduced tomatoes into the local diet, and Eritrean cooks transformed the ingredient entirely. Where Italian sauce tends toward sweetness and acidity, silsi has the heat of berbere, the richness of spiced butter, and the depth of long-cooked onion. It is East African in flavor despite a Mediterranean ingredient. This is what colonialism could not achieve: it introduced the tomato and Eritrea made it its own. Good silsi depends on patience with the tomatoes. The fresh tomatoes — or canned, in a pinch — should cook long enough that they completely break down and their water evaporates, leaving behind a thick, concentrated paste. At that point the sauce fries slightly in the butter, developing a slight caramelization at the edges of the pot that is the mark of a properly finished silsi. The smell at this stage — sweet tomato and hot berbere crisping in clarified butter — is one of the great smells of East African cooking.