True Connections

Ethiopian cardamom is also known as false cardamom, but there’s nothing bogus about it.

The subtly smoky spice, derived from a ginger plant that flourishes in East Africa, is the driving force of Ethiopian cooking. In fact, its tangy flavor and faint astringency are so crucial to the cuisiane that Daniel Wassé ’87 and his wife, Helen, held off on launching their vegan food stand in Baltimore until they were sure they could source the real deal from their native country.

“Without fresh false cardamom, Ethiopian food is just a pale reflection of what it should be,” Wassé says. “You can forget it."

Once the Wassés arranged for trusted contacts to ship them unadulterated spices, they felt ready to hawk chickpea stews and sautéed greens at farmers markets. For their business, which debuted in 2019, they chose the name Korarima, the Amharic word for false cardamom.

Korarima is one of several entrepreneurial projects the Wassés have underway. “COVID proved the wisdom of our thinking that the more things you have going on, the better,” says Wassé, who’s also an elementary school teacher, piano instructor, and Learning & Labor concert pianist. “I have very little free time, let’s put it that way.”

Wassé inherited his interest in piano from his mother, who grew up in a low-income Cleveland neighborhood. “If my mother had the capital, including social capital, she would have loved to go far with piano,” he says. “She still plays organ in church.”

Instead, she found work as a nurse, which took her to Ethiopia. While there, she met and married Wassé’s father, Alula Wassé, who served as longtime Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s librarian. As the nation’s political situation grew increasingly volatile, Wassé’s father sought to protect his young family by requesting a scholarship to an American university. After the 1974 coup d’état, Wassé says, “there was no going back.”

Although Wassé grew up in Seattle, he describes his childhood as shaped by an “Ethiopian aesthetic.” Between 1971 and the early 1980s, Washington’s Ethiopian immigrant population increased tenfold to about 200 people, with the community organizing a refugee association in 1983. As a teenager, Wassé washed dishes at Kokeb, Seattle’s first Ethiopian restaurant.

“When it comes to diversity, I had not much of a clue,” Wassé says. “At Oberlin, I saw that and appreciated that.”

His term as a bread baker at Keep Co-op also made Wassé a cooking enthusiast who can prepare whatever he feels like eating. “Carrot soufflé, anything,” he says by way of example. “I’ve nailed down Thanksgiving when it comes to turkey. Yesterday, I made a killer Ukrainian borscht.”

After graduating from the conservatory with a piano performance degree, Wassé taught piano lessons before returning to Seattle to run the Ethiopian Community Center. For five years, his life was an exhausting swirl of deportation fights and equal funding demands on behalf of the city’s 25,000 Ethiopian-born residents. He eventually stepped away from professional advocacy but wanted to find a way to continue engaging with Ethiopian culture.

If the Wassés hadn’t relocated to Silver Spring, Maryland, seven years ago, they never would have contemplated selling Ethiopian food. Offering shiro and misir in the domestic capital of Ethiopian restaurants would be akin to delivering “snowballs to the North Pole,” Wassé says. But there was demand for more Ethiopian food near their new home in Baltimore, and Helen Wassé was primed to meet it.

“She learned to make berbere the traditional way, laying peppers in the backyard,” Wassé says. Her pungent spice mix seasons the sauces and stews they ladle from silver tureens at the 32nd Street Farmers Market on Saturday mornings and outside Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall before Baltimore Symphony Orchestra concerts.

History has left its imprint on Ethiopian cuisine. For financial reasons, Korarima is a vegan operation, so it doesn’t serve kifto, made from minced raw beef. Yet Wassé likes to cite kifto’s reputed origin story, which involves 16th-century Ethiopian troops preparing meals without fire, since light would reveal their position to enemy soldiers.

For Wassé, the whole Ethiopian experience—including centuries of conflict, conquests, and environmental crises—is bound up in Ethiopian food. While the country has undergone almost constant change since Wassé’s family left, its iconic dishes have remained essentially the same. That’s why food isn’t merely a source of extra income for Wassé; it’s “the way I connect to the culture I identify with.”