The West Knows Yemen’s War and Famine. A Daughter of Immigrants Is Spreading the Word About Its Cuisine.
She self-published ‘Sifratna’ just for friends, family and colleagues. But it has turned into something else.
By Kara Elder
“Yemeni cuisine is such a foreign thing to people,” Amjaad Al-Hussain says one Sunday afternoon in February. She’s just finished cooking a batch of adas, a hearty breakfast stew of red lentils, onions and tomatoes, spiced with cumin and coriander.
As the adas sputters in its final minutes of cooking in her Fairfax kitchen, she warms a few glugs of olive oil in a small skillet, drops in a generous amount of minced garlic and cilantro, and fries the aromatic mixture until the garlic is golden and the herb almost blackened and crisp. Then she stirs the supercharged oil into the adas, adding a jolt of flavor and lusciousness. “This is my go-to dish for brunch,” she says as she serves it with spoonfuls of an herbed sweet pepper, tomato and feta salad.
Al-Hussain, 28, has never actually been to Yemen, which her family fled in the early…
