“There are then laid before every guest, instead of plates, round cakes (if they may be so called) about twice as big as a pancake, and something thicker and tougher. It is unleavened bread of a sourish taste, far from being disagreeable, and very easily digested, made of a grain called teff. It is of different colours, from black to the colour of the whitest wheat bread. Three or four of these cakes are generally put uppermost for the food of the person opposite to whose feet they are placed. Beneath these are four or five of ordinary bread and of a blackish kind. These serve the master to wipe his fingers upon, and afterwards the servant as bread for his dinner. Two or three servants then come, each with a square piece of beef in their bare hands, laying it upon the cakes of teff placed like dishes down the table, without cloth or anything else beneath them. By this time all the guests have knives in their hands, and their men have large crooked ones, which they put to all sorts of uses during the time of war. The women have small clasped knives, such as the worst of the kind made at Birmingham, sold at a penny each. The company are so ranged that one man sits between two women; the man with his long knife cuts a thin piece, which would be thought a good beefsteak in England, while you see the motion of the fibres yet perfectly distinct and alive in the flesh. No man in Abyssinia, of any fashion whatever, feeds himself or touches his own meat. The women take the steak and cut it lengthways about the thickness of a little finger, then crossways into square pieces something smaller than dice. This they lay upon a piece of the teff bread strongly powdered with black pepper, or Cayenne pepper, and mineral salt; they then wrap it up in teff bread like a cartridge.