7. Spaghetti with your camel, curry with your pancakes
Your diet in Somaliland will be pretty limited and mostly confined to some goat and camel meat. Although a lot of people will tell you camel meat is pretty healthy, it is very greasy, fatty and chewy and not pleasant to eat. At least not to me.
But Somalia as a whole has half of the world’s camel population. Add this abundance to the infertility of the soil and the extreme weather and poverty of the country and it should come as no surprise that not a lot of alternatives are on offer. You will eat a lot of camel meat.
Somalilanders also like to eat camel liver and that is a popular breakfast item accompanying some laxoox, a pancake type of bread that resembles a bit the Ethiopian injera but is thankfully sweeter and more pleasant. Camel liver stew can also be found in the market in Hargeisa if you are feeling brave enough.
For a bit of change, you might be able to find some goat meat. Goat meat is common across the Middle East and I had my fair share in Oman. At the Six Senses Zighy Bay, I enjoyed it in the traditional way of cooking: buried underground with hot stones and left to cook slowly for many hours. Goat meat is not very different from the taste of lamb and it is a good variation from the camel meat.
Perhaps the most curious things about Somaliland is that fact that they eat spaghetti as the main staple and carbohydrate. All African countries have one type of staple or other, sometimes it is cassava, ugali, potatoes, banana, tapioca or even just plain rice. But I had never seen spaghetti as being such a commonplace item.
The time of Italian colonialism in the south of Somalia brought pasta to the country and I felt grateful for whoever added a bit of variation to the rice. If everything else fails, you can always eat plain pasta. Bear in mind you might have to learn to eat it with your hands as locals do.
And if you are in Somalia, you can also always have a banana, with your spaghetti or rice. While bananas may not be as common in Somaliland, they are certainly as staple of the rest of Somalia.
Somaliland’s cuisine is pretty limited and aside from camel, goat, rice, and spaghetti, you are unlikely to eat anything else. Except for breakfast where a local variation of a pancake called laxoox which is a spongy, holed up pancake of a slightly darker color than the French crepe and usually eaten with chickpea curry for breakfast. Continue to next page
