Sudanese food is simple, satisfying, and often very good. The cuisine is built on a few staple ingredients — sorghum, lentils, beans, dried meat, and vegetables — with strong influences from the Nile Valley, the Arabian Peninsula, and sub-Saharan Africa. The variety is more regional than it might first appear.
Ful medames is the national breakfast: slow-cooked fava beans mashed with oil, lemon, and often tomato and onion. In Sudan it is eaten with flat kisra bread or with a round wheat bread called gurrasa. You will find it everywhere, from roadside stalls to hotel dining rooms.
Kisra is the Sudanese staple bread, a thin, slightly sour flatbread made from fermented sorghum. It is used to scoop up stews and sauces the way injera is used in Ethiopia. It is an acquired taste for some — slightly tangy and very thin — but it grows on you.
Aseeda is a stiff porridge of sorghum or wheat, served with a sauce (marara, a bitter offal-based sauce; or a vegetable or meat stew). This is proper peasant food in the best sense — filling, cheap, nutritious.
Shorba (soup) is common — clear broths with vegetables or meat, sometimes with a little chili. Sudanese food is not generally spicy, but pili pili (chili sauce) is usually available on the side.
Shaiyah is grilled meat — chunks of beef or lamb cooked over charcoal at roadside restaurants. In Khartoum's market areas, the air in the evenings was thick with the smell of it.
Tea and coffee are taken seriously. Sudanese tea (shai) is sweet and sometimes spiced with ginger or cinnamon. Jebena coffee — brewed in a clay pot, served in small cups with ginger or cardamom — is a proper ritual in many homes and tea stalls.
Alcohol has been officially banned since 1983 under Sharia law. Home-brewed merissa (a sorghum beer) remains common in non-Muslim communities, particularly in the south, but is not served publicly.