Hummus

• 1. Introduction

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  Hummus once filled a single dish that weighed approximately 10,450 kilograms. Three hundred cooks in the village of al-Fanar, near Beirut, prepared it. The result was more than double the weight of the previous Israeli-Arab record, and it was validated by the Guinness World Record. The dish itself is simple: cooked, mashed chickpeas blended with tahini, lemon juice and garlic, usually finished with olive oil. The contest over that record is one sign of how much people care about who owns this spread. So where did hummus come from, and what did medieval cooks put in it? Why do its spellings differ from one shop to the next, and how did a Levantine dip end up in refrigerators around the world?

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• 2. Spelling Troubles

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  The Arabic word حُمُّص means simply chickpeas. The full name of the prepared spread is ḥummuṣ bi ṭaḥīna, meaning chickpeas with tahini. The everyday Arabic form ḥummuṣ is a variant of ḥimmaṣ or ḥimmiṣ. These may trace back to Aramaic, whose words ḥemṣīn and ḥemṣāy match the Syriac ḥem(m)ṣē for chickpeas. English borrowed the word around the mid-20th century, either straight from Arabic or through its use as the name of the dish.

  Most major dictionaries from American and British publishers give hummus as the primary English spelling. Some American dictionaries offer hommos as an alternative. British dictionaries give houmous or hoummos instead, and the major British supermarkets print houmous on their labels. Other variants include homous, houmos and houmus. Turkish spells the word humus, but English writers usually avoid that form. It looks identical to the word for organic matter in soil. The oldest written trace of the dish is far older than any of these spellings.

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• 3. Medieval Cookbooks

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  Cooks in Egypt and the Levant had chickpeas, sesame, lemon and garlic on hand for centuries. Even so, the evidence is too thin to say where or when hummus was invented, and several places in the Middle East claim it. Chickpeas were widely eaten and often cooked in stews and other hot dishes. Yet puréed chickpeas eaten cold with tahini appear in no records before the Abbasid Caliphate.

  The earliest mention of a dish equivalent to hummus comes from Syria. It sits in a 13th-century cookbook attributed to the historian Ibn al-Adim of Aleppo, though its authorship is uncertain. The recipe calls the dish chickpea kisāʾ, which means garment. It lists chickpeas, lemon, sesame and olive oil, and it leaves out garlic.

  Cookbooks written in Cairo in the 14th century record other early recipes for something close to ḥummuṣ bi ṭaḥīna. One is a cold purée of chickpeas with vinegar and pickled lemons, plus herbs, spices and oil. It has no tahini and no garlic, and it appears in the Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table.

  Muhammad bin Hasan al-Baghdadi's The Book of Dishes describes a purée of chickpeas and tahini called hummus kasa. Vinegar, not lemon, sharpens it, and it carries many spices, herbs and nuts but no garlic. Cooks could also roll it out and let it sit overnight.

  According to food historian Nawal Nasrallah, no hummus recipes are recorded after the 14th century until a Lebanese cookbook of 1885. By then, garlic had become a standard ingredient.

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• 4. Regional Tables

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  Olive oil, a few whole chickpeas, parsley and paprika form the standard garnish for hummus. Diners scoop it up with flatbread such as pita. It also appears as part of a meze, or beside falafel, grilled chicken, fish or eggplant.

  In Egypt, hummus is a common dip eaten with pita and often flavored with cumin or other spices. In the Levant, it has long been a staple, often served warm, with bread at breakfast, lunch or dinner. Gardens, farms and markets supply every ingredient, which helped its popularity. Levantine cooks garnish it with olive oil, nana mint leaves, paprika and parsley.

  Kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws, allows the ingredients of hummus to be combined with both meat and dairy meals. That helps explain why it is a common part of everyday meals in Israel. Chickpea dishes have long belonged to the cooking of Jews in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Mizrahi Jewish immigrants from those lands brought their own variations. Iraqi Jews, for example, prepared hummus with fried eggplant and boiled eggs. Israeli versions use large amounts of tahini for a creamier texture.

  One author calls hummus "one of the most popular and best-known of all Syrian dishes" and a "must on any mezzeh table". In Canada, Syrian and Lebanese families in the Arab diaspora serve it with falafel, kibbeh and tabbouleh. They do so even among third- and fourth-generation descendants of the original immigrants.

  In Cyprus, both Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities include hummus in local cooking and call it humoi, written χούμοι. Greek Cypriot caterers popularized it in the United Kingdom, which sometimes leads people to think of it as a Greek food. In Turkey, it counts as a meze. In the French region of Provence, a dish called poichichade resembles it.

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• 5. Inside The Bowl

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  A hundred grams of hummus provides roughly 170 calories. Chickpeas, the main ingredient, bring appreciable amounts of dietary fiber, protein, vitamin B6 and manganese. Recipes vary, and so does the nutrition, depending mainly on the proportions of chickpeas, tahini and water. Hummus counts as a good to excellent source of dietary fiber, vitamin B6 and several dietary minerals, meaning more than 10 percent of the Daily Value. In the United States and Europe, shops now stock numerous traditional and non-traditional varieties, such as beet or chocolate.

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• 6. Supermarket Shelves

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  Waitrose was the first British supermarket to stock hummus, in the 1980s. Chefs such as Yotam Ottolenghi, Claudia Roden and Anissa Helou helped popularize it across the United Kingdom. By 2013, £60 million worth of hummus was sold there each year. One survey found that 41% of British respondents had hummus in their fridge, twice as many as in the rest of Europe. A Waitrose spokesperson said it had become a grocery staple.

  In 2006, hummus was present in 12 percent of American households. That figure rose to 17 percent by early 2009. One commentator credited America's embrace of ethnic and exotic foods. During 2006-2008, some 15 million Americans ate hummus. By 2016, an estimated 25% of US households did. That year, the leading manufacturer, Sabra Dipping Company, held a 62% share of American hummus sales and was forecast to exceed $1 billion in sales in 2017.

  American farmers have increased chickpea production four-fold since 2009. They harvested more than 100,000,000 pounds in 2015, up from 25,000,000 pounds in 2009. Many tobacco farmers have switched to growing chickpeas to meet the demand.

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• 7. Disputed Ownership

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  In October 2008, the Association of Lebanese Industrialists petitioned the Lebanese Ministry of Economy and Trade. It asked for protected status from the European Commission, presenting hummus as a uniquely Lebanese food. European Union countries hold similar Protected Geographical Status over regional foods. The association was still "collecting documents and proof" to support its claim.

  Hummus is often seen as an unofficial national dish of Israel, reflecting its popularity among the entire Israeli population. Israel's critics describe this as an appropriation of Lebanese, Palestinian or Arab culture.

  Ofra Tene and Dafna Hirsch argue that the dispute exposes nationalism through food. They stress the role of industrialization, since Israeli private companies began producing hummus commercially in 1958.

  Jewish immigrants from Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries also took up the dish, which Mizrahi Jews had long eaten in Arabic-speaking lands. Historian Dafna Hirsch describes this as an attempt to blend into the Middle Eastern environment. Sociologist Rafi Grosglick points instead to the importance of its health aspects.

  Abu Gosh and Kafr Yasif, two Arab-Israeli villages, have become famous through a process of gourmetization. In recent years, the Arab identity of hummus has become a marker of authenticity. Enthusiasts now travel to remote Arab and Druze villages in the northern Galilee region for culinary experiences.

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• 8. Records And Screens

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  Israel held the record for the largest dish of hummus in 2008. Lebanon took the title in 2009, Israel won it back in January 2010, and Lebanon reclaimed it in May 2010. Chefs on both sides treat the competition as a way of contesting ownership of the dish.

  The 2005 short film West Bank Story sets two fictional restaurants against each other. One is the Israeli Kosher King and the other is the Palestinian Hummus Hut. A parody of West Side Story, the film won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film.

  In 2012, Australian filmmaker Trevor Graham released a documentary called Make Hummus Not War. It examines the political and gastronomic sides of hummus.

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