Garbanzos : The Big Lentil

The garbanzo has personality. You couldn’t mistake it for any other bean or pea, not this largish, yellowish, lumpily spherical ball of protein and fiber. The surface has vaguely face-like marks that made the Greeks and Romans think of a ram’s head and the Portuguese of a beak (in Portuguese it’s called grao de bico , “the beaked seed”).

Its flavor is mellow and nutty, vaguely flesh-like. And it’s the most easy-going of legumes in the kitchen, because it’s just about impossible to overcook.

The garbanzo was domesticated at least 6,000 years ago somewhere in northern Iran and spread basically east and west: East as far as India, but no farther--it has never amounted to much in Southeast Asia or China; west to the Mediterranean (and later to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the New World), and, from the Mediterranean, as far south as Ethiopia. But in Europe it never got very far from the Mediterranean.

This is why the garbanzo has yet to be discovered by some Americans. The English knew little about it until the Renaissance, and even in the 18th Century, Samuel Johnson’s notoriously opinionated dictionary defined it as “a kind of degenerate pea.”

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Even the French were late to the garbanzo party. Although many people in this country know this legume as garbanzo, showing that they ultimately learned of it from Spanish-speaking people, its other name, chick pea, shows what an uphill struggle it had in northern Europe. That name comes from the French pois chiches , which the French themselves borrowed either from Italian (where the word is ceci ) or some obscure Spanish dialect, because in the Middle Ages there were no garbanzos north of Provence.

Nobody doubts that the ancient Egyptians and Iraqis ate garbanzos, though there’s some question about what they called them. For instance, scholars have narrowed the Sumerian name for them down to either gu.gal.gal (literally, “the big lentil”) or zid.nad.mal .

In Iran, “to be the garbanzo in every soup” means to be a meddler. The 13th-Century poet Rumi used it for a mystical allegory in which a garbanzo asks the cook: “You bought me and approved of me, so why are you putting me on the fire?” The cook replies: “I am not boiling you because I hate you, but to make you tasty so that you may mingle with the vital spirit.”

The Greeks and the Romans, who believed garbanzos had been revealed to them by the god Poseidon, were the ones who really got behind the garbanzo. In the Iliad, Homer’s heroes were eating erebinthos , and in the 6th Century BC, the Greek poet Xenophon wrote: “As you live stretched upon a soft couch by the fire in the winter season, these should be your words when you have had enough of food, and are sipping sweet wine and sneaking garbanzos with it.” The Greeks took the fateful step of introducing the garbanzo to India, in time for it to be mentioned in the Sanskrit epic known as the Ramayana.

The Greek physician Hippocrates made great claims for its health benefits: “It clears away spots in the skin, beautifies the complexion, is beneficial for hot humors and serviceable for ringworm,” among other things. He also believed it clears the voice, an idea that was still current in the Renaissance.

To the Romans, garbanzos were, above all, a snack eaten fried (as garbanzos are still eaten in the Near East). The orator Horace characterized the ordinary man in the crowd as “a buyer of walnuts and fried garbanzos.” They were also served boiled, of course. A Roman recipe from the 2nd Century AD says to cook garbanzos with salt, cumin, oil and a little wine. (Some ideas never die--substitute lemon juice for the wine and mix in some bread at the end and you’d have shurbat hummus , an everyday garbanzo soup still prepared in Egypt.)

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In this country the garbanzo is mostly known in two cold dishes, the Near Eastern dip hummus bi-tahineh and the traditional San Francisco three-bean salad. Elsewhere in the world, it also goes into soups and stews (it’s hard to imagine a Spanish cocido without garbanzos), fillings for stuffed vegetables, even desserts. The Egyptians make a candy called hummusiyya and the Iranians a garbanzo cookie, nan-e nokhodchi.

But it’s not unusual that we should be so familiar with hummus bi-tahineh , because the mealy garbanzo lends itself readily to grinding into a paste or flour. Whole culinary motifs have been woven out of this property. In Ethiopia, during Lent people make “garbanzo fish” ( ye-shimbra assa ) by baking garbanzo paste molded into fish shapes.

Ground garbanzo flour plays such a large part in Indian cooking that it has its own name, besan . Indian cooks turn it into dumplings, crepes and spicy breads. It makes the batter in which vegetable dumplings ( pakora ) are fried.

Indeed, in India the garbanzo is considered the most versatile of legumes. Late in life the Mughal ruler Shah Jehan, who built the Taj Mahal, was imprisoned by his son and gradually deprived of all his pleasures. In the end, he had to choose only one variety of legume, but he outwitted his son by picking the garbanzo. It could be served as a soup, a bread, a dessert, even as a fresh vegetable (though not commercially available in this country, fresh green garbanzos are delicious and can be eaten raw).

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One use that seems to have died out is the liquid in which garbanzos have been boiled; medieval cooks in the Near East often used it as a flavoring for stews. One 13th-Century Moorish cookbook went even further: “Garbanzos in their skin have no use in the various branches of cuisine,” it insisted. “They are a dish of nomads and gluttons; those who want to strengthen themselves with it make only its broth, add to it meat and make a dish of it.”

Bold words. But the rest of the same cookbook gives dozens of recipes for garbanzos--boiled, fried, ground and all the rest of the ways.