This Hummus Holds Up After 800 Years

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/magazine/ancient-hummus-recipe.html

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We do not eat quite like our ancestors. Gone from our tables are the roasted hedgehogs of Stone Age Britain and the flamingo tongues of ancient Rome. Nor do we know if, decades from now, our descendants will toast Pop-Tarts and dust steaks with edible gold. Or if the future climate will support agriculture of any kind, or human life at all — a scenario explored in C Pam Zhang’s eerily timely novel, “Land of Milk and Honey,” coming in September, in which deadly smog kills off nearly all the earth’s crops, forcing people to subsist on mung-bean powder.

But there are dishes that have endured. One evening this past spring, Lucien Zayan, who runs the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, made a recipe that dates at least as far back as the 13th century. One version appears in a Syrian cookbook from that time by the historian Ibn al-’Adeem with the most sublime of titles, translated from the Arabic as “Winning the Beloved’s Heart With Delectable Dishes and Perfumes.”

You take chickpeas, hard and dry, and boil them until their skins loosen and they reveal themselves, tender little hulks with souls of butter. Maybe you think of the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi’s parable of a chickpea that rises from the pot’s seething depths to accuse the cook of torture — only for the cook to reply calmly that this is the path to a higher destiny: to “become food and mingle with life.” Then you mash the chickpeas in a swirl of tahini, olive oil, vinegar, spices and herbs, and fold in a crush of nuts, seeds and preserved lemon, sour-bright and tasting of aged sun. This should yield a spread thick enough “to hold its shape when picked up with a piece of bread,” the food historian Nawal Nasrallah writes on her blog, In My Iraqi Kitchen.

You might recognize this as hummus. Notably absent from the recipe is garlic, despite its ubiquity in the cooking of the Arab world at the time. It’s not certain exactly when garlic was introduced to the dish: Nasrallah notes that there is no documentation of hummus recipes after the 14th century until the late 19th century. A Lebanese cookbook from 1885 names garlic among the ingredients, as if it was already a given.

For Zayan, a Frenchman of Egyptian and Syrian descent, the history, however incomplete, is inextricable from the recipe. He often returns to the theme of origins and the vagaries of fate. Last fall, for instance, a five-week festival at the Invisible Dog devoted to the union of art and food featured cakes, by Spencer Merolla, made of coal ashes and a photograph, by JR, of people sharing a picnic on opposite sides of the border fence separating the United States and Mexico. Zayan’s Jewish parents were expelled from Egypt in 1956 — his mother from Cairo, his father from Alexandria — and later met in France. When asked how his family ended up in Paris, he answered simply, “Because that was the first train we could take.”

Zayan served the medieval hummus, somewhat cheekily, at a meal otherwise dedicated to garlic, as part of the Salle à Manger dinner series that he hosts at his apartment, down the street from the Invisible Dog. Garlic can hide other flavors, he tells me. Here, instead, the nuts — he uses hazelnuts, for more butteriness, and pistachios, with their hint of camphor — fortify the chickpeas in their earthy heft, so close to the richness of meat.

We think we know what a recipe is. We can picture it: list of ingredients, numbered steps. And yet for much of human civilization, recipes were rarely written down, and of those that were, almost none have survived. A few clay tablets from Babylon, circa the 17th century B.C., offer sketches of stews with minimalist instructions: “You prepare water. You add fat.” The first Western text that could be called a cookbook, “De Re Coquinaria” (“The Art of Cooking”), is typically credited to Apicius, a Roman epicure who lived in the first century A.D., although the manuscript might not have been compiled until 300 to 400 years later.

All those centuries from which no recipes remain, people were cooking, of course. A recipe existed only in the doing, the way that the “Odyssey” once existed only in the telling, made new each time, revised, embellished, its glory subject to the seemingly boundless human capacity for error and its counterpart, invention. Pinned down on the page, a recipe is just a promise. As Rebecca May Johnson asks in her recently released memoir-manifesto, “Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen,” “Can I know a recipe without cooking it?”

Online, people so often complain about having to read a story when all they want is the recipe. But without the story, how would you know that the recipe has been researched, obsessively tinkered with, loved? How could you be sure that the person giving it to you is someone you can trust?