By Joel Denker

The golden seeds nestled on a bed of “sticky rice,” sweetened with coconut milk, that shared a plate with tender slices of mango. This is a traditional Thai dessert. The color and nutty taste of the seeds, brought out by toasting, lent excitement to the ensemble.

A plate of sticky rice, this time covered with black sesame seeds, accompanied my dish of green curry with chicken and eggplant. Rice, the recently opened Thai restaurant on 14th Street, surprised me with this striking color contrast.

In search of the sesame experience, I went to the Malaysia Kopitiam restaurant and tried their achar, a mixture of pickled vegetables—carrots, zucchini, cabbage—and pineapple. The sweet and sour as well as spicy assembly was topped with crunchy sesame seeds and chopped peanuts.

Sesame is now part of exotic dining. It has joined an ever-expanding repertoire of condiments with which we invigorate our food. It is also commonplace in cafe cuisine, where sesame noodles are now a fixture. In the supermarket, salad dressings like Annie’s Sesame and Shitake, a favorite of mine, appeal to the health-conscious and adventurous alike.

As we exult in this novel flavoring, we should remind ourselves that sesame is more than a culinary ornament. The “queen of oil seeds” is a plant of great antiquity. A field crop in a wide spectrum of societies, sesame is the oldest oil-bearing plant. It was a necessity for daily life as well as a central ingredient in cultural rituals in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

The omnipotent sesame actually looks quite homely. The bushy, leafy plant confused the Chinese, who called it “foreign hemp,” the source of marijuana. One Sanskrit-Chinese Dictionary, cited by botanist I.H. Burkill, describes sesame: “This plant is in appearance like the ‘great hemp’ (Cannibus sativa). It has red flowers and green leaves. Its seeds can be made into oil; also they yield an aromatic. . . .”

Despite their resemblance, sesame and hemp are difference species altogether. Sesame is known by the many oil-laden pods attached to its branches. The capsules store seeds full of the much-coveted oil. Usually white, the seeds can also be red, brown, and black, even tan and olive green. Whether black or white, sweet or bitter (typical of the black), the plants are just different varieties in the same family.

One of the Arabic words for sesame, juljulan, which means “small bell,” is suggestive: The seeds bounce around in their pods causing a rattle. When ripe, the pod easily bursts, emitting the seeds, which explains the “open sesame” image in the tale, Thousand and One Nights. Farmers typically pick the plant when it’s green to avoid this danger.

Sesame is a hardy plant that can weather drought and flourish in hot tropical and sub-tropical climates. Ancient civilizations, like that in the Indus Valley in present-day Pakistan, where scholars believe the plant originated between 3050 and 3000 B.C., cultivated sesame as a four-month summer crop.

Since sesame oil was used for cooking and lighting, especially where the olive was absent or scarce, it became a valuable commodity, a keystone of ancient economies. The crop had to be carefully tended. Plants were threshed and seeds extracted, dried, and pressed for oil.

Excavations in Armenia, a sesame heartland, have uncovered the equipment for oil production. In the ruins of the town of Teishebaini (near the city of Yerevan today), archaeologists found a sesame workroom complete with a basin for washing and soaking seeds, mortar and pestle (probably for removing the seed coat), and a wooden press for drawing the oil. Jars for storing the oil, whose antioxidants prevented spoiling, were also discovered.

So valued was the plant that farmers, according to botanists Dorothea Bedigian and Jack Harlan, most likely borrowed in order to pay for planting. A tablet discovered in Mesopotamia showed a loan of silver to grow sesame, to be repaid with the crop.

The rulers of the lands where sesame grew kept it under their control. Egypt’s Pharoahs, scholar William Darby points out, demanded the oil as tribute from their subjects and from conquered peoples. Royalty kept the lamps of temples ablaze with oil and made offerings of it to the gods.

In China, sesame oil served sacred and mundane purposes. It lit the holy lamps of Buddhist ritual. How fitting that the liquid was known as the “foreign flavor of pious thoughtfulness.” In addition the oil was turned into lamp black for ink.

The flavor of sesame has also tickled the fancy of people through the centuries. The Babylonians enjoyed festive sesame wine. In Assyrian myth, the Gods celebrated with swigs of the wine before creating the earth. In other societies, bread, rolls, and cakes were enriched with the seeds.

In Hellenic tradition, the bride was presented with sesame cake to encourage fertility. “The cake is baked and they are kneading the sesame biscuit,” the playwright Aristophanes wrote about a wedding preparation.

The Arabs, who became devotees of sesame, have popularized the flavoring. They introduced it to colonies, like Sicily where it is still sprinkled on bread. “Wherever Arabs go, you find sesame,” food historian Karen Hess told me.

To refresh my memory of its infectious tang, I stopped by George’s Townhouse for a falafel dressed with tahini, the creamy sesame paste. Unlike the Asian sesame oils, tahini is pressed from raw, not toasted, seeds. To liven up an otherwise sour seasoning, George Rababy, the restaurant owner, adds lemon, garlic, and salt.

His hummus and baba ghanouj dips, George says, are not complete without an infusion of tahini. Tahini mixed with smashed pine nuts, he added, makes a pleasing sauce for baked fish. At Bacchus, the Lebanese restaurant, my wife, Peggy, and I relished an appetizer of lightly fried cauliflower perked up with a tart tahini dressing.

I wonder if George knew that sesame had deep American roots. Benne, as it was known in West African languages, traveled with the slaves to the deep South, particularly South Carolina and Georgia. Carrying on a long African tradition, the new Americans planted the seeds, emblems of good luck, in their gardens and cooked with them.

The slaves thickened soups with benne, boiled them with greens, and used the seeds to make puddings. They even used the oil, historian Joseph Holloway reveals, to fire up lamps.

Benne fascinated Thomas Jefferson, who contemplated growing it, but was never successfully able to do so. In a letter to Anne Randolph found by historian Hess, he expressed his excitement: “Beny . . . is among the most valuable acquisitions our country has ever made. it yields an oil equal to the finest olive oil. I received a bottle of it, and tried it with a great deal of company. . . . it was brought to S. Carolina from Africa by the negroes.”

When our friends, Rick and Rob, returned from a trip to South Carolina, they brought us a gift of benne wafers, sesame crackers that are popular gift shop items in the state. Join me. Crunch down on one of those crackers and pay your respects to the legendary seed.

 

Originally published in The InTowner: http://intowner.com/food-in-the-hood/