By Joel Denker
I had always thought of the chickpea as an unassuming bean. I had enjoyed the pleasure of chickpea dishes like hummus and falafel. But until I began digging into its story, I hadn’t realized the strong feelings the lowly legume had aroused. I was astonished to learn that the Roman orator Cicero’s name came from the Latin word for chickpea. His family was not alone: The families of other Roman statesmen—Fabius, Lentillus, Pisus—were also inspired to name themselves after beans. Nations have vied with each other for the right to claim falafel and hummus as their own.
The chickpea also carries a stigma. I discovered this truth from one of my many journeys to the Ironbound, a Portuguese-Brazilian enclave in Newark, New Jersey, a favorite haunt of mine. On one visit, I stopped for lunch at a bakery-café whose simple country soups, like caldo verde (kale and potato), and egg custard pastries I relished. My curiosity piqued by a new item in the display case, a chickpea and cod salad, I asked a woman standing next to me about the unusual dish. She said that the salad was called Maia-Desfeita, which means “half an insult.” Later, I pieced together the story behind its name. The two unlikely bedfellows represented clashing cultures. The salt cod was a subsistence food for generations of Portuguese. The chickpea, known as the Grao de-bico, or granule with a beak, was associated with the hated Moors who had conquered Portugal and Spain.
Scorned and adored, the chickpea was an ancient crop that sustained many of the early civilizations. The poet Homer evoked the chickpea in a simple rustic setting: “Just as dark-fleshed beans and chickpeas leap off the threshing floor sped by shrill wind and a strong winnower, so bitter arrows ricochet off the breast-plate of noble Menelaus and fly far off.” Domesticated in the Fertile Crescent more than 10,000 years ago, the wild chickpea was native to southern Turkey and nearby Syria. The legume’s ancestors had disadvantages for the pioneering farmers. The pods, for example, easily burst open, spreading seeds over the soil. Farmers, scholar Jared Diamond suggests, latched on to a “non-popping” mutant from the wild and steadily improved it. They also bred a larger and sturdier seed.
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To learn more about chickpeas, see The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, coming in October from Rowman & Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442248861/The-Carrot-Purple-and-Other-Curious-Stories-of-the-Food-We-Eat.
