Ferula assa-foetida L. and Ferula foetida (Bunge) Regel, the asafoetidas of commerce; with silphion, the lost laser of Cyrene, which was probably also a Ferula
Origin: Herat & Khorasan
Asafoetida is neither a seed nor a leaf but a dried gum-resin, tapped from the root of giant fennels that grow wild in the deserts and dry mountains of eastern Iran and Afghanistan. The plant spends four or five years building a thick, carrot-like taproot; then, before it flowers, the soil is cleared from the top of the root, the stem is cut away, and the exposed root is sliced. A milky latex wells up and hardens in the air, and it is scraped off and the root sliced again, over a period of weeks, until it gives no more. Engelbert Kaempfer, who watched the gathering in Laristan, near the Persian Gulf, in the 1680s, described the root as heavy and white, 'full of a fat, very white, and most fetid juice'. Henry Bellew found the plant growing wild on the sandy plains near Kandahar in 1857 and noted that it 'is never cultivated': its gum was collected from wild plants on the deserts where they grew.
Which plant yields the asafoetida of commerce has always been uncertain. Hobson-Jobson, the Anglo-Indian glossary of 1903, called it 'a curious example of the uncertainty which sometimes besets the origin of drugs which are the objects even of a large traffic', and named four candidate species. Today's processors name two, Ferula assa-foetida and F. foetida, and the Indian trade grades the resin into two kinds: hing kabuli sufaid, milky white and soluble in water, and hing lal, red, dark, and soluble in oil. Both come from the same deserts and almost always reach the kitchen as the same compounded powder, so this map gives them a single origin.
Pure resin is so strong that almost nobody cooks with it. What is sold in Indian shops is compounded asafoetida, a powder in which the ground resin is cut with rice flour or wheat flour and gum arabic, often to about half its weight, which is why much commercial hing is not gluten-free. The practice is very old. Pliny the Elder complained in the first century CE that the Persian laser reaching Rome was 'extensively adulterated with gum, sacopenium, or pounded beans'.
India, which eats more asafoetida than anywhere else, has never grown its own. It imports about 1,200 tonnes of raw resin a year from Afghanistan, Iran, and Uzbekistan, and cultivation began only on 15 October 2020, when the Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology planted the first seedling, raised from seed introduced from Iran, at Kwaring, in the cold desert of Lahaul. Related species grow wild in Kashmir, and Hobson-Jobson thought they might yield some of the resin, but India's supply has always been imported.
The Romans knew a second resin of this kind, the silphion or laser of Cyrene in Libya, and it is filed here because the Roman kitchen treated the two as one ingredient. No specimen survives, so silphion has no secure scientific name. The descriptions in Theophrastus point strongly to a Ferula, and in 2021 the pharmacognosist Mahmut Miski argued that Ferula drudeana, a rare species he first collected near Hasan Dağı in Cappadocia in 1983, may be silphion surviving in Anatolia. His later papers call it 'the putative Anatolian ecotype of the silphion plant', and the identification remains a hypothesis rather than an established fact.
The first record of people eating asafoetida comes from Alexander's army. In the spring of 329 BCE the Macedonians crossed the Hindu Kush into Bactria, and Aristobulus, who marched with them, reported that nothing grew there but terebinth trees and 'silphium', which the sheep devoured. Strabo adds that the road was so bare that the soldiers ate the flesh of their pack animals raw for want of firewood, 'but silphium grew in great abundance, which promoted the digestion of this raw food'. They called it silphium because it reminded them of the plant they knew from Cyrene.
Rome had both. The Cyrenaic laser came first, and Cyrene grew rich on it: the city put the plant on its coins from the sixth century BCE, and Pliny records thirty pounds of it brought to Rome for the public service in 93 BCE and fifteen hundred pounds taken from the treasury by Julius Caesar at the outbreak of the civil war. By Pliny's own day it had vanished. A single stalk had been found within living memory and sent to Nero as a curiosity, and Rome imported only the laser of Persis, Media, and Armenia, 'much inferior' and often adulterated. That Persian laser is generally identified as asafoetida, and it is most probably the laser of the cookery book attributed to Apicius, compiled after the Cyrenaic plant had gone, which allows 'laser from Cyrene or from Parthia' and explains how to make a little go a long way.
After Rome, Europe kept asafoetida as a drug and forgot it as a seasoning. The Germans called it Teufelsdreck and the Dutch duivelsdrek, devil's dung, and by the early modern period it was an apothecary's remedy rather than anything a cook would use.
India never forgot it. The Buddhist monastic code allows sick monks hiṅgu among the gums permitted as medicine, the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang found it growing near Ghazni in about 645, and a Chalukya king's encyclopaedia of the twelfth century seasons fish with it. By the sixteenth century European visitors were struck by it. Garcia de Orta, writing at Goa in 1563, called it 'the most used thing in all India', as much for the kitchen as for medicine. Ralph Fitch travelled from Agra to Bengal in 1586 with a fleet of boats laden with 'Salt, Opium, Hinge, Lead, Carpets'. In 1611 Pedro Teixeira wrote that in Gujarat 'the natives put in all their food Ingu', and in 1673 John Fryer found Indians mixing it 'in all their Pulse' and making it into wafers 'to correct the Windiness of their Food'. The supply came overland from Afghanistan. Bellew, at Kandahar in 1857, noted that the produce was 'for the most part exported to Hindustan', and in Calcutta, through much of the twentieth century, the Afghan pedlars known as Kabuliwalas sold it from door to door with their dried fruit.
India is the world's great consumer of asafoetida, and in some Indian kitchens it is indispensable. It is fried for a few seconds in the hot fat that seasons dals, vegetables, pickles, and the lentil wafers of the south and west, where it softens and deepens into a flavour reminiscent of cooked onion and leek. That is the reason for its importance to the communities that avoid onion and garlic: many Brahmin households, the Jains, and the Kashmiri Pandits, for whom it supplies the savour that the alliums supply to everyone else.
The processing is concentrated in Hathras, in western Uttar Pradesh, which has blended and packed hing for about a century, received a Geographical Indication for its product in 2023, and is called the hing capital of India. Raw resin arrives from Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan and leaves as compounded powder, some of it for export. As Henry Bellew found at Kandahar in 1857, the producing countries send most of what they gather to India. Elsewhere asafoetida survives as a specialist's ingredient, bought by cooks who follow Indian recipes and by those seeking a substitute for onion and garlic.
Historical Journey of Asafoetida
Cyrene & Cyrenaica — c. 570–525 BCE
Before Rome knew asafoetida it knew silphion, the laser of Cyrene, and this point stands for that lost plant. It grew wild in the hinterland of the Greek city of Cyrene, in what is now eastern Libya, and for some six centuries it was the city's fortune. Cyrene put the plant on its silver coins from the sixth century BCE onwards; the juice, tapped from root and stalk and cured in vessels with bran, was 'sold at the same rate as silver', according to Pliny; and the people of the country ate the stalk roasted or boiled. The kings of Cyrene tried to keep the trade to themselves, but Strabo records that Carthaginian ships came to Charax, on the Syrtis, with cargoes of wine and went home with silphium and its juice, smuggled out of Cyrene by merchants.
Pliny believed that it could not be cultivated, and it did not last. Pliny writes that by his day it had not been found in Cyrenaica for many years, because the tax-farmers who leased the land found it more profitable to graze sheep on it, and that a single stalk found within living memory had been sent to the Emperor Nero as a curiosity. Strabo mentions an earlier 'spiteful incursion of barbarians, who attempted to destroy all the roots'. No ancient writer says that Rome destroyed it. Modern retellings that place the plant at Carthage, or have Roman soldiers burn it after the sack of the city in 146 BCE, have no support in the sources, which put it at Cyrene and blame its loss on grazing and over-harvesting; Carthage's only part in the story is the smuggling trade. Synesius, bishop of Ptolemais in Cyrenaica around 400 CE, claimed to have seen the plant, so it may have survived in corners for longer than Pliny thought.
What silphion actually was is unknown, because no specimen survives. The ancient descriptions point to a giant fennel, a Ferula, and so to a close relative of asafoetida, and in 2021 Mahmut Miski proposed that a rare Anatolian species, Ferula drudeana, growing near old Greek villages in Cappadocia, may be the plant itself. The proposal is serious and unproven. What is certain is that Rome treated the laser of Cyrene and the laser of Persia as one ingredient, and that when the first was gone, the second took its place.
Herat & Khorasan — c. 329 BCE
The giant fennels that give asafoetida grow wild across the deserts and dry uplands of eastern Iran and Afghanistan, from the plains of Herat and Kandahar in the old province of Khorasan to Laristan near the Persian Gulf, and the first people on record to eat them were soldiers. In the spring of 329 BCE Alexander's army crossed the Hindu Kush, where, as Aristobulus reported, nothing grew but terebinth trees and silphium. The men were eating the raw flesh of their pack animals for want of firewood, and Strabo says that the silphium, which grew in great abundance, helped them to digest it. They called it silphium after the plant of Cyrene; it was asafoetida.
The resin has been gathered here for more than two thousand years, and most of it has gone elsewhere. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang found the plant growing near Ghazni in about 645. Engelbert Kaempfer watched the roots being bared and sliced in Laristan in the 1680s. Henry Bellew, riding on the plain north-east of Kandahar in 1857, found the plants growing wild in the sandy and gravelly plains of western Afghanistan, 'never cultivated', their resin 'for the most part exported to Hindustan'. That is still the pattern. Afghanistan, Iran, and the neighbouring Central Asian republics gather and sell the resin; India cooks with it.
Where it grows, it is gathered rather than cooked, and that is why this point carries no recipe. No Iranian or Afghan dish built on asafoetida is recorded in any source consulted for this entry. In Iran the resin belongs to folk medicine, where it is given against intestinal worms, and a study of South Khorasan, the province around Tabas where villagers still bare and cut the roots by hand, found that about ninety-nine per cent of the harvest is exported, chiefly to India, Europe, and the Arab countries. Nor does the record show that it was ever otherwise. This is not a cuisine that has been lost: the first people recorded eating it in these mountains were Alexander's soldiers, and the later travellers who watched it gathered, Bellew at Kandahar in 1857 amongst them, describe a crop for export.
In Persian the plant is angūzeh. The use that Strabo's soldiers found for it, as an aid to digesting a heavy meal, is the use that the Indian kitchen still claims for it in every pot of dal.
Rome & the Roman Empire — 93 BCE
Rome cooked with laser for centuries, and the record shows both kinds arriving. The Cyrenaic laser came first: Pliny records thirty pounds of it brought to Rome from Cyrene for the public service in the consulship of Gaius Valerius and Marcus Herennius, in 93 BCE, and fifteen hundred pounds of it taken from the public treasury by Julius Caesar, together with the gold and silver, at the outbreak of the civil war in 49 BCE. By the time Pliny wrote, in 77 CE, the Cyrenaic plant was gone, and 'there has been no other laser imported into this country, but that produced in either Persis, Media, or Armenia', inferior to the old and often cut with gum or pounded beans. That Persian laser is generally identified as asafoetida, carried west along the roads from the Iranian plateau.
The Roman kitchen used it as a seasoning of the first rank. The recipes collected under the name of Apicius call for laser again and again, in sauces for poultry, game, pork, and lamb, and Apicius treats the two sources as interchangeable: his laseratum, the laser flavouring, is made with 'laser from Cyrene or from Parthia' dissolved in a little warm broth. The same book shows how precious it had become. One recipe explains how to make an ounce of laser last for ever: keep it in a jar with about twenty pine kernels, crush a few kernels into the dish when the flavour is wanted, and replace them as they are used.
The tradition did not survive Rome. After the empire, European cooks abandoned the resin, and it lived on in Europe only as an apothecary's drug; the dishes on this point are Apician, and nobody in Italy cooks them now.
India had known hiṅgu for a very long time before anyone wrote down a dish made with it. The Pali Vinaya, the oldest code of Buddhist monastic discipline, allows sick monks 'the use of gums as medicine: hiṅgu, hiṅgu lac' and the rest, and its Victorian translators identified the first as Ferula assa-foetida and noted that it came from Persia. The first Indian recipe to call for it comes from the court of the Western Chalukyas at Kalyani. The Mānasollāsa, the encyclopaedia of kingship attributed to Someśvara III and dated to about 1131, describes the royal sport of fishing and then how to cook the catch, and one of its preparations roasts what its translators render as the fish's scrotums, presumably the milt, over the fire, cuts them up, fries them in hot oil, and finishes it with cardamom, pepper, and rock salt, 'and season with asafetida'. How the resin reached the Deccan the record does not say; it came, like all India's asafoetida, from the deserts of Afghanistan and Iran, and the path is drawn from there on that evidence.
The Deccan never let it go. Four centuries later Garcia de Orta told the story of a Portuguese at Vijayanagara whose horse was cured with asafoetida, and of the king who called it 'the food of the gods'. In the Marathi kitchen it is one of the two seasonings of varan, the plain pigeon-pea dal of Maharashtra, which is often cooked with nothing but turmeric and asafoetida; and across the south, under the names iṅgu, iṅguva, and perungāyam, it goes into the hot oil of almost every tempering. A government report on the trade notes that the demand for processed hing first rose in the southern markets in the 1920s, around Thanjavur.
Gujarat is where Europeans first saw how much asafoetida India could eat. Garcia de Orta, writing at Goa in 1563, called it 'the most used thing in all India', and singled out the Banias, the merchant castes, 'and all the Gentiles of Cambay': if they could afford it they ate a great deal of it, rubbed the cooking pot with it first, and put it into the greens and vegetables they ate as the seasoning of all their food. A Portuguese merchant praised their greens to Orta, who tried them and found them agreeable enough, and noted with surprise that they did not smell at all. In 1611 Pedro Teixeira wrote that 'in the Kingdom of Gujarat and Cambaya, the natives put in all their food Ingu', and at Surat later in the century John Ovington found the people 'much taken with Assa Foetida, which they call Hin', mixing a little into the cakes they ate.
Those cakes were the wafers of pulse that English came to call poppadoms. John Fryer, who travelled in western India and Persia in the 1670s, described the Indians mixing hing 'in all their Pulse' and making it up 'in Wafers to correct the Windiness of their Food', and an English account of the western coast in 1814 described the same wafer of black-gram flour 'highly seasoned with assa-foetida'. The papad has kept its asafoetida, and it is the dish on this point. Gujarati cooking still begins with the vaghar, mustard seed and asafoetida in hot oil.
The record does not say by which road the resin reached Gujarat in Orta's time, overland from Afghanistan or by sea from the Persian Gulf, where Kaempfer saw it gathered; the path is drawn from its desert homeland on that evidence.
The road from Kabul brought asafoetida to the Mughal heartland, and by the late sixteenth century it was a bulk commodity at Agra. In 1586 the English merchant Ralph Fitch left Agra for Bengal 'in the companie of one hundred and four score Boates, laden with Salt, Opium, Hinge, Lead, Carpets, and divers other commodities down the River Jemena'. A few years later the Ain-i-Akbari, the record of the emperor Akbar's household, set down the recipes of his kitchen, and two of its meatless dishes call for asafoetida: a dish of aubergine, and pahit, a dal dressed with ghee, fresh ginger, cumin, and asafoetida and eaten with plain rice.
The Doab, the land between the Ganges and the Jumna, has kept the taste. A breakfast of Mathura and the Braj country is kachori and aloo, a crisp pastry stuffed with black gram and asafoetida eaten with potatoes in a thin gravy perfumed with it, and potatoes fried with cumin and asafoetida are an everyday dish of north Indian homes. Madhur Jaffrey, who grew up in Delhi and went to London in 1955 to study drama, remembered sitting in the canteen over 'watery cabbage mess or transparent roast beef' whilst 'dreaming of hing jeere ki alu'. And some forty kilometres east of Mathura, Hathras has made itself the hing capital of India: for about a century its workshops have blended the imported resin into the compounded powder sold across the country, and in 2023 Hathras hing received a Geographical Indication.
Ralph Fitch's fleet of 1586, laden with salt, opium, and 'Hinge', was bound down the Jumna and the Ganges for Satgaon in Bengal, and Bengal has been receiving its asafoetida from the west ever since. In Calcutta it came to the door: through much of the twentieth century the Afghan pedlars called Kabuliwalas, familiar from Tagore's story of 1892, went from house to house selling dried fruit and hing.
Bengal uses asafoetida more sparingly than the west of India, and in a particular way. It goes into the plain dal of split black gram, biulir dal, with fennel and ginger, and into the vegetarian, onion-free cooking called niramish; and it gives its name to a fried bread that Kolkata's sweet shops sell all day, hinger kochuri, a soft puri of white flour stuffed with a paste of black gram and asafoetida and eaten with potato curry or cholar dal. It is the Bengali cousin of the crisp hing kachori of the Braj country, softer and thinner, and made like a luchi rather than a pastry.
Kashmir has two cuisines, and asafoetida is the mark that tells them apart. The Muslim cooking of the valley, the cooking of the wazwan, uses onions, shallots, and garlic; the cooking of the Kashmiri Pandits, the valley's Hindu Brahmins, does not, and uses asafoetida instead. Walter Lawrence, the settlement commissioner who wrote The Valley of Kashmir in 1895, found it odd that the Hindus of Kashmir should avoid tomatoes, carrots, and red beans for their colour, and that 'onions and leeks are avoided on other grounds', noting that 'it is the more odd when it is remembered that they are flesh-eaters'. Lawrence does not mention the asafoetida, and the date on this point is his record of the allium-free meat kitchen in which it does its work; the Pandits' own cookbooks put it plainly: 'Pandits use Asafoetida (Hing) instead of Onions, Garlic or Shallots.'
With dried ginger and a great deal of ground fennel, asafoetida is the foundation of the Pandit gravies. It replaces the garlic in their dum aloo, and it seasons their rogan josh, the lamb braised red with Kashmiri chilli in yoghurt, where the Muslim version of the same dish relies on onion and shallot. Many Pandit families have since admitted onion and garlic, but the asafoetida has stayed. How it first reached the valley the record does not say; Kashmir traded for centuries over the passes with Afghanistan and Central Asia, where the resin is gathered, and the path is drawn from there on that evidence.
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