Sesamum indicum (syn. Sesamum orientale); wild progenitor Sesamum mulayanum
Origin: Indian subcontinent: the Harappan civilisation of the Indus Valley and peninsular India (modern Pakistan and India)
Sesame (Sesamum indicum) was domesticated on the Indian subcontinent from the wild progenitor Sesamum mulayanum, a species of peninsular India to which the cultivated plant is most closely related in form and in chromosome number, and the match is close enough that some botanists treat the wild plant as no more than the uncultivated race of the crop itself. Charred sesame seeds recovered from the Harappan city of Harappa, in a stratum dated to roughly 3500 BCE, are amongst the earliest cultivated sesame found anywhere, and the seed was firmly established across the Indus Valley, and traded west by sea, before the third millennium BCE was out. The botanical puzzle is that the great majority of the genus Sesamum, some three dozen wild species, grows not in Asia but in sub-Saharan Africa, which long tempted scholars to look there for the crop's origin; it was the patient botanical and archaeological work of Dorothea Bedigian, weighing the seed evidence against the distribution of the closest wild relatives, that placed the domestication of cultivated sesame squarely in India, from which it then travelled both west into the ancient Near East and east along the Silk Road.
Sesame is, by most reckonings, the world's first cultivated oilseed, a plant prized from the very beginning not for a grain to be milled or a fruit to be eaten fresh but for the rich, stable oil pressed from its tiny flat seeds. That oil keeps remarkably well in the heat, resisting the rancidity that quickly spoils animal fat, and in a hot climate before refrigeration this was a quality beyond price; it is the reason sesame became the everyday cooking fat and lamp oil of Mesopotamia and the lasting oilseed of the tropics. The plant itself is an erect annual of the dryland farm, drought-hardy and forgiving, bearing foxglove-like flowers that give way to seed capsules which split open with an audible snap when ripe, scattering the seed, a habit that demands careful timing at harvest and that folklore long tied to the magic password 'Open Sesame'. The seed coat varies in colour from the pale ivory and gold of the hulled Middle Eastern seed, through the natural brown of the unhulled grain, to the black sesame revered across East Asia, but these are colour cultivars of one species, S. indicum, not separate plants, the differences of hue carrying real differences of flavour and of culinary use rather than of botany.
Few seeds have travelled so far or settled so deeply into so many distinct cuisines as sesame, which spread out of its Indian homeland in the Bronze Age and has since become a true staple on three continents. The earliest journey was westward by sea and overland into Mesopotamia, where sesame became the great oilseed of Sumer, Akkad, and Babylon, pressed for cooking, for medicine, for anointing, and for the lamps of the temples; cuneiform tablets record it under the name šamaššammu, and the Greek historian Herodotus, writing centuries later, reported that sesame was the only oil the Babylonians used. From Mesopotamia it passed into pharaonic Egypt, where it was grown along the Nile and ground into the sesame pastes ancestral to tahini, and into the classical Greek world, where the seed was pounded with honey into the cake the Greeks called sēsamis, eaten at weddings as an emblem of fertility and carried by soldiers and athletes as concentrated nourishment, a sweet that survives almost unchanged as the pasteli of modern Greece.
Eastward, sesame travelled the Silk Road into Han China, where its foreign provenance was fixed forever in its old name 胡麻 (húmá, 'Hu hemp'), the Hu being the western peoples through whom it came, and tradition crediting its introduction to the envoy Zhang Qian. The Chinese made the toasted seed and its dark, intensely fragrant oil central to their cooking, drizzled at the last moment for aroma and ground into the sesame paste of the dan dan noodle, and they raised black sesame into an ingredient with a sweet culinary world of its own. From China the seed and its oil passed onward into Korea and Japan, which toasted, ground, and pressed it into the very foundations of their seasoning, in the goma-ae dressings and the sesame oil that perfume countless dishes.
The African and Atlantic journey ran in the opposite direction. Carried south up the Nile into Nubia and the Sudan, and then west along the Sahel into the kingdoms of West Africa, sesame became benniseed, one of the few oil crops able to thrive in the short rains of the savanna, ground into the rich beniseed soups of the Hausa and pressed for cooking oil. From West Africa it crossed the Atlantic in the most terrible of all migrations: enslaved West Africans carried the seed they called benne, planting it for food and for the good fortune it was held to bring, and it took root in the Gullah Geechee Lowcountry of the American South as the benne wafer of Charleston and in the brittle confectionery of the Caribbean. Spanish ships carried it from the Old World to Mexico, where, under the Arabic-derived name ajonjolí, it became inseparable from mole, ground into the long-simmered sauces of Puebla and Oaxaca. And in the Arab, Persian, and Ottoman worlds the ground seed reached its highest refinement of all, as the smooth tahini at the heart of hummus and as the sugar-boiled sesame halva that travelled the Balkans and crossed, with Jewish emigrants, to America. From a single dryland crop of the Indus, sesame had reached into very nearly every kitchen on earth.
Sesame is the great connective seed of world cooking, present across three continents not as a mere garnish but as a true staple, a seasoning, an oil, and a sweet, and it carries this weight in cuisines that have otherwise almost nothing in common. In the Middle East and the Levant it is ground into tahini, the smooth, pourable seed butter that is the soul of hummus and baba ganoush, the dressing thinned with lemon and garlic for falafel and fish, and the binder of the za'atar spread on flatbread for breakfast, whilst boiled with sugar it becomes the dense, flaky halva of every market. Across East Asia its toasted oil seasons more dishes than any other single fat, the final fragrant drizzle over noodles, soups, and stir-fries, and black sesame fills the dumplings, flavours the ices, and sweetens the pastes of China, Korea, and Japan.
In India it gives the cold-pressed gingelly oil that is the defining cooking fat of the Tamil south, and the til sweets bound with jaggery that mark the winter-solstice festival of Makar Sankranti; in Persia it is the breakfast paste ardeh swirled with grape syrup; in West Africa it is the beniseed soup and porridge of the savanna; in Burma it is a primary cooking oil and the seasoning of the sticky rice and the tea-leaf salad; and in the American South it survives as the benne wafer of Charleston, a living thread back to West Africa. Above all it crowns the world's breads, from the seed-encrusted Turkish simit and the bagel to the everyday burger bun, the most familiar use of all and the one by which most people in the West know the seed at all.
The modern cultivation of sesame is led by Sudan, Myanmar, India, Tanzania, and Nigeria, much of it still hand-harvested on smallholdings because the seed capsules ripen unevenly and shatter when dry, a stubborn agronomic difficulty that has resisted full mechanisation. Surging global demand for tahini, driven by the worldwide spread of Levantine and Mediterranean eating, and for toasted sesame oil has carried the seed and its products far beyond any of its historic homes, and the recognition of sesame as a major food allergen has, in turn, made it one of the few seeds whose presence the labelling laws of many countries now require to be declared.
Historical Journey of Sesame
Harappa, Indus Valley (modern Pakistan) — c. 3500 BCE
Sesame was domesticated on the Indian subcontinent from the wild Sesamum mulayanum, the closest relative of the cultivated crop in both form and chromosome number, and the charred seeds recovered from the Harappan city of Harappa, in a stratum dated to roughly 3500 BCE, place it amongst the earliest cultivated oilseeds found anywhere in the world. The farmers of the Indus Valley grew it above all for the oil pressed from its tiny flat seeds, a fat that resisted the rancidity which spoiled animal fat in the heat and which could therefore be stored, traded, and burned in lamps as well as eaten, a quality beyond price in a climate without refrigeration. The seed established itself swiftly across the Punjab and the Indus plain, and was already being carried west by sea, to the lands the Sumerians called Meluhha, before the third millennium was out. The legacy of this north-western cradle endures most vividly in the winter sweets of the region, where the toasted seed is bound with boiled sugar and jaggery into reori, the small, crunchy, sugar-coated sesame nuggets still made from Lahore to Multan and eaten at the festivals of Lohri and Basant that mark the turning of the cold season. It was the painstaking botanical and archaeological work of Dorothea Bedigian, weighing the seed evidence against the distribution of the wild relatives, that fixed this Indus origin against the older temptation to look to Africa; from here sesame spread south into peninsular India and west into Mesopotamia, beginning the journeys that would carry it across the world.
Babylon, Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) — c. 2400 BCE
Sesame reached Mesopotamia through the long sea trade between the Indus Valley and the head of the Persian Gulf, the commerce with the land the Sumerians called Meluhha, and on the alluvial plain of the Tigris and the Euphrates it became the single great oilseed of Sumer, Akkad, and Babylon. The cuneiform tablets of the temple economies record it under the name šamaššammu, the 'oil plant', and account for its pressed oil with bureaucratic care, the finest grade known as ellu, used for cooking and frying, for the anointing of bodies and of kings, for medicine, and for the lamps that burned before the gods in the temples; centuries afterwards the Greek historian Herodotus, looking back on Babylonia, reported that sesame was the only oil its people used. The seed was eaten as well as pressed, and the Mesopotamian kitchen pounded and pressed it with the other sweet keeping foods of the irrigated land, the dried fig and the thick date syrup called dibs, into dense, portable cakes that could be stored and carried and shared. This Mesopotamian fig and sesame cake, a confection of pressed dried figs studded with toasted sesame and bound with date syrup, is the earliest documented sesame sweet of the ancient world and the distant ancestor of every halva that would follow it, from the seed paste boiled with sugar in the Ottoman markets to the brittle sweets of the Sahel and the Caribbean. From Babylon the seed travelled onward into Egypt, into Persia, and, with the caravans, towards the classical Greek world.
Thebes, Egypt — c. 1500 BCE
By the New Kingdom sesame was firmly established along the Nile, grown for the oil pressed from its seed and for the seed itself, depicted in the tomb paintings of Thebes amongst the offerings of the harvest and prescribed in the medical papyri for ailments of the body and as a base for ointments. The Egyptian kitchen toasted and ground the seed, and from this ancient habit descend two living traditions of the modern Egyptian table. Dukkah, the dry blend of toasted sesame pounded with hazelnut or chickpea, coriander, cumin, and salt into which warm bread is dipped after it has been dragged through olive oil, preserves the old technique of grinding the seed with nuts and spice into a fragrant, crumbly meal. And the Egyptian cook's way of loosening pounded sesame paste with lemon juice and water to dress raw vegetables survives in dishes such as fugl salat, the salad of crisp radishes cut into the sharp, nutty tahini sauce with lemon and fresh herbs, the direct ancestor of the tahini dressings that thread through the cooking of the whole region. From its hold on the Nile sesame moved outward in three directions that would each become a great branch of its history: west along the North African coast towards the Maghreb, south up the river into Nubia and the Sahel, and across the eastern Mediterranean into the markets and kitchens of classical Greece.
The Deccan and Tamil South, Peninsular India — c. 1000 BCE
Carried south from the Indus into the peninsula, sesame became one of the oldest and most cherished seeds of Indian cooking, woven into ritual and diet alike and known across the languages as til, from the Sanskrit tila, with its cold-pressed oil called gingelly from the Tamil and the Dravidian south. In Maharashtra and the western Deccan the toasted seed is bound with melted jaggery into the small round sweets of tilgul laddu, exchanged hand to hand at the winter-solstice festival of Makar Sankranti with the words til-gul ghya, god god bola, 'take this sesame and jaggery, and speak sweetly', a sweet that carries the warming, auspicious charge the season demands. In the Tamil south, cold-pressed gingelly oil (nallennai) is the defining cooking fat of the region, golden and faintly nutty, the medium that carries the tempered, sesame-strewn ellu sadam, the rice tossed with toasted seed and dal, and the dark, sour poondu kuzhambu, the garlic and tamarind gravy simmered in gingelly oil that is eaten with rice across Tamil Nadu. Across the dryland Deccan the seed is also dry-roasted and pounded with garlic and chilli into the pungent powdered chutneys eaten with the millet flatbread jowar bhakri, the staple of the rain-fed plateau. Sesame is so deeply embedded in the diet, the medicine, and the festival calendar of the subcontinent that India, with its neighbours, remains amongst the largest growers of the seed in the world.
Athens, Greece — c. 400 BCE
Sesame was thoroughly familiar to the classical Greeks, who called the seed sēsamon, a name already recorded in the Mycenaean Linear B tablets as sa-sa-ma and borrowed, ultimately, from the Semitic East. In the markets of Athens the seed was sold loose and worked into sēsamis, the pressed cake of sesame pounded with honey that survives almost wholly unchanged as the pasteli of modern Greece, a slab of toasted seed bound in caramelised honey and cut into bars. These sesame-and-honey cakes carried a weight of meaning beyond mere sweetness: they were eaten at weddings as emblems of fertility and plenty, the many seeds standing for many children, and they were given to soldiers and athletes as dense, durable, energy-rich nourishment that would keep for the march or the games. Both the comic poets, who joked of sesame cakes on the festal table, and the physicians, who weighed the seed's heating and nourishing properties, mention it freely, a sure sign of how ordinary it had become. From the Greek world the love of the sesame-and-honey bar passed outward into the wider Mediterranean and the Near East, where it met the older pressed-fig-and-sesame confections of Mesopotamia and, centuries afterwards, the Arab art of boiling the ground seed with sugar into halva, the long line of sesame sweets running unbroken from the Athenian market stall to the modern Greek pasteli sold at every roadside fair.
Chang'an, Han China — c. 100 BCE
Sesame travelled the Silk Road into Han China, and the memory of its foreign arrival was fixed forever in its old name, 胡麻 (húmá), 'Hu hemp', the Hu being the peoples of the western regions through whom the seed had come; tradition credits its introduction to the great envoy Zhang Qian, who opened the routes to the west under the Emperor Wu. The Chinese made the toasted seed and its dark, intensely fragrant pressed oil central to their cooking, but in a manner all their own: the oil is added not for frying but at the very last moment, drizzled over noodles, congee, and finished stir-fries for its aroma alone rather than for heat, a perfuming touch unlike any use in the West. Ground into a thick, smoky paste, the seed gives the dan dan mian of Sichuan, the chilli-slicked noodles whose sesame depth balances their numbing heat, its body, and dresses the cool pai huang gua, the smashed cucumber tossed in garlic, vinegar, and sesame. Black sesame became a prized ingredient in its own right, regarded as nourishing and warming and ground into sweet, dark fillings: it stuffs the glutinous hei zhima tangyuan, the soft rice balls floated in hot syrup at the Lantern Festival and the winter solstice, and it fills the hollow, sesame-crusted jian dui, the deep-fried balls of glutinous dough that puff and crackle in the oil and stand amongst the best-loved of the southern dim sum.
Khartoum and the Middle Nile, Sudan — c. 350 CE
Sesame travelled south from Egypt up the course of the Nile into Nubia, where it was grown in the kingdoms of Kush and Meroë whose pyramids still stand along the Middle Nile, and over the long centuries this stretch of river became one of the great sesame lands of the world, a pre-eminence that endures, for Sudan remains to this day amongst the very largest producers and exporters of the seed on earth. Pressed sesame oil (sayt al-simsim) is the everyday cooking fat of the Sudanese kitchen, used where other regions reach for animal fat or olive oil, and the seed is boiled with sugar into the dense slab sweet halawa sold in every market. Above all the ground seed becomes tahini, and from it the Sudanese cook makes salata tahniyya, the tahini salad thinned with lime juice and water, sharpened with garlic, and very often blended with pounded groundnut to give it body and depth, set beside the simmered fava beans of ful and torn flatbread at almost every meal of the day. It is along this same Middle Nile, and out from the trading towns that grew where the river met the grasslands, that sesame was carried westward along the whole length of the Sahel into the kingdoms of West Africa, the next great stage of its African journey.
Seoul, Korea — c. 600 CE
Carried onward from China across the short sea, sesame became one of the defining flavours of the Korean kitchen, so woven into its grammar that few dishes are finished without it. Toasted sesame oil (chamgireum), pressed dark and fragrant, and toasted, lightly crushed sesame seeds (kkae) season almost every banchan, marinade, and bowl of rice on the Korean table, lending the warm, nutty roundness that underlies the cuisine. The seed and its oil perfume bulgogi, the thin slices of beef steeped in a marinade of soy, sugar, garlic, pear, sesame oil, and toasted seed before they are grilled, and they enrich the dipping sauces of the barbecue table, dress the seasoned vegetable namul, and finish the kimchi. Boiled and ground, black sesame becomes the smooth, restorative porridge kkaejuk, eaten as a gentle, strengthening food. Korea also turns the seed into confectionery, frying and binding it with boiled grain syrup into kkae gangjeong, the brittle, lacquered slabs of the gangjeong family of sweets that are cut into neat bars and eaten especially at the lunar New Year and the other festivals of the year, when trays of glossy seed and puffed-grain brittle are set out for guests. From Korea the seed and its toasted oil passed onward across the strait to Japan, where they would be taken to an even finer refinement.
Kyoto, Japan — c. 800 CE
Sesame, known in Japan as goma, became essential to both the everyday and the temple kitchen, prized for the depth of flavour released when the seed is freshly toasted and ground. The Japanese cook grinds white or black sesame in the ridged earthenware mortar called a suribachi, releasing its oils into a fragrant paste, and from this comes goma-ae, the dressing of ground toasted seed, soy, and a little sugar in which blanched green vegetables are tossed: ingen no goma-ae, runner or green beans bound in the sweet, nutty sesame dressing, is amongst the most beloved of these small side dishes. The same toasted seed is scattered over rice and salads and worked into countless seasonings. In the Buddhist shojin cuisine of the temples, where no animal food is permitted, the monks of Mount Koya raised sesame to its highest art in goma-dofu, the silken, eggless 'tofu' made by setting patiently ground sesame with kudzu starch into a quivering, ivory block of pure seed, served with a dab of wasabi and a little soy. Black sesame (kurogoma), with its deeper, almost bitter fragrance, flavours the sweets, ice creams, and broths of the modern Japanese table, and Japan has embraced the Sichuan sesame-and-chilli noodle as its own richer, creamier tantanmen, the bowl of springy noodles in a sesame-thickened soup that is now a fixture of the ramen shop.
Isfahan, Persia (Iran) — c. 900 CE
Sesame was ancient on the Iranian plateau, traded west from the Indus and north from Mesopotamia since the days of the great empires, and in the Persian kitchen the ground seed became ardeh, the Persian tahini, smooth and pale and pourable. From it comes one of the most enduring of all Persian breakfasts, ardeh-o-shireh, the sesame paste swirled together at the table with shireh, the thick reduced syrup of grape or date, until the two marble into a sweet, nutty, restorative spread that is scooped up with torn pieces of warm barbari bread on a cold morning, a humble dish beloved across every class of Iranian society. The Persian cook also boils ardeh with sugar into the dense, flaky halva ardeh, scatters the whole toasted seed over the great oven flatbreads barbari and sangak so that it crackles and perfumes the crust, and presses the seed for its keeping oil. Threading through the sweets, the breads, and the breakfast tables of Persia, sesame passed from here into the wider Islamic world that Persian taste and learning did so much to shape, carried by trade and conquest towards the Levant, the Maghreb, and beyond.
Kano, Hausaland (northern Nigeria) — c. 1000 CE
Carried south up the Nile into Nubia and then west along the whole length of the Sahel, sesame became benniseed, a staple of the dryland farming of West Africa and one of the very few oil crops hardy enough to thrive on the short, uncertain rains of the savanna, where it could be grown by smallholders on poor soil without irrigation. In the Hausa kingdoms of the Sahel, of which Kano was the great walled trading city, the seed is ridi, dry-roasted and ground into the rich, thick beniseed soup miyan ridi, dark and deeply nutty, eaten across Hausaland with the stiff pounded-grain porridge tuwo into which the diner dips fingerfuls of the sauce. The seed is pressed for cooking oil and, across the Sahel and the Sudan more broadly, roasted into snacks and worked into porridges and relishes. Sesame here carried more than its food value, for the benne plant was held to bring good fortune and to ward off evil, and it was grown deliberately at the edges of fields and gardens for the luck it conferred. This belief in the seed as a plant of good fortune would cross the Atlantic with the people who carried it, surviving the most terrible of migrations to take root in the gardens of the enslaved in the Americas.
Mandalay, Upper Burma (Myanmar) — c. 1100 CE
In Burma, and above all in the dry zone of Upper Burma around Mandalay where the crop grows readily, sesame and its oil became foundations of the kitchen in a way matched in few other countries. Cold-pressed sesame oil (hnan zi) is a primary cooking fat of the Burmese table, fragrant and golden, poured generously into curries and salads where other cuisines might use a neutral oil, and the toasted seed is everywhere besides. It is stirred through lahpet thoke, the celebrated fermented tea-leaf salad in which the soft, tart pickled leaves are tossed with crisp fried beans, peanuts, toasted sesame, garlic, and a slick of sesame oil into the dish that is the very emblem of Burmese hospitality, served to mark welcome, friendship, and the settling of disputes. The seed is ground with salt and scattered over the sticky rice eaten for breakfast across the upland country, and it perfumes hsi htamin, the sesame-oil sticky rice pressed into rounds and sold warm from the morning stalls of Mandalay, dusted with toasted seed and fried onion. Myanmar grows the seed in great quantity, on smallholdings across the central plain, and stands amongst the largest sesame producers in the world.
Damascus, Syria (the Levant) — c. 1200 CE
In the medieval Arab kitchen, and nowhere more than in the great city of Damascus, the ground seed reached its highest refinement as tahini (ṭaḥīna), the smooth, pourable paste of hulled, toasted sesame milled to a cream, and the thirteenth-century Arabic cookbooks of Syria and Egypt record it already at the heart of the sauces and sweets that still define the Levantine table. Tahini became the very soul of the region's cooking: whisked with lemon, garlic, and the pulped chickpea it makes hummus bi tahini, and folded into smoke-charred aubergine it makes baba ganoush, the two dips by which the cuisine is known across the world. Thinned with lemon and garlic it becomes the sauce poured over fish and falafel; pounded with a great deal of parsley it becomes the green bakdounsiyeh; and boiled with sugar or grape syrup it is whipped and pulled into halawa tahiniyya, the dense, flaky sesame halva sold in slabs in every market from Aleppo to Beirut. The toasted whole seed is pounded with dried wild thyme and sour red sumac into za'atar, the seasoning scattered on oil-brushed flatbread for the everyday Levantine breakfast, and it crowns the sweets of the season, as in roasted figs with wild honey and sesame, where the toasted seed gilds the caramelised fruit and binds the dish to the most ancient of all sesame confections. From this Levantine refinement the paste and its sweets passed onward to Anatolia and the Ottoman world.
Hanoi, Vietnam — c. 1300 CE
Sesame, called vừng in the north around Hanoi and mè in the south, settled into the everyday Vietnamese kitchen as a humble but indispensable seasoning. Toasted until golden and pounded coarsely with salt and roasted peanuts, it becomes muối vừng, the country's great seed-and-salt condiment, a fragrant, savoury dust kept in a jar in every kitchen and scattered generously over the steamed glutinous rice xôi that is eaten for breakfast across the north and packed up as travelling and working food, much as furikake serves the Japanese table. The combination of xôi with muối vừng, the soft warm sticky rice against the salty, nutty crunch of the seed, is one of the most beloved everyday foods of Vietnam, sold from baskets on every morning street. The whole seed coats the chewy, hollow fried dough balls bánh rán, crackling as they fry, and in the old imperial city of Hue the seed is cooked with sugar and malt and pulled by hand into mè xửng, the soft, chewy sesame candy that is the city's most famous sweet and a favourite gift carried home by travellers. From the breakfast rice to the festival sweet, sesame threads quietly through the whole of the Vietnamese day.
Fez, Morocco — c. 1300 CE
Sesame was woven through the baking and confectionery of the Maghreb, carried west along the North African coast from Egypt over many centuries and enriched, in the great cities of Morocco such as Fez, by the refined cooks of the Andalusi world who crossed from Moorish Spain and brought with them the sophisticated sweet-making of al-Andalus. The toasted seed crowns the round semolina-and-wheat khobz, the daily bread baked or sent to the communal oven in every Moroccan medina, sprinkled over the loaf before baking so that it toasts to fragrance on the crust. It studs the honey-soaked, flower-shaped fritters of chebakia, fried in their thousands during Ramadan and dunked in honey before being rolled in sesame, eaten to break the fast alongside harira soup. And it is toasted and ground together with almonds and slowly browned flour, bound with honey and oil and warmed with cinnamon and anise, into sellou (also called sfouf), the dense, crumbly, intensely nourishing sweet that is pressed into bowls and kept for new mothers regaining their strength and for the breaking of the Ramadan fast. From the Maghreb and Moorish Spain, this deep habit of sesame in the bread and the sweets of the table would cross the Atlantic with the Spanish to the New World.
Istanbul, Ottoman Empire — c. 1525 CE
From its capital on the Bosphorus the Ottoman Empire spread the sesame seed and its paste across the three continents it straddled, drawing the older Levantine, Persian, and Balkan sesame traditions into a single imperial cuisine. The sesame-crusted bread ring simit was sold in the streets of Istanbul from at least 1525, the records of the city noting it by name: a ring of dough dipped in diluted grape molasses, which both sweetens the crust and helps the seed to cling, then rolled thickly in sesame and baked to a deep, glossy, nutty brown, and it became, as it remains, the defining street food of the city, carried through the crowds on trays and poles. The kitchens of the palace gave sesame an exalted place, and Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent kept a dedicated Helvahane, a 'house of halva', amongst the imperial kitchens, where confectioners boiled the ground seed with sugar into the tahini halva that travelled out through the Balkans and was carried, in time, by Jewish emigrants from the Ottoman lands all the way to America. Tahini ran through the wider Ottoman sweet kitchen besides: it pools, rich and bittersweet, beneath the glistening candied pumpkin of kabak tatlısı, served with crushed walnut, and it binds the walnut paste stuffed into dried figs for İncir dolması, the sesame seed and the seed paste together gilding the sweets of the Ottoman table.
Oaxaca, New Spain (Mexico) — c. 1600 CE
Spanish ships carried sesame across the Atlantic to New Spain, bringing with the seed its Arabic-derived name, ajonjolí from the juljulān of the Moors, a small linguistic monument to the seed's long passage through Andalusia and the Maghreb. In the kitchens of central and southern Mexico, and above all in the mole country of Puebla and Oaxaca, the toasted seed took root as though it had always belonged there. It became inseparable from mole, the great festival sauces ground from chillies, spices, nuts, seeds, and a little chocolate and simmered for hours: toasted sesame is ground into the body of mole poblano, lending its richness and nutty depth, and the whole toasted seed is showered over the finished dish, the pale scattering against the dark sauce its very signature on the plate. Sesame also tops the anise-scented sweet breads and the seeded rolls of the Mexican panadería, the pan dulce eaten with coffee or chocolate at almost every hour. The seed settled so deeply into the regional cooking that ajonjolí is now grown across the Pacific lowlands of Mexico and treated as a native flavour, indispensable to the festive table of a country far from its Old World homes.
Charleston, South Carolina (American South) — c. 1700 CE
Enslaved West Africans carried sesame across the Atlantic in the holds of the slave ships as benne, the Mande name travelling with the seed, and they planted it in their own garden plots both for food and for the good fortune the plant was held to bring, a belief brought intact from the Sahel; by the early eighteenth century it was growing across the Carolina Lowcountry around Charleston. In the Gullah Geechee kitchen the toasted seed became the benne wafer, the thin, crisp, intensely nutty little biscuit, sometimes sweet and sometimes savoury, that is the great surviving emblem of Charleston's African-rooted cooking, as well as benne brittle, the seed set in caramelised sugar, and the silky thickening of benne soup, in which pounded toasted seed enriches a broth in the manner of the West African beniseed soups from which it descends. The earliest published American recipe for a sesame dish appears in Sarah Rutledge's The Carolina Housewife of 1847, a written record of a tradition already old in the Lowcountry by then. Benne remains one of the clearest and most moving surviving threads binding the cooking of the American South to West Africa, a seed planted for luck that outlived bondage to become a treasured regional taste.
Port-au-Prince, Haiti (the Caribbean) — c. 1750 CE
The same terrible Atlantic crossing that planted benne in the Carolinas carried sesame throughout the Caribbean, where enslaved and free Africans made the toasted seed a fixture of the islands' confectionery, sweetened by the cane sugar that the same plantations produced in such cruel abundance. In Haiti, around Port-au-Prince and across the island, the seed is bound with boiled cane sugar and groundnuts into tablèt, the brittle, glassy slabs of caramelised sugar dense with seed and nut that are cut into pieces and sold from trays and baskets at the roadside, the most characteristic of all Haitian street sweets; the tablettes carry the African seed, the New World sugar, and the French name of the colony all at once. In Jamaica the same seed is wangla, a name carried directly from a West African word for sesame, cooked down with sugar and ginger into the chewy 'wangla drops' or 'wangla cakes' of the island's old-time sweet sellers. The seed remains a small but tenacious staple of Caribbean street confectionery, another living memory, like the benne of Charleston, of the West African plant from which it all descends and of the people who carried it across the ocean.
Taiwan — c. 1950 CE
Toasted sesame oil is one of the defining fats of the Taiwanese kitchen, carried across the strait over the centuries by Fujianese settlers and then in great force by the post-war migration of 1949, and naturalised so completely that it has become wholly Taiwanese. It is the very soul of mayou ji (麻油雞, sesame oil chicken), the deeply restorative winter dish in which chicken is simmered with a great quantity of sliced ginger, rice wine, and dark, toasted sesame oil until the broth turns fragrant and warming, a dish pressed in particular upon new mothers during the month of confinement to rebuild their strength. And it is the first and most important of the three cups that name san bei ji (三杯雞, 'three-cup chicken'), the island's most beloved dish, in which chicken is braised with whole garlic cloves and ginger in equal cupfuls of toasted sesame oil, soy sauce, and rice wine until the sauce reduces to a glossy, intense glaze, then finished off the heat with a great fragrant handful of Thai basil thrown in to wilt. Sesame, the toasted seed and the dark pressed oil alike, runs through the snacks, the sweets, the brittle candies, and the warming medicinal tonics of Taiwan, the easternmost staging post of a journey that began on the dryland farms of the ancient Indus.
