The Gastrographer
Mapping Culinary History
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Journey Point Map Key
Chickpea
Cicer arietinum
🌍Origin
Karacadağ, Southeast Turkey — c. 7500 BCE
🌱Domestication
The chickpea, Cicer arietinum, was taken into cultivation from its wild progenitor Cicer reticulatum in the foothills of the Karacadağ mountains of southeastern Turkey, and its origin is amongst the most precisely localised of any major crop plant on earth. Whereas many cultivated species were domesticated independently several times over in different regions, the genetic and archaeological evidence for the chickpea points instead to a single domestication event in this one specific corner of the upper Fertile Crescent, the same volcanic massif from whose slopes the first cultivated einkorn wheat has also been traced. The Neolithic settlements of the region, at Çayönü and Nevali Çori amongst others, have yielded domesticated chickpea remains dating to approximately 7500 BCE, placing the plant amongst the founder crops of Old World agriculture, the small handful of cereals and pulses upon which the whole Neolithic revolution of the Near East was built. The advantages that recommended the chickpea to those first farmers were immediate and lasting, and they explain why so unassuming a seed should have travelled so far and embedded itself so deeply. Dried, the chickpea will keep for years without spoiling, a dense and portable store of nourishment against the lean season and a provision that could be carried on a journey or a campaign. It is, weight for weight, amongst the most nutritionally complete of all the pulses, exceptionally rich in protein and in the slow-burning starches that sustain hard labour, and it can be ground into a fine, keeping flour of remarkable versatility or soaked overnight and cooked tender within a couple of hours. Like all the legumes it carries, in the nodules of its roots, the bacteria that fix atmospheric nitrogen into the soil, so that a crop of chickpeas leaves the ground richer than it found it and feeds whatever is sown after it. Two great cultivated forms diverged from this single origin over the millennia of the plant's spread, and they divide the chickpea world to this day. The older type is the desi chickpea, small, angular, dark-coated, and rough, the ancestral form that remained dominant across India, Pakistan, Iran, and Ethiopia and that lends itself to splitting into dal and grinding into flour. The later type is the kabuli chickpea, larger, paler, rounder, and smooth-skinned, a mutation associated with the Kabul region and Afghanistan and named for it, which spread westward to become the standard chickpea of the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern kitchen, the bean of hummus, of the cocido, and of the Greek baked pot. One plant, one origin, two forms, and between them the foundation of the pulse cookery of half the world.
⛵Global Voyage
From its single origin in the Karacadağ foothills, the chickpea spread outward through the Fertile Crescent with the first farmers, and its progress can be tracked through the written and excavated record of the earliest civilisations. It appears in the botanical record of Mesopotamia and in the cuneiform tablets of the Tigris and Euphrates valley by around 5000 BCE, amongst the provisions of New Kingdom Egypt and at Predynastic Nile sites by the fourth millennium, and across the breadth of the Indian subcontinent, at the great cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation, by about 3000 BCE, carried east along the overland trade routes that linked the Near East to the plains of the Indus. Wherever it went, the chickpea's keeping qualities and its nitrogen-fixing generosity to the soil recommended it, and it settled into the agriculture of each region it reached. Along the way the plant diverged into the two great forms that still divide the chickpea world. The desi chickpea, small, dark, angular, and rough-coated, is the older and ancestral type, and it remained dominant across the eastern range of the plant's spread, in India, Pakistan, Iran, and the highlands of Ethiopia, where it is split into dal and ground into flour. The kabuli chickpea, larger, paler, rounder, and smooth-skinned, is a later mutation associated with Afghanistan and the region of Kabul that gives it its name, and it travelled westward to become the standard chickpea of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking, the bean that the Greeks baked, the Romans milled into farinata flour, the Arabs ground into hummus, and the Spanish stewed into cocido. The spread of the chickpea westward was accomplished above all by two great waves of cultural transmission. The classical world carried it around the Mediterranean: the Greeks ate it roasted in the street and slow-baked in the village oven, and the Romans stamped it into their language and milled it into a chickpea flour whose tradition survives in the farinata of Liguria. The Arab expansion of the medieval centuries then carried it further and bound it more deeply into the cuisines of an enormous arc, westward across North Africa to the harira of Morocco and onward into Spain as the garbanzo, and into the refined kitchens of the Levant where it crystallised into hummus bi tahini and falafel. From Spain it crossed the Atlantic with the colonial agricultural complex into the highland stewing pots of the Andes, and from India the long arm of the indenture trade carried it across the Indian Ocean to the Natal coast of South Africa. Today India alone grows some 65 to 70 percent of the world's chickpeas, yet the bean is fundamental to the cooking of the entire band of the globe that runs from Morocco to Myanmar, the most widely beloved pulse of half the human race.
🍽Modern Culinary Role
The chickpea is the world's third most important pulse crop, after the dry bean and the dry pea, and amongst the major legumes it is the most protein-dense of all, a distinction that has only grown in significance as the world has turned, for reasons of health, economy, and climate, towards plant proteins. India dominates the harvest, growing the great majority of the global crop, with Australia, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Myanmar amongst the other leading producers, and the bean has lately found a vast new market in the West as the basis of supermarket hummus, of the roasted snack, and of the gluten-free chickpea flour. What sets the chickpea apart is the sheer breadth of the cuisines it anchors and the number of forms it takes. In South Asia it is the foundation of an entire culinary edifice: split into chana dal, whole as the dark kala chana and the spiced chana masala, and ground into besan, the chickpea flour that makes pakora, kadhi, bhatura, and a host of sweets. Across the Middle East and North Africa it is hummus and falafel in the Levant, the soup harira that breaks the Ramadan fast in Morocco, and the standard companion to couscous from Marrakech to Tunis. Around the northern Mediterranean it is the Ligurian farinata griddled from its flour, the Greek revithia slow-baked overnight in the village oven, and the garbanzo at the heart of the Spanish cocido. In the highlands of East Africa it is shiro and shimbra, ground and shaped to feed the long fasts of the Ethiopian Orthodox calendar. This versatility is the key to the chickpea's reach. It can be eaten whole or split, simmered soft or roasted hard, milled to a flour, sprouted, or shaped into a fritter, and in every form it carries a generous load of protein and substance. It is, by any reasonable reckoning, the most versatile pulse in the world's kitchen, a single ancient seed that serves as snack, soup, stew, sauce, bread, batter, and sweet across the breadth of three continents.