when the origins of hummus unleash passions – L’Express

Sad coincidence of history. It was ten years ago that Yotam Ottolenghi, the Israeli chef and global star of the kitchens with 10 million books sold worldwide, and the Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi published Jerusalem. This bestseller, which has sold more than 120,000 copies in France, celebrated the reconciliation of Middle Eastern flavors and the cuisine of European Jews in the heart of a city where they were both born. One to the west, the other to the east. In view of the tragic events in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, this humble attempt at gastronomic dialogue seems ridiculous today.

At the slightest spark, Oriental kitchens are won over again by what Gilles Deleuze called “sad passions”. Hatred, resentment and a strong feeling of powerlessness. A conflict whose solution seems, more than ever, out of reach. And the table, like other cultural vectors, once again becomes, to a much lesser extent, a battlefield. Recently, restaurants in the trendy Brooklyn neighborhood, where Jews and Arabs are used to living together, even report receiving “one-star” reviews simply for being Palestinian. Then it was a petition signed by 900 chefs, producers and other players in American “food” with the organization Hospitality for Humanity which ignited the powder by demanding a ceasefire, but also a boycott of the big brands or Israeli food products that have invaded our kitchens. Among the prestigious signatories: Helen Rosner, a famous gastronomic critic of the New YorkerSamin Nosrat, the chef and author of the best-seller Salt Fat Acid Heat adapted on Netflix, or even Reem Kassis.

This chef, columnist at New York Times and author of a reference work The Palestinian table, is a friend of Michael Solomonov, a successful Israeli chef. This owner of around twenty restaurants in the United States lost his military brother on Yom Kippur, shot dead by a sniper on the Lebanese border. Until recently, the two of them held joint conferences on culinary identity, cooked with “four hands” in their respective establishments… Until the terrorist attack of October 7 and the military operation of The IDF in Gaza brutally interrupt this gastronomic complicity born in Philadelphia. “Food diplomacy does not work and we cannot solve problems like the Israeli occupation of Palestine with a plate of hummus,” assures Reem Kassis.

The word is out. Again and again, hummus. In 2023, it remains the dish that unleashes passions in the Middle East regarding its origin. With, in the background, the very flammable question of cultural appropriation. Put an Israeli, a Lebanese, a Palestinian, a Greek, a Turkish, a Jordanian, a Syrian and an Egyptian around a table, and they will all be able to tell you that the hummus comes “from them”. But where was this comforting cream made from chickpeas, lemon juice, garlic and tahini (sesame cream) really born? Already, in the Banquet of Plato (around 380 BC), the chickpea is listed, reports Luciana Romeri in Kentron, the multidisciplinary journal of the ancient world. But the first traces of its culture date back to the 8th century BC in Mesopotamia, in the region of the Fertile Crescent, this immense area which goes from the Dead Sea to the Persian Gulf via the south of Turkey, the north of Iraq and Western Iran. Hummus, in its current form, did not arrive until much later, in the 15th century, in different regions of the Ottoman Empire.

Recently, the “hummus war” has taken an almost nationalist turn. Lebanon, whose cuisine is celebrated throughout the world, has refused to be robbed of its authorship. Never mind, setting records in the Guinness Book is a way to claim it in the eyes of the world. October 2009: 250 Lebanese cooks create the largest platter of hummus in the world, weighing almost 2 tonnes. January 2010, residents of the Arab Israeli town of Abu Gosh, near Jerusalem, replicated and prepared 4 tons of hummus. A few months later, a new record fell. 2000 kg of lemons and 700 kg of bottles of olive oil will be used to make more than 10 tonnes of this silky paste. It was at this time that the Association of Lebanese Industrialists launched a procedure to have it registered as national heritage. The government will even ask the EU to only recognize the name “hummus” for Lebanese products. The affair immediately sparked an outcry in Israel and other countries in the area. The Lebanese attempt was stillborn. If Israel has claimed a “biblical” origin for hummus, it is above all its hundreds of chefs – from London to Paris – who, by sublimating the emblematic paste of the Middle East, have been accused of appropriating it.

So can research help us see things more clearly? Again, there are only hypotheses. Middle Eastern historian Ari Ariel claims that the first traces of a “vinegar” hummus are found in cookbooks from Cairo in Egypt in the 13th century. For the great American food historian Charles Perry, expert in medieval Arab cuisine, the Lebanese origin of modern hummus cannot be excluded, particularly due to the presence in quantity of its delicious citrus fruits. But his main theory leans more towards Damascus. Hummus is traditionally served in a small red terracotta bowl, with a raised rim. The hummus can thus be whipped with a pestle, and it rises along this rim […] A sophisticated urban dish, not an ancient folkloric dish,” he says, suggesting that it was probably developed by Turkish rulers in the 18th century in the capital of present-day Syria. “It was the largest city in the region, with a sophisticated ruling class,” he argues at the BBC. But as is often the case, History perpetually comes up against “stories”, the culinary experience, in short, gastronomic pleasure. Have we never heard that it is on the Palestinian side that we find the best “houmoussiyas”, these restaurants entirely dedicated to hummus?

The Jewish state did not wait to know the origins of hummus to position itself on this huge market. The marriage of major Israeli industrial players to certain American behemoths – the hummus manufacturer Sabra which came under the fold of Pepsico in 2008 – has allowed it to have a head start in the very lucrative “spreads” sector. Like guacamole, consumed in astronomical quantities on the day of the Super Bowl in the United States, hummus, celebrated by vegetarians for its nutritional properties, has been elevated to the rank of an essential aperitif around the world. And this even if today there is danger ahead… Complicated climatic conditions, disruptions in supply chains as well as the war in Ukraine, of which both belligerents are producers, are creating tensions on the markets .

What if hummus’ worst enemy was hummus itself? Today, this ancestral paste is available in multiple versions with paprika, onions, basil, dill, olives, vegetables, or even dried tomatoes… Worse still: many countries, industrial and even renowned chefs are completely twisting the word “hummus” to make beet or zucchini pasta… which no longer contains a gram of chickpeas. A flagrant act of cultural misappropriation! In San Francisco, chef Beit Rima, who cooks “comforting Arab cuisine” in his establishment, sums up the eternal debates in New York Times : “If you’re appropriating our food, give us credit. If you say that Israeli cuisine is an eclectic cuisine that draws inspiration from the Jewish diaspora and local Palestinians, that’s more respectable. But appropriating our cooking and erasing our existence are two different things.”

Reem Kassis, The Palestinian tablePhaidon (2017)

Yotam Ottolenghi, SimpleHachette cuisine (2018)

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