You take chickpeas, hard and dry, and boil them until their skins loosen and they reveal themselves, tender little hulks with souls of butter. For much of human civilization, recipes were rarely written down, and of those that were, almost none have survived. You might recognize this as hummus. Notably absent from the recipe is garlic, despite its ubiquity in the cooking of the Arab world at the time. It’s not certain exactly when garlic was introduced to the dish: Nasrallah notes that there is no documentation of hummus recipes after the 14th century until the late 19th century.

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Persons: Nawal Nasrallah, It’s, Nasrallah, Frenchman, Spencer Merolla, —, Alexandria —, ” Zayan Organizations: JR Locations: United States, Mexico, Egypt, Cairo, Alexandria, France, Paris, Salle