It’s been hard to focus. Yet the spaciousness created during this unprecedented time allows us to control, analyze, and make adjustments to the rhythm and meaning of our days. It took me a week to calm down enough to welcome time for reading. And what did I read? HUMMUS, written by three colleagues: Dan Alexander, Orly Peli-Bronshtein Ariel Rosenthal. What might have begun as a cookbook project morphed into a triumphant work of non-fiction, with the Biblical chickpea, as its protagonist. But there are as many important characters in this enormous undertaking as there are characters in a Dostoevsky novel. While HUMMUS may sound like the title of a recipe, here it summons a way of life whose subtitle tells a bigger story: “on the hummus route: a journey between cities, people, and dreams.”
So here we go! During this time of isolation and seclusion, we can take our imaginations on a trip and follow the borderless migration of a legume worshipped by cooks and poets alike. To tell the story of the chickpea is to sing the story of mankind – with all its joys and hardships. From Cairo to Damascus, Gaza, Jaffa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Nazareth, Acre, and Beirut, the chickpea has no country of its own – the very point the authors long to make. It makes its home everywhere.
And so the book opens with an introduction by Dan Alexander…”a Palestinian, a Lebanese, and an Israeli walk into a bar…” Not a joke exactly, but the first step of the journey that takes the reader back into history, to biblical roots, and agricultural routes (including a recipe that’s 1000 years old) – to the childhood memories of celebrated cooks (Claudia Roden), of superstar chefs (Sami Tamimi, Ariel Rosenthal), and of the men and women in both exotic and humble climes, who unabashedly, and unknowingly, share a common love. While the authors explore nine locales or “hummus hubs” in the Middle East, there are no doubt hundreds of cities elsewhere in the world that could be added to their colorful, hand-drawn map. But the book is already 400 pages, and thousands of miles, long.
It is truly a cookbook as there are seventy mouthwatering recipes to enjoy (from Egyptian koshary, to Palestinian hummus with hot peppers, to hummus with buttered lamb from Aleppo). But it is also an art book, directed by Dan Alexander, one of the world’s most accomplished graphic designers with gorgeous images and personal stories of more than thirty contributors. Most of all, HUMMUS allows us to become vicarious travelers and inspired cooks, but citizens of a larger community, one chickpea, and one page, at a time.