A History of Hummus
A short piece of fiction, written for a performance in Liverpool. A recording of that performance is here: https://shipwreckedrecords.bandcamp.com/album/matt-barton-live-at-prohibition-studios
Harry loved hummus.
‘I love hummus,’ said Harry.
‘I haven’t had a seagull attack me in months,’ said Bill.
‘Have you ever had hummus though?’ This was 1995. Harry was 18.
‘What’s hummus?’
And with that question, Harry felt a sudden burst of pride because, unlike Bill, he not only knew what hummus was, but he loved it.
Harry loved hummus.
According to New Lines Magazine, hummus ‘literally means chickpea in Arabic.’ For those of you who still don’t know what hummus is, something Harry knew in 1995, it’s a chickpea dip made with garlic, tahini, and lemon juice. The first mention of hummus, according to some sources, is in a middle eastern cookbook from the 13th century.
Harry discovered hummus in 1995 when he visited the house of his first girlfriend, near Sefton Park in Liverpool. He’d never met middle class people before and his concept of cuisine was confined to the arena of egg, chips, and beans, served with five slices of buttered bread. Harry’s parents called pizza ‘pizzer.’ The only pasta they ever ate was tinned spaghetti. Harry’s older brother, Ed, loved tinned spaghetti when they were kids but, like Harry, his tastes had become more refined since then.
‘Of course I know what hummus is,’ Ed said.
This was about a week after Harry had made his discovery. Ed, four years older than Harry, had once bought a copy of Le Monde, despite not being able to speak French. He still can’t speak French now.
‘Me mum still calls pizza pizzer,’ Harry said. They were sat on a bench just off Dale Street. It was Ed’s dinner hour and Harry was unemployed. They’d bumped into each other in a Stanley Street delicatessen.
‘I know,’ said Ed. ‘Me dad still calls nazis nazzys.’
The two brothers sat in silence for a while. They never had much to say to each other.
‘Soft cheese should be served with crackers,’ said Ed, unexpectedly breaking the silence.
‘Yeah?’ said Harry.
‘Anyway,’ said Ed, ‘it’s time I got back to work.’ Ed worked for the council. He wore a tie and Harry wanted to wear a tie one day too.
On the way back to Sparrow Hall, Harry stopped off at the Pioneer, to buy some hummus.
The Pioneer in Broadway HAD NO HUMMUS.
He asked one of the assistants, ‘Where do you keep the hummus?’ But the assistant didn’t know what he was talking about.
‘I hate it round here,’ Harry told his mum and dad when he got home, ‘they don’t even have hummus in the Pioneer.’
‘What’s hummus?’ said Harry’s dad. Christ! Harry couldn’t believe these were his actual parents.
A lot of middle eastern countries argue over the origins of hummus. Some suggest Syria as the birthplace of this delicacy. According to a BBC website, there are those who proffer an ancient Jewish tradition of hummus. In the Book of Ruth, from the Hebrew bible, there is a line that reads: ‘Come hither and eat of the bread and dip thy morsel in the hometz.’ However, the Lebanese government once petitioned the EU to recognise hummus as a Lebanese dish.
There’s a hummus war in the middle east.
At first, Harry wasn’t sure what his friends would think of his love of hummus. He’d sounded a few of them out- Bill was the first- and found that, largely, there was a complete ignorance of the stuff. This fed a feeling of specialness in Harry that some part of him suspected was illusory.
He found it hard to play it cool when it came to hummus at his girlfriend’s house. He didn’t want to seem overly enthusiastic- he wanted to come across as somebody who was used to hummus-somebody who just accepted it as an everyday thing.
‘Would you like some hummus?’ Harry’s girlfriend’s dad would say.
‘Yes,’ said Harry, as calmly as he could, wanting to scream and shout and rant and rave. Harry learned a lot about restraint during these hummus sessions at the dining room table. They would dip strips of pitta bread into the pot, like the soldiers Harry had dipped into soft boiled eggs as a child. Sometimes, if there was no pitta, they would use small pieces of carrot or even strips of red pepper. Harry preferred the bread to the crudites. Crudites always reminded him of the time he’d accidentally pronounced it ‘crud-ites.’
Eventually, for some obscure, forgotten reason, Harry split up with the girl who had introduced him to hummus. The girls that came into his life subsequently were all hummus-savvy, though none of them shared his enthusiasm.
In 1999, at a party in Aigburth, Harry persuaded Bill to try some hummus. Bill liked it enough to go back for more, which took Harry by surprise. Perhaps Bill, who had never seemed particularly refined, had hidden depths. Another friend, Brian, was offered hummus at the same party. His reaction was one of anger.
‘Fuck off,’ Brian said. ‘I’m not eating a chickpea paste.’
After this, Harry felt closer to Bill-they were different, Harry thought, to the likes of Brian who was still so stuck in his ways that he couldn’t even dream of accepting hummus into his life.
At the same party, Harry had praised the couscous. For years after, his friends wouldn’t let him forget this.
‘Ooo,’ they’d say, effecting posh accents, ‘Great Coose Coose!’
‘Love the Coose Coose!’
‘The coose coose is superb!’
To make hummus you will need:
7 oz canned chickpeas
2 crushed garlic cloves
100ml Tahini
4 tbsp lemon juice
4 tbsp water
Rinse and drain the chickpeas, combine ingredients in a food processor and blend until creamy.
Serve at room temperature with a dash of salt to taste and a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil.
Around 2001, Harry was in the Boots on Whitechapel. He was perusing the sandwich aisle when a couple of ‘lads’ turned up, also looking for a sandwich. Harry had long hair at the time, as he was into music and experimenting with veganism. The ‘lads’ were short-haired and dressed in sports tops and tracky bottoms. Harry decided to hold back until they’d chosen, fearing that one of them might decide to comment on his hair.
The two lads were all over the sandwiches, obviously having no idea of what it was they were looking for. One of them drifted accidentally into the vegetarian section of the aisle where he picked something up.
He seemed confused by the sandwich he was holding. Turning to his friend he said, ‘What’s hummus?’
Quick as a shot, the friend answered, ‘Hummus? How the fuck should I know?’
Harry considered this. Why would he have been so bothered by the question, ‘What’s hummus?’
What would bother anybody enough about such a question that they would respond in such a way? As Harry had already seen with his couscous faux pas, it was obvious that some foods are seen as a challenge to masculinity. Quiche, for instance, Harry had once heard described as ‘gay pizza.’ But for this lad to be aware that hummus might possibly be a challenge to his masculinity, he must also have, secretly, known exactly what hummus was. His reaction:
‘Hummus? How the fuck should I know?’
Was obviously a smoke-screen, hiding his guilty secret-which was that he knew precisely what hummus was. Possibly, this lad had tasted hummus and maybe even liked it. Maybe it kept him awake at night. Maybe, in his private moments, in the privacy of his own house, he was a secret eater of hummus.
Harry played the scene over and over in his head. It opened up so many questions.
In 2003, Harry knocked round at Bill’s new place on Church Road. Bill gave him the ‘Grand Tour’ of his one-bedroom flat. Bill’s trousers were too tight because he’d been listening to The Libertines; he was working as a labourer on a building site in town.
‘Grab a beer from the fridge,’ Bill said.
In the fridge, next to eight cans of Carling, was a little plastic pot of ‘Moroccan hummus.’
‘Hummus,’ Harry said.
‘Yeah,’ Bill answered.
‘I just…hummus…remember we had it at that party in Aigburth?’
But Bill had no memory of the moment Harry had introduced him to hummus. It turned out Bill regularly bought himself a pot of either Moroccan, or red pepper hummus when he did the big shop on his day off. Harry felt upset at having been written out of the story of Bill’s relationship with hummus, especially as Bill didn’t see it as a particularly special or unusual thing to have in the fridge.
The next few years saw many similar shocks for Harry. He got in a habit of travelling around Liverpool, checking out supermarkets. Once it was impossible to find hummus any further out than Wavertree but Harry began to notice it slowly creeping north.
Once he saw a hummus-wrap in a Huyton Best-Buy and pots of the stuff became common as far out as Kirkby. He knew the bubble had burst when he caught his own mother scraping out hummus with a potato cake while she was watching Coronation Street.
‘What happens now?’ Harry asked his brother, Ed. They were sat in Doctor Duncan’s pub on St John’s Lane.
‘Have you tried avocado?’ said Ed.
But somehow, Harry could never really take to avocado.
In 2013, The Guardian reported that: ‘More than 40% of Britons have a pot of hummus in the fridge.’
Harry was 36, finished.
Absolutely everybody loved hummus and any sense of it belonging to Harry as a cultural experience had long gone.
Harry was all over. And that wasn’t even the hardest part. He couldn’t even get decent hummus anymore. He went to Tesco one day and all they had was Marmite Hummus! MARMITE HUMMUS!
Now Harry was an average nobody and he got to live the rest of his life as a schnuck.
