We love chickpeas. Just something about those little nuggets that are so tasty. I think I could make anything and as long as I added chickpeas to it, it would be devoured. We snack on them, add them to salads, heck, I've even cooked with chickpea flour.
Skillet Chickpeas
One onion, diced
Three cloves garlic, diced
Sesame oil
Small can sliced black olives, drained
2 cans chickpeas/garbanzo beans, drained
1/2 t. salt
1/2 t. pepper
1 t. curry powder
Saute the onion and garlic in the sesame oil. Add the olives, chickpeas and seasonings, heat through. Serve over rice with a splash of Braggs Aminos. Enjoy!
Chickpeas, also known as garbanzo beans, are a legume high in protein and one of the earliest cultivated vegetables; 7,500-year-old remains have been found in the Middle East.
The name "chickpea" traces back through the French
chiche to Latin
cicer (from which the Roman cognomen Cicero was taken). The Oxford English Dictionary lists a 1548 citation that reads, "
Cicer may be named in English Cich, or ciche pease, after the Frenche tonge." The dictionary cites "Chick-pea" in the mid-18th century; the original word in English was chich, found in print in English in 1388, and taken directly from French.
The word
garbanzo came to English as "calavance" in the 17th century, from Old Spanish (perhaps influenced by Old Spanish
garroba or
algarroba), though it came to refer to a variety of other beans (
cf. Calavance). The Portuguese
arvanço has suggested to some that the origin of the word
garbanzo is in the Greek
erebinthos. But the Oxford English Dictionary notes that some scholars doubt this; it also mentions a possible origination in the word
garbantzu, from Basque — a non-Indo-European tongue — in which it is a compound of
garau, seed +
antzu, dry.
Domesticated chickpeas have been found in the aceramic levels of Jericho (8350 BC to 7370 BC) along with Cayönü in Turkey (7250-6750 BC) and in Neolithic pottery at Hacilar, Turkey (ca 6700 BC). They are found in the late Neolithic (about 3500 BCE) at Thessaly, Kastanas, Lerna and Dimini. In southern France Mesolithic layers in a cave at L'Abeurador, Aude have yielded wild chickpeas carbon dated to 6790±90 BCE. Domesticated chickpeas have also been found at several archaeological sites, including Tell el-Kerkh in Syria and Akarçay Tepe (7280-8700 BP) in Turkey. The earliest to date is Tell el-Kerkh, in the late 10th millennium BC, and scholars suspect that since el-Kerkh is a considerable distance from the native lands of the wild chickpea, the domestication took place somewhat earlier than that.
By the Bronze Age, chickpeas were known in Italy and Greece. In classical Greece, they were called erébinthos and eaten as a staple, a dessert, or consumed raw when young. The Romans knew several varieties such as venus, ram, and punic chickpeas. They were both cooked down into a broth and roasted as a snack. The Roman gourmet Apicius gives several recipes for chickpeas. Carbonized chickpeas have been found at the Roman legion fort at Neuss (Novaesium), Germany in layers from the first century CE, along with rice.
Chickpeas are mentioned in Charlemagne's Capitulare de villis (about 800 CE) as cicer italicum, as grown in each imperial demesne. Albertus Magnus mentions red, white and black varieties. Nicholas Culpeper noted "chick-pease or cicers" are less "windy" than peas and more nourishing. Ancient people also associated chickpeas with Venus because they were said to offer medical uses such as increasing sperm and milk, provoking menstruation and urine and helping to treat kidney stones.
In 1793, ground-roast chickpeas were noted by a German writer as a coffee substitute in Europe and in the First World War, they were grown for this in some areas of Germany. Chickpeas are still sometimes brewed instead of coffee.
Okay, I said above we'd probably consume them no matter what they were in? I think I'd have to draw the line at coffee. But that's just me.
