Jump to content

Talk:Hummus

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Spelling and Pronunciation[edit]

Why is the Hebrew spelling not included with the Arabic spelling? It is an Israeli food as well.

"חומוס" Mikhaelnachman (talk) 02:26, 26 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I am not against this proposal, but maybe it is not included because it's etymologically an Arabic word...? --Vanlister (talk) 11:13, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I would support adding the Hebrew in addition to the Arabic, because the dish is a staple in Israel (even outside the Arab Palestinian community) and the Modern Hebrew word for chickpea is חומוס (ḥumus).newmila (talk) 23:52, 24 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It's eaten across the entire world, that isnt a reason to include an unrelated language. nableezy - 00:07, 25 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Its an arabic word, the name has no connection to hebrew. Doesn't belong in the article. --Supreme Deliciousness (talk) 10:43, 25 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hummus is not served warm.[edit]

It is served room temp or cold. Check the sources. M hesham7 (talk) 20:26, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently it's a thing. Arp242 (talk) 16:25, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Im sure mustard ice cream is a thing but its not the primary way to do it. M hesham7 (talk) 12:49, 17 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It being a thing doesn't warrant it being referred to as "often served as a warm dish", since it's an edge case. I agree with modifying this part. Laslas19 (talk) 10:51, 6 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@M hesham7 hummus is definitely served warm in the Middle East. It's quite common at lunch restaurants in isreal where it will be freshly made hence warm. Miszt (talk) 08:08, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In arab restaurants, it is served cold or room temperature, similar to how tahini or baba ganoush is served. I believe arab restaurants should hold more weight to this classification than israeli restaurants as there are obviously way more arab restaurants that serve hummus than israeli. It does not seem just to list the israeli version as the default. M hesham7 (talk) 10:40, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The oldest evidence of Hummus[edit]

A new study found that Syria is the most likely place for the origin of humus


“the earliest mention in the fascinating world of medieval Middle Eastern cookbooks of hummus is a 13th-century work attributed to the Aleppo historian Ibn al-Adeem (but that may alternatively have been written by an Ayyubid prince).

The strongest evidence now points to Syria as the origin of hummus.

This discovery was part of a fascinating essaywritten by Mahmoud Habboush, a Palestinian author and journalist (and food aficionado) based in the U.K. The essay was published in the first print edition of New Lines earlier this year — its imagery is just as succulent as the text and the recipes that came with it. “

https://newlinesmag.com/newsletter/the-true-origins-of-hummus/


we should update the history section

Whatsupkarren (talk) 16:36, 8 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 18 January 2024[edit]

Hummas is not an isreali dish. Hummas was invented in Syria — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.26.215.195 (talk) 00:44, 18 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@108.26.215.195 doesn't neglect that it's a Israeli dish. The origin of a dish doesn't limits it's significance to other cultures or places. Pasta was invented in Asia, still it's an Italien dish. Hummus is a staple in Israel, Egypt and many more places Miszt (talk) 08:13, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hommus spelling most common in Australia[edit]

Perhaps there should be a sentence similar to the one about Houmous being most common in Britain based on how supermarkets sell it, but about Australia. Woolworths, Coles, and Aldi are our most popular supermarkets and nearly all the brands they sell spell it Hommus. From my experience, Hommus seems the most popular spelling in Australia - recipes, restaurants etc favour that one. 118.208.139.96 (talk) 08:04, 14 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Checking sources[edit]

So after lazily aceepting at face value all four sources (Shalev 2020; Grosglik 2015; Nussbaum 2021; Carlin 2018) cited for the claim that ḥummuṣ was mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, particularly Book of Ruth 2:14, I decide to check them out:

  • Carlin, Na'ama. (2018). Chickpeas and peace in the middle east. Eureka Street, 28(12), 21–23.
  • Shalev, Meir. My Wild Garden: Notes from a Writer's Eden. Schocken, 2020
    • No page number given.
    • While this book can be found on google books, using the search tool provided by google books, I found no result for "hummus" ( https://books.google.com/books?id=F8mfDwAAQBAJ&q=hummus#v=onepage&q=hummus&f=false )
    • I pirated the book and found absolutely no mention of hummus in it. As for the Book of Ruth, this is what Shalev writes on page 189: “When I was a young girl” (I have put this in quotation marks because this is a family saying used by us all, even the males), when milking was done with bare hands, and on Nahalal primary-school trips to neighboring Arab villages, we could still see peasant farmers separating the grain from the chaff with a threshing board, and winnowing with a wooden pitchfork like Araunah the Jebusite in the Book of Samuel and Boaz in the Book of Ruth.
    • So Shalev (2020) cannot be used as a source.
  • Grosglik, R. (2015). Hummus and the Organic Food Trend in Israel: Cosmopolitanizing a National Dish. Ethnologie française, 45, 257-267.
    • The link https://doi.org/10.3917/ethn.152.0257 works; I will also give the English version's link ( https://www.cairn-int.info/article.php?ID_ARTICLE=E_ETHN_152_0257 )
    • Grosglik indeed writes: At the counter on which the diners eat are placemats with a reference from the Bible allegedly to hummus (“And at meal-time Boaz said unto Ruth: Come hither, and eat of the bread, and dip thy morsel in the Hometz” [Ruth 2-14]. The meaning of the word “Hometz” in modern Hebrew is vinegar. However, “Hometz” not only sounds a bit like “Hummus,” but also resembles the word “Himtza” which is the Hebrew name of chickpeas. This biblical reference expresses the assertion that hummus belong to the Israeli-Jews.. However, he cautiously uses the word "allegedly" and does not explicitly affirm that the claim is true. Elsewhere he writes:

      • Hummus is an ancient Middle Eastern dish adopted from the Palestinians by Jewish settlers [Hirsch, 2011].

        ,

      • Hummus was appropriated several decades ago as an icon of Israeli culture.

        ,

      • Previous studies have already pointed to hummus as a cultural object that reflects assimilation of otherness and culinary appropriation. the establishment of the state of Israel, hummus was considered clearly an Arab food [Litani and Ariedi, 2000]. The pioneering Zionists—East European Jews who migrated to Palestine early in the 20th century so as to establish a Jewish state, as well as Jews from Middle Eastern countries, who migrated to Israel after its establishment—added hummus into their culinary repertoire as part of their practical and symbolic attempts at settling in the region [Hirsch, 2011]. Later, after the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and because of the frequent visits of Israeli-Jews to Eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank, the prevalence of hummus flowered. Sociologist Liora Gvion argues that hummus adopted into the Israeli culinary repertoire as part of a cultural process represented selective appropriation of regional (Middle Eastern) and Arab cuisine [Gvion, 2006]. On the contrary, Dafna Hirsch and Ofra Tene [2013] argued that hummus began its way as a popular “Israeli dish” in the late 1950s as a result of industrial production processes and commercial distribution. One way or another, all researchers agree that nowadays hummus is a very popular dish among Israeli-Jews and is a central element of the Israeli “national food” repertoire [Hirsch, 2011].

    • So Grosglik (2015) cannot be used as a source.
  • Last but not least, Nussbaum, Harriet. Hummus: A Global History. Reaktion Books, 2021.
    • The link ( https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/H/bo130702920.html ) leads to a paywalled book
    • So I pirated the book & I found out that Nussbaum does not endorse the claim that ḥummuṣ is found in Ruth 2:14. In fact, she criticizes Meir Shalev for claiming so

      • In 2007 the Israeli author Meir Shalev published an article in Hebrew entitled ‘Ha-hummus hu shelanu’ (‘Hummus Is Ours’), arguing for the existence of hummus in the biblical period. According to Shalev, the Book of Ruth contains a reference to hummus. In one story, the biblical figure Boaz invites Ruth to dip her morsel of bread into ḥomeṣ – a word that the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible gives as ‘sour wine’ and that has the meaning ‘vinegar’ in modern Hebrew. Shalev proposes that they are, rather, dipping their bread into an ancient form of hummus.
        Dependent on context, modern Hebrew speakers use the word ḥummuṣ to mean chickpeas or hummus. But this term has been relatively recently borrowed from Arabic: an alternative word, ḥimṣa, was once used in Hebrew with the meaning ‘chickpeas’. Shalev claims that the words ḥummuṣ, ḥimṣa and ḥomeṣ are all based on the same Semitic three-letter root, ḥ-m-ṣ, further leading to his assertion that Boaz and Ruth were dipping their bread in hummus rather than vinegar. He connects the meanings by remarking that chickpeas sour quickly (and therefore taste similar to vinegar and other such foods), proposing that they gained their Hebrew name this way.
        Despite the connection between these words, there is no reason to assume that ḥomeṣ. – which ordinarily implies wine vinegar – has anything to do with hummus in the Book of Ruth. First, while it might not have the literal meaning of pure vinegar in the context (bread dipped in vinegar does not sound especially appetizing), it may well suggest a dish seasoned or preserved with vinegar or indeed any other sour or fermented food. Furthermore, even if ḥomeṣ does have the meaning of ‘chickpeas’ in the Book of Ruth, as they were surely eaten in biblical times, there is no reason to suggest that these chickpeas would have been prepared in a manner similar to hummus. Certainly Ruth and Boaz were not dipping a pitta into a smooth and creamy mixture of ground chick-peas, tahini, lemon and garlic and rounding the meal off with a plate of freshly fried falafel. Shalev’s attempt to connect modern-day hummus with the world of ancient Israel belongs firmly to the twenty-first-century debate over the ownership of hummus (but more on that story later).

    • So Nussbaum (2021) can not be used as a source. Shalev's 2007 article, which Nussbaum cites and criticizes, should be.

Erminwin (talk) 03:15, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Hummus&oldid=1230405542"