The members of the botanical family known as Leguminosae were among the first cultivated plants in the Mediterranean. Legumes or beans (strictly, beans are a genus in the family Leguminosae) were also one of the first domesticated plants in the New World, appearing before 6000 B.C. Beans have among the highest protein content of all plant foods and are, for that reason, known as poor people’s food and are nutritionally important for people who cannot or choose not to eat meat. The amino acids found in beans are perfectly complemented by those in cereals, and these two foods are the first ones found preserved in archeological sites. When we see Mediterranean dishes with wheat and beans, or rice and lentils, or maize and peas, they are dishes that come very close to fulfilling our protein needs. But, in the words of the botanist Charles B. Heiser Jr., this was a “happy accident,” because primitive people knew nothing about amino acids or proteins.

(photo: Lentils, All-creatures.org)

Legume plants are also important for another reason. No other cultivated food plant has the ability that most legumes do of being able to obtain nitrogen from the atmosphere through the action of special bacteria that live in nodules on their roots. This nitrogen goes into the production of protein that makes itself available to humans when we eat the seeds. When the legume plant dies, the nitrogen is returned to the soil, helping other plants grow and building up soil fertility. Historically, this “green manuring” was important for the nutrient-poor Mediterranean soil. The Book of Daniel (1: 12) gives a sense of the importance of beans: “And let them give us pulse to eat, and water to drink.”

The Mediterranean legumes are of great variety, such as carob or St. John’s bread (Ceratonia siliqua). The pods of carobs, native to Syria, are eaten by some people in the Mediterranean because of their high sugar content, although they are used mostly for livestock feed. The grasspea or India pea (Lathyrus sativus) is a legume eaten in the Mediterranean as well as Asia, and when eaten in quantity without other foods can cause a disease known as lathyrism, which leads to a paralysis of the lower limbs that can be permanent. In the seventeenth-century Moroccan medical compendium, Tuhfat al-ahbāb, this legume is described as an aphrodisiac. The chickpea (Cicer arietinum) is native to the Near Eastern Mediterranean, as are lentils (Lens esculenta) and fava beans (Vicia faba), also known as the broad bean, Windsor bean, horse bean, Scotch bean, and English bean. A wild form of this plant is no longer known. The lupine bean (Lupinus albus) is native to the Near Eastern Mediterranean and so is bittervetch (Vicia ervilia) and the cultivated pea (Pisum sativum), of which there are of two kinds, the field pea, used mostly for dried peas and forage, and the garden pea with its high sugar content. Several Mediterranean legumes originated in Africa, such as the hyacinth bean (Lablab niger), native to the East African savanna and the cowpea (Vigna unguiculata), also known as the aspargus bean or yard-long bean, native to West Africa.