Chickpea

also garbanzo bean. This buff-colored seed is a plant native to the Mediterranean. Its Latin name, Cicer arietinum, found its way into Old French as chiche. Speakers of Middle English adopted this name for the legume and tacked on a redundant "pea" at the end. Not long afterward, the resulting compound transformed into "chickpea." An ancestor of the greatest orator of ancient Rome, Cicero, supposedly had a chickpea-like wart at the end of his nose, thus the family name.

Chickpeas are one of the oldest cultivated foods in the world. They were grown in Neolithic times in what is now Sicily. During the Roman Empire, they were shipped in jars from Sicily to the rest of Italy, where they are called ceci. The chickpea is said to have resulted in the massacre of Charles I and his French soldiers in 1282, when Sicilian rebels identified the foreigners by asking them to pronounce the word ceci correctly. Those who did not were killed.

In India, chickpeas are known as gram; in Spain as garbanzos; in France as pois chiche. At one time, they were commonly used in Turkey to feed horses, and more than likely to feed camels, too, because the Turkish name translates to "camel corn."

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