From The Food Encyclopedia by Jacques Rolland and Carol Sherman
A tropical Asian plant, Sesamum indicum, cultivated for its shiny, beige, mildly flavored seed: a food, a flavoring agent and a source of oil. From the Greek sesamon, sesame was cultivated in Mesopotamia as early as 1600 BC. It was popular in Greek and Roman cuisine and grew extensively in Africa, its point of departure for North America as part of the slave trade. Black seeds are Japan's favorite, with a hearty, slightly bitter flavor. Brown and red seeds are rarer. The seeds get their color from their hulls, and although they taste delicate and sweet when raw, toasting deepens and enriches their flavor. Tahini is a paste of raw sesame seeds widely used in Middle Eastern cuisine; the Chinese make a paste with roasted seeds. In South Carolina, Georgia and New Orleans, "benne wafers" are sesame-seed cookies that get their name from the West African word for sesame. Simsim is the Arabic word for sesame seed. The expression "open sesame" was inspired by how sesame seeds suddenly pop out of their seedpods when fully mature. See also benne.
