Thinking about the future prosperity of my family and friends, I recently carried two packets of lentils from Rome to Dorset. A wholly unnecessary exercise considering how widely available they are in the UK, but I did it to make myself feel important, I suppose. And so that, on New Year’s Eve, around the stroke of midnight, I can call everyone into the kitchen to eat a spoonful or seven, to ensure thriving good fortune and happiness in 2024. At least that is the idea.
Along with barley, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch, emmer wheat, einkorn wheat and flax, lentils are one of the eight neolithic founder crops domesticated as early as 12,000 years ago in the fertile crescent – what is now southern Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Egypt, and parts of Turkey and Iran. Cultivation seems to have been particularly significant in ancient Egypt, where red lentils have been found in burial tombs. Seeds travel, of course, thanks to birds and people, and lentils made their way all over the place. Including Greece and Italy, where they became a staple in the local diets, both as a whole pulse and ground into a flour suitable for making hearth bread. This double function and their nutritious, “useful” nature made lentils, known as lentĭcŭla, a precious food. And of course they look precious, the magic of their round form resembling a coin.
