Andrew Simpson: Travels with houmous ……

Thursday, 11 June 2026

Travels with houmous ……

Now, I have my old friend Lois to thank for setting me off on a journey with houmous.

Houmous, 2026

It is of course one of those foods which is served up as a starter or one of several dishes often eaten cold.

And today, she wrote about her first encounter with this dip from the Levant in her blog.*

My Wikipedia tells me that houmous is a dip, made from cooked mashed chickpeas blended with tahini, lemon juice, and garlic. The standard garnish includes olive oil, a few whole chickpeas, parsley, and paprika”.**

And for those unfamiliar with the Levant it’s that area at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and includes Akrotiri and Dhekelia, Cyprus, Hatay Province, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Greece, Iraq, Libya and Turkey.***

That said purists would limit the definition to just the first eight countries.

I grew up with the Levant, mainly through old historical maps and from the books of Eric Ambler who described the area where spies, and police chiefs mingle with petty criminals, drug dealers and dodgy bankers, set against a backdrop of seedy and romantic places between the two world wars. People die in nasty ways; no one can be trusted and always the agents of foreign powers lurk in the shadows.

Ten minites out from the Pireaus, bound for the Levant, 1982

My favourite of the books is the "Mask of Dimitrios" written in 1939 which pretty much begins with the discovery of a body fished out of the sea and identified in an Istanbul morgue as that of a notorious criminal and by degree takes the investigator to Smyrna, and on to the Piraeus, Sofia and eventually Paris.

Along the way he encounters more murders, the trafficking of women, a smuggling gang, a stash of heroin, a bit of blackmailing and an Italian spy.

Nor is this all because the dead criminal faked his own death and our investigator is at various times, betrayed, framed and imprisoned.

In the Levant, 1982

For a sixteen year old this was a world far removed from southeast London and introduced me to a mysterious but shabby place and time, which I would not begin to visit for another twenty years.

By which time like Lois I had been introduced to houmous and a whole mix of food from the Mediterranean and in the process fell in love with both olives, and olive oil and that way of eating which was all about long slow evenings with heaps of food, fine wine, and good company.

None of which is unique to me, but I suppose marked out that journey from uninviting salads and over cooked vegetables and many a mundane meal to different and exciting dishes.

Gigantes plaki 2003

But then each generation discovers their food of choice. For my parents, grand parents and great grandparents it will have been new products sourced from Britain’s empire, made possible by advances in food preservation and cheap foreign labour and enhanced for those in the armed forces who were taken to the far corners of the globe while acquiring and controlling those imperial possessions and fighting the wars of the last century.

And now the invitation to different foods comes via supermarkets, sleek media presentations and the constant desire to discover new things to eat and impress friends.

To my embarrassment I can confess that some of my introductions to new things to eat have indeed come via the supermarket and the telly, but more have been while on holiday or in the case of humous from a chance conversation with Lois many decades ago.

Location; The Levant