The First Time I Ate Hummus

I remember the first time I ate hummus. It’s hard to imagine now, that there was ever a time when hummus would be considered exotic. Supermarket fridges heave with the stuff, toddlers scoop it up with carrot sticks. But in the 1990s hummus was yet to have its day. Sun dried tomatoes were the Mediterranean ingredient on everyone’s lips.

In my student halls of residence in Liverpool, there were four girls from Leeds on my floor. Nadia was one of them. She was loudly and proudly Leeds, and her family were from one of the countries on the eastern side of the Mediterranean (I don’t remember which, I’m sorry to say.)

We rarely cooked together, but we did share tastes of food, especially food from whatever you could describe as “back home.” The Norwegian girls gave us sweet cheese with honey, one Irish girl made a heart-stopping rice pudding made of cream and butter, with a hint of rice. And Nadia gave me a slice of toast with hummus on.

For a girl of my age and background, I had relatively cosmopolitan tastes. My paternal grandfather was Polish, so at home we would sometimes have eastern European food like sauerkraut. We preferred coffee to tea, which was a highly suspicious thing to do in 90s West Yorkshire. My mum had a wok in the 80s, and a Ken Hom cooking video which I used to watch obsessively when home sick from school. We would do our shopping in Leeds, with its large populations of Asian and Caribbean citizens, rather than in the more homogeneous Wakefield.

Most of my peers in my very white, working class home town ate the same things at home as we got for school dinners. Meat pies, salty jacket potatoes, baked beans. The smell of tinned vegetables and barley water still takes me back to going over to a friend’s house for tea (what we call the evening meal in Yorkshire.) My German class was aghast when we discovered Berliners put mayonnaise* on chips. Hummus was never on the menu.

So it was in the communal kitchen of my student halls that I first tried it. And I can clearly remember that moment. The toast was warm and crisp. The butter (proper butter, not margarine) was molten and salty. And on top of it all, still cold from the fridge, was the hummus. Savoury and garlicky, I was smitten.

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