The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Houmous, Huh?

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Houmous

As a student in London in the early 2000s houmous was ubiquitous; I’m not saying people were throwing it from windows or from their cars as you waited at the bus stop, but places like Leon were starting to pop up and also this was East London, so there were plenty of Lebanese restaurants (not that I went to any!). My first experience of houmous was at student house parties in East London. Invariably it was either too garlicky, or too dry, or too lemony – in short, it always too much of one thing and not enough of the other.

Houmous is one of those dishes which appears easy to make but the artistry of it is all in the balancing of flavours and, not to forget, texture. And, suffice to say, as spotty, hungover undergraduates there wasn’t much artistry to be found in us. However, I suppose houmous represented something new to me. I’d never eaten houmous before, I was suspicious of it at parties, but it wasn’t long before I was buying it every week, in fact I was known to eat almost an entire tub on return from doing the shopping. In saying it was about a half-mile walk to the Sainsbury’s and back from the student halls of residence. 

It represented something new in food, something so far removed from the carbohydrate laden, ultra processed diet of my childhood and the importance of being open minded about new flavours, and textures, even if it is actually quite calorie dense. Houmous was a symbol, I guess, of moving to London and trying foods outside my ken, in all its beige, dry, lemony lumpiness.