The Global Pantry: Traveling the World Through Its Best-Loved Pulses

Open burlap bags of lentils in a dozen shades, chickpeas the color of old parchment, black beans with a lacquered shine. We tend to hurry past them on the way to something more photogenic.

We shouldn’t. If you want to understand how a place actually eats, day in and day out, the beans will tell you more than the banquet.

Pulses are the world’s great common denominator: cheap, storable, endlessly local in their preparations. Here are five dishes that prove it, and how to bring them home. Cairo: ful medames

In Egypt, breakfast has been settled for centuries. Ful medames – fava beans slow-cooked overnight until they collapse into a rough, earthy mash – is ladled out of huge metal urns from street carts and hole-in-the-wall shops all over Cairo, dressed at the table with olive oil, lemon, cumin, and chopped tomato.

It’s eaten by scooping with fresh baladi bread, and it costs next to nothing. Egyptians will tell you, with some justice, that they’ve been eating it since the pharaohs.

India: a country of dals To say “dal” is to say almost nothing and almost everything: the word covers the split pulses themselves and the hundreds of dishes made from them. In Punjab it might be a rich, buttery dal makhani simmered overnight; in Tamil Nadu, a quick toor dal soured with tamarind; in Bengal, a thin, comforting masoor dal with mustard oil.

What unites them is the tadka – spices bloomed in hot fat and poured, sizzling, over the finished pot. It is the sound of dinner across a subcontinent.

Rome: pasta e ceci On a chilly evening in Rome, look for pasta e ceci on a trattoria’s handwritten menu.

Chickpeas are simmered with garlic, rosemary, and a little tomato, half of them crushed to thicken the broth, then short pasta is cooked right in the pot so the starch binds everything into something between a soup and a stew. It’s cucina povera at its finest – “poor cooking” that eats like wealth. Mexico: frijoles de la olla

Before beans are refried, they are simply frijoles de la olla: “beans from the pot,” simmered gently – traditionally in clay – with white onion, garlic, and a branch of epazote, then served in their own savory broth with warm tortillas. In homes across Mexico this pot is a near-daily constant, and the leftover broth, spiked with salsa, might be the best part.

The Levant: hummus, taken seriously We know hummus as a supermarket tub; in Beirut, Damascus, and Jerusalem it is a dish you sit down to, served warm and silky in shallow bowls, slicked with olive oil, eaten with pita for breakfast.

The difference starts with dried chickpeas cooked until they nearly dissolve – canned ones never quite get there – and plenty of good tahini. Order it “with ful” or topped with whole warm chickpeas, and taste how serious the genre gets.

Bringing the journey home

Here’s the happy secret about this kind of food travel: of everything you eat abroad, these dishes are among the easiest to recreate faithfully, because their soul lives in technique and time rather than rare ingredients.

What matters is starting from dried, not canned – fresher dried pulses cook more evenly and taste sweeter – and keeping a few of the right spices whole. Good sourcing helps.

Online wholefood grocers now stock the full global range of dried beans, lentils, and pulses – fava beans for your ful, split pigeon peas for a proper sambar, real chickpeas worth the overnight soak. UK-based Whole Food Earth, for example, carries over 3,600 organic wholefoods, including the whole spices that make a tadka sing, and ships across the UK and Europe.

One order, and your pantry holds five countries. Cook a pot of beans slowly on a Sunday, and your kitchen smells like somewhere you’ve been – or somewhere you’re going.

Either way, dinner travels well.