Black lentil 250 g

Lentils have been grown all over the Mediterranean since the Neolithic. They have been found in the storerooms of Sumerian palaces, in many Egyptian tombs and in the excavations of Troy, and they were certainly a staple of all the nomadic peoples of Asia Minor. The ancient Greeks and Romans saw them as an energy-rich, nourishing food, fit for the tables of the common people, soldiers, farmers and slaves. Every day, shiploads of lentils (as well as spelt, chickpeas and peas) reached the port of ancient Ostia from Egypt and North Africa, the true granaries of the Empire.

In Republican times Cato the Censor also encouraged growing them in the Roman countryside: in his De agri cultura (2nd century BC) he suggested storing them dried after marinating them first in vinegar and then in oil. The Lentuli, patricians of the gens Cornelia, profited greatly from them, and their family name came from growing lentils on a large scale. In the 1st century AD Pliny the Elder believed they brought a calm temper to those who ate them regularly, and throughout the Middle Ages they replaced meat on fast days. They were always found in monastery gardens and pantries because, as the 16th-century physician and botanist Castore Durante put it, they helped monks live chastely and quench “venereal appetites and sexual seed”.