From Curye in Inglysch IV:73 (somewhat modified into modern English)

Chickpeas: Take chickpeas and layer them in ashes all night or all day, or lay them in hot embers. Next day, wash them in clean water, and put them over the fire with clean water. Boil them up, then add oil, garlic whole, saffron, strong powder and salt. Boil it and serve it forth.

Firstly, why heat the presumably dry chickpeas for a day and then wash them? Am I roasting them? I’m thinking not. The next recipe in the book is for lupini beans, and it mentions parboiling them to hull them. I checked online for the best ways to hull chickpeas: none of them involve roasting, but at least one does involve soaking them in baking soda, which is alkaline. Wood ashes are also highly alkaline. In fact, the recipe doesn’t say to leave them in hot ashes, just ashes – it only says the embers should be hot: but hot embers are on their way down to ashes. So, I rest them overnight in an alkaline substance, and then wash them in clean water. I’m thinking this is about hulling the chickpeas: for the purposes of the feast, I think I’ll just use the baking soda method Cooks Illustrated recommends for ease. (though I really ought to try the ‘buried in ashes’ technique sometime, just to make sure.)

Once I get past that step, I’m then cooking them in clean water over the fire. That sounds like a fast soak to me. At the end of this, I expect to have thoroughly hydrated chickpeas ready to actually cook.

Then I add oil, garlic cloves, saffron (possibly for color?) and ‘powder fort.’ I know that powder fort is a relatively standard spice mix, like curry powder or chili powder, of strong flavored spices. I’ve a couple of versions of recipes for it stored away, but it looks like every kitchen or spice merchant had their favorite blend, so I can pretty much take this wherever I want, as long it’s definitely ‘strong.’ Garlic simmered for a while ends up with much the same sweetness as roasted garlic: not as intense, but definitely not something that’s going to overwhelm. The only named oil I can remember from this period is olive oil: this doesn’t actually say olive oil, but it a logical assumption.

So the recipe becomes:

Ingredients:

• Chickpeas
• Alkaline solution such as baking soda.
• Water
• Whole garlic cloves
• Saffron
• Strong spice blend
• Olive oil
• Salt

1. Rest the chickpeas in an alkaline substance, then wash to remove the hulls.
2. Simmer the chickpeas until they are fully hydrated, about an hour.
3. Add all other ingredients and simmer again until fully done.

Quantities: Well, this is part of a feast with about 10 dishes, so I’m thinking we don’t need to ‘fill up’ on chickpeas. Allowing .25 cup cooked per person seems generous, based on previous experience with feasts. Like most beans, dried chickpeas triple in size when they are soaked, so…for .25 cup cooked, I’ll need 1.34 tb of dry chickpeas. Just try measuring that! For a table of 8, that’s 2 cups cooked, which would be 2/3 cup dry. .6 cups dry is conveniently just about .25 lbs dry, so, with some rounding up, I come up with 2 lbs of chickpeas.

Garlic – I’m a garlic fan, but not everyone is: I’m going to say 1 garlic clove per person, which should mean half a head per table. 3 heads it is. I tend to add salt ‘to taste’ but the consensus appears to be somewhere between .5 to 1 tbsp kosher salt (less if table salt) per cup of dry chickpeas. People can always add salt at the table, so I’ll stick the lower end of that, making it 2.5 tbsp of salt for the batch.

Updated Ingredients list:

• 2 lbs dried chickpeas
• 1.5 tbsp baking soda.
• Water
• 42 peeled garlic cloves (3 bulbs?)
• 3 pinches saffron
• 4-8 tsp strong spice blend (will need to do to taste)
• .75 cup olive oil
• Salt