Lentil - online puzzles

The lentil (Lens culinaris or Lens esculenta) is an edible legume. It is a bushy annual plant known for its lens-shaped seeds. It is about 40 cm (16 in) tall, and the seeds grow in pods, usually with two seeds in each. As a food crop, the majority of world production comes from Canada, India, and Turkey.

In cuisines of the Indian subcontinent, where lentils are a staple, split lentils (often with their hulls removed) known as daal are often cooked into a thick curry /gravy that is usually eaten with rice or rotis.

Background

History

The cultivated lentil Lens culinaris was derived from its wild subspecies L. culinaris subsp. orientalis, although other species may also have contributed some genes, according to Jonathan Sauer ( Historical Geography of Crop Plants, 2017.) Unlike their wild ancestors, domesticated lentil crops have indehiscent pods and nondormant seeds.Lentils are the oldest pulse crop known, and among the earliest crops domesticated in the Old World, having been found as carbonized remains alongside human habitations dating to 11,000 BC in Greece. The lentil is indigenous to Western and Central Asia.

Name

Many different names in different parts of the world are used for the crop lentil; lentil ( English ), adas (Arabic), mercimek (Turkish), messer (Amharic), dahl or daal ( Hindi ) and hiramame ( Japanese ) are the most common names.The first use of the word lens to designate a specific genus was in the 16th century by the botanist Tournefort. However, the word "lens" for the lentil is of classical Roman/ Latin origin: McGee points out that a prominent Roman family took the name "Lentulus", just as the family name "Cicero" was derived from the chickpea, Cicer arietinum.