The lentil (Lens culinaris) is the small, lens-shaped edible seed of a bushy annual legume and one of the founder crops of farming, domesticated in the Fertile Crescent some eleven thousand years ago. Sold dried in a spectrum of colours — green, brown, black, yellow and the quick-cooking split red — it carries a mild, earthy, faintly beany savour and softens to a creamy, mealy tenderness in a fraction of the time other pulses demand. Inexpensive, protein- and fibre-dense and needing no soaking, it is a backbone of dal, soups, stews and salads from India to the Mediterranean.