ABSTRACT
Fenugreek is an annual herb growing to a height of 30 to 60 cm (1-2 ft.). The petals of the §owers are usually pale yellow, occasionally white, and sometimes with lilac at the base. The pods are very long and narrow and usually curved. Before ripening, the pod is green or reddish, and at maturity, it is straw colored or light brown. The pod contains 10 to 20 seeds. Fenugreek grows wild in southern Europe and Asia. This ancient crop plant is known from an archaeological location in Iraq dated at 4000 BC as well as from several Early Bronze Age sites of the Near East. The antiquity of fenugreek is also evidenced by the many words for it in various languages of old derivation: Arabic, Indian (Sanskrit), Latin, and classical Greek. It was grown in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The seeds of fenugreek were used for medicinal and culinary purposes by the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and these uses have persisted down to modern times. The hay was used to promote animal health, a form of veterinary practice in very early times that has survived to the present. Fenugreek is cultivated today in all Mediterranean countries, the Near East and Middle East, northeastern Africa to Ethiopia, Arabia, Turkey, India, China, and Japan. It is grown to a minor extent in Argentina, Canada, and the United States. Fenugreek seed is a source of the steroid diosgenin, which is used in making the female contraceptive pill and synthetic sex hormones. (Diosgenin, mostly obtained from tubers of certain species of South American yams of the genus Dioscorea, is the starting compound for over half of the total steroid production by the pharmaceutical industry.) Drugs from the seeds are now used both in human and veterinary medicine. Today, fenugreek is a multipurpose crop, harvested as a spice, a tea, a vegetable (the leaves are occasionally consumed in India), a forage, a dye plant, and a starter material in the production of steroidal hormones.
