Ful medames

This marks for the second year in a row my first post being a recipe from the African continent; last year my first post was injera, while this time let’s move a little northern, in Egypt, with what many consider the national egyptian dish, Ful Medames.

The fava or broad bean is one of the oldest and bigger beans existing, a stubborn plant whose tough seeds make it one of the most labor-intensive beans to work (for this reason it was often fed to horses rather than used for consumption), but favas are also higly adaptable and one of the few legumes able to tolerate low temperature, and that’s why they can be grown as far as in northern Europe. This adaptability allowed favas to proliferate not only in the arid Middle East and Africa but practically anywhere as either a winter or spring crop, probably first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent region, even though the origins of faba are largely unknown and its wild ancestor is probably extinct; its closest wild relatives have a different number of chromosomes and cannot be crossed with fava beans, which suggests that neither of these is an ancestor.

The oldest archaeological remains of favas were found near Nazareth dated between 6500 and 6000 BCE, which contains a cache of some 2,600 well-preserved beans, evidence that they were being gathered and stored, but that those pulses were probably wild; exactly when and where favas were domesticated remains a complete mystery, since it suddenly appear in Bronze Age sites in the third millennium BCE in places as far flung as the iberian peninsula, northern Italy and Switzerland, and the Mediterranean basin, and that’s why some argue that favas may have been independently domesticated in Spain and around Israel, but most likely they spread from the Fertile Crescent in every direction, becoming the premier bean of the ancient world; when the word bean is encountered in European texts prior to 1492, it almost always refers to fava beans.

According to some sources, the roots of fūl mudammas can be traced to Pharaonic Egypt since beans have been found in Twelfth Dynasty tombs (1991-1786 B.C.), while others have suggested that beans were not commonly cultivated in ancient Egypt, and Herodotus in the fifth century B.C., mentions the fact that the Egyptians “never sow beans, and even if any happen to grow wild, they will not eat them, either raw or boiled.”; this claim however could hold true only for the priests, who were said to avoid beans either because they were used in sacrifices (Rameses III offered 11,998 jars of shelled beans to the Nile God), or because this was seen as a means of conscious self-denial for priests, or according to Pliny that claimed that priests abstained from beans because they dull the senses and cause sleeplessness, and anyways egyptians and arabs have a saying going like “Beans have satisfied even the Pharaohs”.

Generally associated with funerary rituals, like most of the seeds, grains and legumes, since they are “dead” but have a positive significance because of their regenerative capacity, the ancient Romans for example believed that the plant of the fava bean was directly linked with the underworld due to its long roots and stem with little ramifications, therefore this plant was considered able to bring the dead back to the world of the living, while broad beans were said to house the souls of the dead; the black spots on the plant’s flowers were associated with mourning.
Fava beans were not always regarded positively, though, since some cultures considered it undesirable to the point where its cultivation was banned in some regions and historical moments.
Herodotus, the Greek historian of the 5th Century BCE, wrote for example that Egyptians actually refused to cultivate fava beans (but as discussed earlier, this seems far from true), while in Rome priests of Jupiter were not allowed to touch or even mention them, due to their association with death and decay, and the other famous Greek philosopher, Pythagoras, banned his followers from eating fava beans and he was often illustrated avoiding them.

The fava bean remained a staple in Egypt through successive ruling dynasties like Persian, Greek, Roman and Muslim, and it is claimed that ful medames was already recorded in ancient hieroglyphs: the word ful apparently derives directly from the ancient language, even though there are still no definitive evidence that it meant fava beans over beans in a broader sense, while medames means ‘buried’ in Coptic language, probably referring to the original method of cooking the fava beans slowly over hot embers under ground.
A similar dish cooked like this, slowly in a pit, is also mentioned in the Jerusalem Talmud and it is usually called hamin or, by modem-day Ashkenazi Jews, cholent, and it is specifically designed to be food for the Sabbath.
Since no work is to be done on the day of rest, nor fires lit, something had to be devised that could cook slowly for hours before sunset on Friday, and the next day the pot could be opened and a meal served without labor; with a similar aim ful medames is usually consumed at breakfast during Islamic Ramadan, to help people go through the day.
This “over the night” similarity applies to the stories of ful medames preparation during the Middle Ages, when the making of fūl was managed mainly by the people living around the Princess Baths, a public bath in a tiny compound near today’s sabil (public drinking fountain) of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha: during the day bath-attendants stoked the fires heating the qidras, huge pots of bath water, and when the baths closed, embers of the fires continued to burn; since wood was scarce, to not waste any fuel, those huge qidras were filled with fava beans and these cauldrons were kept simmering all night, and eventually all day too, to provide breakfast for Cairo’s population.

That’s way ful medames is usually eaten for breakfast with flat bread, and it mainly consists of dried broad beans, which have to be soaked in water to soften prior to cooking, and are then drained, added to fresh water, and cooked slowly on the stove with a very faint flame, until tender
A special pot, a ful-pot, narrow at the base, wide in the middle, and narrow again at the top, is traditionally used, and this special pot is named damasa, the word being the adjective of tadmiis, which means “stewing.”
An alternative name of the pot is also qidra el-ful, where quidra generically means “pot” in Arabic, but with the specification, el-ful becomes the pot used for preparing ful medames.

I found a bit hard sourcing the kind of whole, dried fava beans used traditionally for ful, so I tried the workaround of using split and peeled fava beans, that are more common here in Italy; obviously, this way it loses some texture, since the peeled beans tend to turn mushy after some stewing, and some color from the missing peels, but I don’t think that for the taste it changes too much, we are still talking about the same bean after all; I was not able to find the canned fava beans that I saw used as a fast workaround in many recipes, however.

Without the need for soaking and stewing for a long time I find it a perfect “fast food”, this time not meaning that is perfect for fasting, rather that is very quick to prepare; the flavours are nice, bold and rich, it requires very little ingredients and nothing hard to source: garlic, cumin, onions, tomatoes and chili peppers, that can be used both for the stew and for final topping, lemon and olive oil on the finished dish, some chopped parsley, or roughly minced fresh onion and tomato to complete the toppings; sometimes, especially in the lebanese rendition, tahini is also used.
Boiled egg is very often sided to the dish, as well as some kind of pickles and olives; obviously, flat bread like pita is used for consumption.
The final texture can very much vary from whole fava beans to a smooth mush: it comes down to personal preference and on the total cooking time of the beans, and I myself like a very mushy texture with just some whole fava beans left.
I think that overall it’s a very underrated as a dish: it absolutely gained a rather high in my personal list of dishes, is a nice option for vegetarian or even vegan people; while traditionally it can also be served together with boiled eggs, eggs mashed directly into the stew, or even cured meats like pastirma, you can easily omit them and still end up with a delicious stew!
Just serve it with some sort of pickle (usually cucumber or carrots pickle, sometimes homemade) to smoother the hot and spicy taste of the stew, and enjoy!