Lech Lecha Recipe – Ful Medames, Egyptian Broad Beans

FUL MEDAMES, EGYPTIAN BROAD BEANS

Claudia Roden

The traditional Egyptian breakfast of dried fava beans is also the national dish, eaten at all times of the day, in the fields, in village mud-houses, and in the cities. Restaurants serve it as a mezze, and it is sold in the streets. Vendors put the beans in large, round, narrow-necked vessels, which they bury through the night in the dying embers of the public baths. Ful medames is pre-Ottoman and pre-Islamic. It is probably as old as the Pharaohs. According to an Arab saying: “Beans have satisfied even the Pharaohs.” Egyptians gleefully tell you that the little brown beans have been found in pharaonic tombs and have been made to germinate. There are fields of them, and promotional explanations on fake papyrus by the Ministry of Agriculture. Of course, they could have been put there by tomb robbers. There are many types of dried fava beans—small, middle-sized, and large, all of which can be used—and there are very good-quality canned ones. Most expatriates are happy with canned ones, which they improve on with flavorings and trimmings. These need to be turned into a pan with their juice and cooked for 15 minutes.

Ingredients

2 cups small Egyptian fava beans (ful medames), soaked overnight (and left unpeeled)
Salt
1/3 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley
Extra-virgin olive oil
3 lemons, quartered
Salt and pepper
4–6 cloves garlic, crushed
Chili-pepper flakes
Cumin
Preparation

As the cooking time varies depending on the quality and age of the beans, it is good to cook them in advance and to reheat them when you are ready to serve. Cook the drained beans in a fresh portion of unsalted water in a large saucepan with the lid on until tender, adding water to keep them covered, and salt when the beans have softened. They take 2–2 1/2 hours of gentle simmering. When the beans are soft, let the liquid reduce. It is usual to take out a ladle or two of the beans and to mash them with some of the cooking liquid, then stir this back into the beans. This is to thicken the sauce.

Serve the beans in soup bowls sprinkled with chopped parsley and accompanied by Arab bread.

Pass round the dressing ingredients for everyone to help themselves: a bottle of extra-virgin olive oil, the quartered lemons, salt and pepper, a little saucer with the crushed garlic, one with chili-pepper flakes, and one with ground cumin.

The beans are eaten gently crushed with the fork, so that they absorb the dressing.

Optional Garnishes
Peel hard-boiled eggs—1 per person—to cut up in the bowl with the beans.

Top the beans with a chopped cucumber-and-tomato salad and thinly sliced mild onions or scallions. Otherwise, pass round a good bunch of scallions and quartered tomatoes and cucumbers cut into sticks.

Serve with tahina cream sauce or salad, with pickles and sliced onions soaked in vinegar for 30 minutes.

Another way of serving ful medames is smothered in a garlicky tomato sauce.

In Syria and Lebanon, they eat ful medames with yogurt or feta cheese, olives, and small cucumbers.

Variations
A traditional way of thickening the sauce is to throw a handful of red lentils (1/4 cup) into the water at the start of the cooking.

In Iraq, large brown beans are used instead of the small Egyptian ones, in a dish called badkila, which is also sold for breakfast in the street.

Claudia Roden is a renowned cookbook writer and cultural anthropologist based in the London, England. She was born in 1936 in Cairo, Egypt. After completing her formal education in Paris, she moved to London to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art. She is best known as the author of Middle Eastern cookbooks including A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1968), The New Book of Middle Eastern Food (2000), The Book of Jewish Food (1997), and Arabesque—Sumptuous Food from Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon (2005).