“Fūl Medames”

Typical fūl medames “Vicia faba“ is served as breakfast by an Egyptian street vendor with  pickled vegetables, as well as fresh rocket (arugula) leaves on the side and plenty of Baladi (local) bread.

Fūl Street Vendor

Fūl medames (Arabic: فول مدمس‎‎, fūl midammis  IPA: [fuːl meˈdæmmes]; other spellings include fūl mudammas and foule mudammes), or simply fūl, is an Egyptian dish of cooked Fava beans served with vegetable oil, cumin, and optionally with chopped parsley, garlic, onion, lemon juice, and chili pepper. It is a staple food in Egypt. Fūl medames is also a common part of the cuisines of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Israel, Sudan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia.

History

The Egyptian used Broad beans (Vicia faba L.), as a popular food in Egypt for a long time. The oldest known broad beans have been found in 5th dynasty tombs. They were mentioned in one of Ramses II's paeans on himself:

"Lower Egypt rowed to Upper Egypt for you, with barley, wheat, salt and beans without number." Stele of Ramses II, year 8-9

Breakfast is ready..

In medicine beans were used in remedies against constipation, in a remedy for a sick tongue or a treatment for male urinary complaints.

According to Herodotus, who travelled through Egypt in the Late Period, beans were ritually unclean and were not grown for human consumption:

"Beans moreover the Egyptians do not at all sow in their land, and those which they grow they neither eat raw nor boil for food; nay the priests do not endure even to look upon them, thinking this to be an unclean kind of pulse." Herodotus, Histories II

Preparing fūl meal

Diodorus thought that the Egyptians were forbidden to eat beans and chick peas in order to teach them the value of abstention. But legumes were found as offerings in tombs. During the times of Ramses III the priests of Thebes and Memphis received donations of beans. Lupins, lentils, chick peas and peas (since the Middle Kingdom) were also consumed. Lentils, easily kept dry, were used in trading. According to the story of Wenamen's journey 21 measures of lentils were part of the payment the Egyptian ambassador gave to the ruler of Byblos for a shipload of timber.

More evidence of the use of fūl in the middle east was in a cache of 2,600 dried wild beans unearthed at a late Neolithic site on the outskirts of Nazareth.

Fūl

The qidra

  

The word medames was originally “Coptic”, meaning "buried", and it’s use here might mean that the beans are buried in the pot, but the most plausible explanation is that the pot was buried in the smouldering ashes for long hours. This cooking method is mentioned in the Talmud Yerushalmi, indicating that the method was used in Middle Eastern countries at least since the fourth century.

Qidra

In the Middle Ages, the making of fūl in Cairo was monopolized by the people living around the Princess Baths, a public bath in a tiny compound near today's public fountain of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, a block north of the two elegant minarets of the Mosque of Sultan Mu’ayyad Shaykh above the eleventh-century Bab Zuwaylah gate. During the day, bath-attendants stoked the fires heating the qidras, which are huge pots of bath water. Wood was scarce, so garbage was used as fuel and eventually a dump grew around the baths. When the baths closed at the end of the day, the red embers of the fires continued to burn. To take advantage of these precious fires, huge "qidras" (copper containers) were filled with Fava beans, and these cauldrons were kept simmering all night, and eventually all day too, in order to provide breakfast for Cairo's population. Cook shops throughout Cairo would send their minions to the Princess Baths to buy their wholesale fūl.

Fūl plant

Although there are countless ways of embellishing fūl, the basic recipe remains the same. Once the fūl is cooked, it is salted and eaten plain or accompanied by olive oil, corn oil, butter, clarified butter, buffalo milk, basturma, fried or boiled eggs, tomato sauce, garlic sauce, tahini, fresh lemon juice, chili peppers, or other ingredients including Cumin.

Fūl is prepared from the small, round bean known in Egypt as fūl ḥammām ("bath beans"). Other kinds of Fava beans used by Egyptian cooks are fūl rūmī ("Roman"), large kidney-shaped Fava beans, and fūl baladī (local beans, which are of middling size).

Fresh ful pods

Fūl akhḍar ("green fūl") are the fresh Fava beans in their pods eaten mostly in spring during “Sham El Nassim”. Grains of green fūl is also cooked in a tomato sauce as a vegetable dish.

sprout beans

Fūl nābit (sprout beans) are dried Fava bean soaked in water until they sprouts then they are boiled, it is normally eaten as a soup.

Bisara

The fūl madshūsh ("crushed fūl") are dried crushed Fava beans, they normally are used to make the famous Falafel (Tamieh) patties that are basically made from Fūl madshush,  some spices and then deep fried. Another dish is “Besara” a variant of cracked Fūl and green coriander, leaks and many more green spices presented as  puree garnished with fried onions.

Falafel patties

Each family, group, village or country has it own variation of how to prepare Fūl, for example the fūl Iskandarani (From Alexandria) ispresented with parsley and cotton oil, Fūl Domiati (From Damietta) with eggs and sunflower oil etc...

Typical Fūl meal

Amazingly enough Fūl will blend with almost any type of culinary ingredient to suite different tastes. Some recipes will pass it through a strainer to get rid of the skin and present it like a puree again garnished with oil and lemon.

Fūl medames was exported from Egypt to other parts of the Arabic Speaking World, as well as other parts of Africa and Asia, but particularly to Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Yemen, Sudan and Libya.

Fūl is a popular breakfast dish in Syria, especially Aleppo. The Fava beans are left simmering in large copper jars throughout the night, to be served the next morning, the beans swim in tahini and olive oil, completed with a hint of red pepper paste (made from Aleppo pepper) over the top.

Fūl is a very common dish in Armenia, however unlike most Middle Eastern countries, it is modified with more exclusive and rare spices and not to forget "Bastourma".

In Somalia, fūl is eaten with a pancake-like bread called laxoox (canjeero/injera). It is also part of Ethiopian cuisine, where it is one of the only dishes not served with Ethiopia's traditional injera (flatbread). Instead, fūl is served with standard flour bread, often providing a communal kitchen for patrons seeking to bake such types of breads. The beans are topped, or mixed with, a combination of oil and Berber spices.

In Malta, fūl bil-toome (beans with garlic) is usually associated with fasting during Lent and Good Friday. The beans are cooked in oil with garlic and fresh or dried mint, and then dressed with olive oil or vinegar before serving.