Fūl medames: a dish with fava beans

Fūl medames is a popular dish in the entire Middle East. It consists of cooked fava beans, served with vegetable oil and a bit of cumin. Depending on the local recipe cooks add chopped parsley, garlic, onion, lemon juice, chili pepper and other vegetables, herbs and spices. Fūl medames is a staple food in Egypt, especially in the northern cities of Cairo and Gizah. However, the dish is also a common feature of other Middle Eastern and African cuisines, such as Israel, Labanon, Palestina, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia.

The first part of Fūl medames, ‏fūl, means 'bean' in Arabic. It is cognate with Hebrew pul ('bean'). The second part is generally considered a Coptic word meaning 'buried', from Coptic tōms, 'to bury'.  Ian D. Morris, historian of early Muslim societies, and I would venture another meaning: medames looks like a version of dims, meaning 'ashes' in the Egyptian dialect of Arabic, in the sense that the beans would be 'cooked in a pot buried in ashes'.

Fūl is prepared from the small, round bean known in Egypt as fūl ḥammām ('bath beans'). The name reflects the Medieval custom, that the making of fūl in Cairo was monopolized by the people living around a public bath. During the day, bath-attendants stoked the fires heating the qidras (qdr is 'pot' in Arabic), huge pots of bath water. When the baths closed, the red embers of the fires continued to burn. To take advantage of these precious fires, the qidras were filled with fava beans, and these cauldrons were kept simmering all night, in order to provide breakfast for Cairo's population.

It has been suggested that ful medames was already prepared in ancient Egypt, because 'ful' was discovered to be written in hieroglyphs. A hieroglyph of 'ful' ('bean') is not proof that the entire dish was prepared in ancient Egypt. Besides, ful once simply meant 'bean' and could also suggest chickpeas. The history of fava beans is far more ancient than, say, around 2700 BC, the start of the Old Kingdom in Egypt.

Valentina Caracuta, an archaeobotanist, found traces of wild fava beans, growing on Mount Carmel (Israel), some 14,000 years ago[1]. Which means that Israel beat Egypt by ten millennia.

This cooking method is even mentioned in the Talmud Yerushalmi, indicating that the method was used in Horn of African and Middle Eastern countries since the fourth century. Although there are countless ways of embellishing fūl, the basic recipe remains the same.

[2] Caracuta et al: 14,000-year-old seeds indicate the Levantine origin of the lost progenitor of faba bean in Scientific Reports - 2016