Ful Medames - History

History

The roots of fūl medammis can be traced to Ancient Northern Sudan and Egypt. Quantities of beans have been found in Twelfth Dynasty tombs (1991–1786 BC). Fava beans were also mentioned in Hittite texts and the Bible. Ramses III of Egypt is known to have offered 11,998 jars of beans to the god of the Nile. Some writers have suggested that beans were not commonly cultivated in Ancient Egypt, and Herodotus in the fifth century BC, 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."

The earliest evidence of the use of ful is a cache of 2,600 dried wild beans unearthed at a late Neolithic site on the outskirts of Nazareth, Israel.

Some believe that the word medammis was originally Coptic, meaning "buried," and its use here might mean that the beans are buried in the pot. This cooking method is mentioned in the Talmud Yerushalmi, indicating that the method was used in Middle Eastern countries since the fourth century. 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, béchamel sauce, basturma, fried or boiled eggs, tomato sauce, garlic sauce, tahini, fresh lemon juice, or other ingredients.

In the Middle Ages, the making of fūl 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, 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, the red embers of the fires continued to burn. To take advantage of these precious fires, 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. Cookshops throughout Cairo would send their minions to the Princess Baths to buy their wholesale fūl.

Fūl is prepared from the small, round bean known in Egypt as fūl ḥammām. The beans are cooked until very soft. Other kinds of fava beans used by Egyptian cooks are fūl rūmī, large kidney-shaped fava beans, and fūl baladī, country beans, of middling size. Fūl nābit (or nābid) is fava bean sprouts, fūl akhḍar ('green fūl') is fresh fava beans, and fūl madshūsh is crushed fava beans.