A Fava Fanatic

Do you have a food fantasy? I have several and one was inspired by an article a food magazine …………it’s spring, I’m in Rome, sitting in a restaurant on the edge of a beautiful piazza. In the centre of the piazza there is a fountain, water cascading over stone gods and out of the mouths of weird beasts. I have a glass of chilled white wine and on the table are slices of the local ham and a basket of bright green fava beans in their pods. I break open a pod and ease out the small beans, no bigger than my fingernail, and eat them. So young and tender these beans don’t need to be peeled. If only my first introduction to favas had been like this dream.

In Australia where I grew up we call favas broad beans. A descriptive enough moniker, they are indeed broad. I remember podding them fascinated by the soft, furry interior of the pod where the beans nestled. The pale green beans were large, flat and bitter. Shelling peas was much more fun, I ate a good portion of my work before it reached the pot, with broad beans not one. Cooking them didn’t help; their skins turned dull olive and tough and they remained bitter. I loved shelling broad beans but hated eating them.

So until my mid-twenties I avoided broad beans. As far as I was concerned they weren’t worth the effort. Then, while reading an Italian cookery book, I learnt that after blanching the beans they slipped them out of their bitter skins before eating them. I decided to give favas a second chance.

I bought a large basket of beans at the local market and went to work. The pods were as I remembered lined with furry velvet, but those flattened, dull olive beans didn’t look any more appetizing. I tried one and spat it out. Still I persevered and dropped my shelled beans into boiling salted water. After a couple of minutes I rescued them and cooled them off in a bath of ice water.
I took a bean between my fingers, pinched its dull skin, and out slipped two bright green bean halves. I tentatively tried one, delicious, a fresh green bean taste and not a trace of bitterness, I ate another then another, I was hooked and in no time I’d devoured them all.
 
Every spring I eagerly await the arrival of favas in the market After blanching and peeling I toss them with fresh pasta, pair them with rabbit, veal, and fish, or mix them with peas, baby onions and carrots and lots of butter – I’ve become a fava fanatic.

I was still skeptical that you could eat very young beans without peeling, even so very spring I’d try one or two beans from the smallest pods I could find, but they were always bitter and I hadn’t made it to Rome.

This spring I was in France, in the town of Poitiers with my friend Bruno. It has a large sprawling market, typically French, selling everything from meat, fish, fruit, vegetables to underwear.  We bought some local white asparagus, grilled eel a regional specialty, they kill and grill them while you wait and we’re selecting goat’s cheese when a tiny stall with a pile of baby favas beans caught my eye.

The stallholder explained they were from his garden, and he’d only brought them to the market to pour faire joli as the beans were so small that they really weren’t worth selling.  In a week, when they were bigger, he’d make more money per kilo. Perhaps that’s why small favas beans so rarely make it to the market? I bought all his beans and apologized for making his stall less joli.

Then I found a man selling country ham and bought a large slice, I couldn’t wait to get back to the house. It was warm and sunny so we sat outside, opened a bottle of champagne, my find was worth celebrating, on the table was a slice of ham and a large bowl of favas.

I took a sip of champagne to steel my nerves, so often reality falls short of the dream. I split open a small pod, eased out the tiny beans and popped one into my mouth. Even with its skin the bean was sweet, followed by a piece of salty ham it was a perfect combination. At that moment, the bells in the local church rang, I closed my eyes and I could almost imagine I was in that Roman piazza ….... I was living a culinary dream.

Fava Bean Purée Recipe