Fava Fave

“I know how to piss them off,” God must have thought. “I’d like to see the humans try to eat these things.” 

He meant fava beans. Also known as vicia faba, by those who speak Latin. Also also known as broad beans, field beans, tick beans, and horse beans (Vicia faba var. equina). After the fall, after being tossed out of the Garden, we were born to labor, to toil and struggle. He was right. Fava beans are a lot of work. Give him the benefit of the doubt: Maybe God made them with horses in mind. 

I never think of fava without remembering our friend Mario, married to the sister of one of Tizi’s best friends back in San Marino. He went to his eternal reward at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, lost in the middle of a heart surgery during lockdown conditions. Whenever we pulled up and stopped in front of our building, just arrived from the US, Mario met us on the sidewalk. He was all smiles. He was enjoying retirement. He had his wife, his kids and grandkids, his friends, his garden. Every fall we talked about how truffle season was shaping up, what they were selling for. He warned us: Watch out for the Chinese truffles. Be sure you get the real thing, meaning the Italian white truffle.  He said he bought one truffle each year and ate it on crostini and pasta for a few weeks, until it was gone.  

One Tuesday, after walking up to the piazza to buy fruits and vegetables from the vegetable man and his wife, I ran into Mario in front of our building. I couldn’t miss his bemused look. He was frequently bemused. He pointed at the bag of fava beans I was holding.

“Why are you buying those things?” he said. 

“I love them,” I said. I figured he meant because of the work they required, why would I buy them. 

“I have more than I know what to do with in my garden,” he said. “Come and pick some.”  He must have known I wasn’t going to do that. The next morning when I opened the front door of our apartment, there was a large bag of them hanging on the door handle. They were fresh, picked that morning (he said he gardened between 5:00 and 7:00 a.m.), the pods dark green, soft and velvety. In a few minutes I had shelled them. We had them for lunch. They were delicious.

The ones I found here in Detroit the other day, from God knows where–Mexico or California, I would guess–were not like Mario’s. They were big leathery things that were hard to break into. What you would like to do is grab the stem and pull it down the edge of the pod, which you hope unzips the thing so you can run your thumb up and divide the pod along that seam, flipping the beans free. That’s what you would like to do. These were mature fava, possibly senior citizens, engineered to sit in storage, travel 2000 miles, then sit in storage again. 

There was some cursing, there was some violence, but I succeeded in extracting the beans. And they were big dudes. At this point, the work is not done. You’re still not out of the extraction stage. These beans wear a jacket, a suit of armor to protect what’s inside. Typically I flash boil them, then remove each jacket one at a time. It’s a fool’s errand, standing at the sink, counting beans. These particular fave (fava’s plural), because of their size and advanced age (I assumed) I assumed would probably be tough, flat, dry, chewy green buttons–so  decided that flash was not enough, that I should let them boil for a bit. I did, six minutes. Drained and shocked in cold water, the jackets softened and wrinkled, some of the jackets split. There was still the sink work, but the beans, brilliant green, popped and slid free, soft and inviting. What to do?

Ordinarily I drizzle olive oil over them and add salt and pepper. And I always think: I need to do better. And these fave, in which I had expected to be disappointed, deserved better. On the Google I searched ricette con le fava and found, on Cookist, no fewer than 25 dishes, among them pasta fava e asparagi. I had stalks of Michigan asparagus leftover from the night before. I had an open box of penne. Do it.

The dish wasn’t much work. Sauté some onion, cut up the leftover asparagus, toss them with the onion and fave; add sea salt and fresh ground pepper. Forget about the penne (we ate pasta the day before). This was a fresh bright green side dish, soft fave and still crunchy asparagus. The recipe called for pecorino. I grated some Parmigiano over mine (Tizi did not). She made the right decision. Better on their own, uncheesed. 

Just to make sure, I went back the next day and bought more fave and repeated the dish. I’ll be going back to the 25 recipes. Thank God for fave. Maddening, then gorgeous and delicious. Worth the effort.