A Western Beans Experiment

Reading Volker Bach's suggestion in "Carolingian Foodways" that flavored boiled fava beans likely were a Carolingian staple inspired me to find another use for some of the canned fava beans I had bought to make ful medames.  Instead of using garlic, lemon juice, and olive oil to flavor the beans after boiling, I decided to use ingredients that were more likely to have been used in Carolingian Europe, namely bacon, onions, and mustard.  

Bach's recipe calls for discarding the water after boiling the beans, then mixing in the bacon, mustard, or other condiments with a little water and then letting the pot sit "over a gentle heat" for 10-20 minutes, so the flavors combine, watching carefully so that the beans don't burn. 

I had two different and conflicting reservations about this recipe.  One is based upon the use of boiling as a period technique.  It seemed likely to me that if a period cook wanted to flavor beans with bacon, the cook would have put the bacon in and boiled it with the beans, stirring in mustard and other flavorants (Bach suggests vinegar, butter or other fats) shortly before serving, instead of dumping out the original boiling water before adding the bacon. Dumping cooking water and adding fresh water, a trivial operation for us, would have been much more difficult when cooking over a fire without a nearby source of running water, or a sink, available.

The other reservation I had relates to ingredients. I was skeptical about how much flavoring would result if you heated modern sliced bacon raw in a pot with beans.  (Salt pork might work better, but that's not especially easy to get where I live.)  Boiling the bacon didn't seem likely to be an improvement.  Most modern bacon is very fatty and thinly sliced, and I feared that boiling it would make the beans greasy and nasty without adding appreciably to their flavor.

So I fried some bacon with onions and, after the beans were finished boiling, I chopped up the bacon, stirred the bacon bits and onions into the beans with a dollop of strong English mustard, and heated the mixture through before serving it. 

The result was wonderful.  The slight crunchiness of the bacon, as well as its flavor, complimented the beans perfectly while the onions added a slightly sweet note, and the mustard became nearly undetectable except for enhancing the umami of the dish.  My husband liked them much more than he had liked the ful medames, and I had to agree.  If I can get a regular source of small dried or canned favas, I will have to make these "Carolingian" beans again.

As a historical experiment, however, the beans I made were a bit of a failure.  They weren't all that Carolingian, because based on my reading of Bach's book, the Carolingians were unlikely to have fried their bacon before adding it to a pot of beans.  So although I have a new and interesting recipe for my repertoire, I still haven't achieved a plausibly Carolingian taste experience.

With these considerations in mind, I'm planning another beany experiment.  This time, I intend to boil (or, rather, simmer, in light of the difficulty of boiling anything in the clay cooking pots of the period) bacon and onions together with some of the canned beans I have left.  Granted, I only need to boil canned beans for about 8-10 minutes, and I do not need to spend hours soaking and cooking dried favas for edibility.  However, it's more conceivable that a Carolingian cook might have thrown onions into a pot toward the end of a long cooking process than to assume that such a cook would have pre-fried them first.  

Part of the impetus for this new experiment is my realization that I don't have to use supermarket bacon.  When I made my last bean recipe, I'd forgotten that we have a sizable hunk of dry-cured bacon, a present from a friend.  It's hard enough that it might need to be boiled to be edible--a boon for the experiment I have in mind.  (In fact, this bacon might need more boiling/simmering to be edible than the canned beans.)  For my next beany experiment, I will hack off some of the bacon and simmer it with my beans, along with some onion pieces, for a much longer time than the 8 minutes of hard boiling recommended by the ful medames recipe I've been using.  The mustard can be stirred in right before serving, as Bach suggests.  I expect this will get me closer to the true Carolingian bean experience.  It will be interesting to see how well my spouse and I like the result.