Boston Brown Bread

Boston brown bread, served with cream cheese.
Found on Wikimedia Commons, Author (?) jeffreyw

Ever since I can remember, I have been fascinated by recipes.  As a young child, I enjoyed reading cookbooks to get more of them.  Sometimes, I still do.  It's a great way to enjoy more food than you can eat without actually overeating.

Anyway, I was looking on the Internet for baked bean recipes to cook (not just because they make interesting reading) when I spotted a reference to something called "Boston brown bread."  Since I'd never heard of it, I went to Wikipedia to track down some basic information about this tasty-looking item. 

According to Wikipedia, Boston brown bread is a sodium bicarbonate quick bread--like Irish soda bread.  Unlike Irish soda bread, Boston brown bread is made with both whole wheat flour and rye flour, and sweetened with molasses--hence its brown color.  It is considered the traditional accompaniment to baked beans, which is why it was referred to in the baked bean recipe I was reading.  

The Food Timeline has some interesting information about this bread.  It cites Boston brown bread as an explicit example of the phenomenon I referred to in my soda bread post.  First, a simple home-cooked food item is simply food for the poor.  As time goes on, that food acquires an aura of healthiness, because it is so basic.  Eventually, it becomes an item made and sought out by "foodies" for its culinary values other than nutrition (e.g., healthiness, flavor).

Boston brown bread often included corn meal--like rye and whole wheat, another cheap flour that could be exploited by the poor to make their meals more interesting. In fact, the same bread, minus the raisins, was called "Rye and Indian" or "Rye and Injun" bread because rye flour and cornmeal were its main ingredients.  Another variant, "thirded bread", was made with equal parts of rye flour, whole wheat flour, and cornmeal.  All of these were thought of as "make do" breads by the folk who lived on them, and were quickly abandoned by most once white bread became cheap.

Unlike soda bread, which was either baked or pan fried, Boston brown bread was often steamed in a container, such as a coffee can.  The Food Timeline claims that this is because early New England houses didn't have ovens.  Instead, they used a fireplace for cooking, and "[s]teaming was an effective way to make bread without an oven."  It also results in a food that looks a lot like what the British still call a "pudding"--a steamed bread, often with raisins or other sweet additions.

Because it's steamed, Boston brown bread is ideal for the slow cooker--all you need is a suitable container to steam the batter in.  I hope to experiment with some recipes for it later this year.

Fuuling Around

Fuul medames, served with flatbread and pickled vegetables.
Photograph by zachbe; found on Wikimedia Commons.

About a year ago, on Saveur magazine's website, I read and tried a recipe for a very old dish:  Fuul (or ful or foul) medames. The recipe suggested by Saveur may be read here.

Fuul medames, or simply fuul, is fava beans, boiled and/or simmered until the beans are soft enough to be coarsely mashed.  A suitably flavorful fat and seasonings of choice are added to the beans before they are eaten.

Fuul is an ancient dish in the Near East. The earliest physical evidence for fuul consumption is a Neolithic cache of fava beans discovered near Nazareth, in Israel, and bean caches have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, though Herodotus (admittedly a less than reliable source) claimed that the Egyptians of his day neither sowed nor ate beans.  Today, the preferred additions to fuul are olive oil, lemon juice, and cumin, but there are a variety of other ingredients one can use to season fuul, including butter, onions, garlic, tomatoes, cayenne, chili peppers, harissa, tahini, coriander, and parsley. Fuul is a popular Near Eastern breakfast food, and is often accompanied with flatbread and eggs (either hard-boiled or fried).

By chance, at the time I read the Saveur recipe, canned pre-cooked fava beans of the type commonly used in the Near East were available at our neighborhood Wegmans supermarket (for $2.49, or thereabouts, for one can, roughly enough for two servings), so I bought a few cans and tried the recipe out.

I loved it, and my husband was at least willing to eat it again on an occasional basis. That was fine with me, because $2.49 per can was a bit expensive for a regular lunch, and I couldn't find an online supplier that would sell the canned beans by the case at a reasonable price.  Fava beans are not terribly common in the United States compared to many other types of beans, and I do not live in a section of the country where Near Eastern immigrants have settled in great numbers and thus where Near Eastern groceries are common.

Shortly thereafter, our neighborhood Wegmans stopped selling the Near Eastern fava beans (which tend to be smaller than the larger favas often used in Italian cooking).  Wegmans switched, eventually, to selling canned, organic large favas for $1.79 per can.  I tried these favas.  They tasted fine, but I had to remove the skins from the beans after opening the can and before heating/cooking them per package directions, because eating fuul with tough bean skins in it is like eating beans containing small pieces of Scotch tape--not very appetizing.  Since I still had not found a supplier that could provide me with a sufficient quantity of canned or dry beans at a price I was willing to accept, I remained resigned to eating ful only occasionally.  This was unfortunate since Eric had become more interested in fuul after discovering that it tasted a lot better to him when he added some cooked ground beef to it.

Then, within the past month or so, I discovered a food blog called Matters of the Belly, which is written by Noha, an Egyptian woman now living in Australia. She writes, with authority, about how to make fuul, here, and suggests a number of different ways to flavor it.

Dried fava beans of the kind commonly used for fuul;
Photograph by miansari66; found on Wikimedia Commons.

Noha's recipe recommends making fuul from dried fava beans, and reading it inspired me to try again to find a source of dry favas, which would keep indefinitely and have the virtue of extreme cheapness. Moreover, she states that one can easily make a large amount of fuul at one time and refrigerate it, heating up smaller portions and flavoring them as you wish to eat them.  Because that's how Eric and I typically handle most meals (i.e., by cooking large quantities in advance and heating up individual portions throughout the week) Noha's recipe rekindled my interest in making fuul a regular part of our lunch time menus.  So I started another bout of web searching...and discovered that Wegmans carries Goya brand dried fava beans!

When I checked the shelves at our local Wegmans, the fava beans were there...for $1.79 a pound. They were the large beans, which are less desirable for fuul (because of the issue with the skins). But I bought three bags of them anyway.  This past weekend, I attempted to make fuul as Noha recommended, a process that took nearly half a day, exclusive of the time needed to soak the beans.

Noha's recipe recommends beginning by soaking the beans in a large quantity of cold water with 2 teaspoons of baking soda, which is supposed to make the beans more digestible and shorten the cooking time.  So that's what I did.  But the baking soda did not result in a significant reduction of the cooking time--possibly because the Goya beans were the large variety (and also appeared to be very old).  Or perhaps I needed to use more baking soda, because we have very hard water in our area.

At any rate, after two hours of simmering (per Noha's directions), most of the beans were still hard, and still possessed their skins.  So I decided to shell the beans by hand, which was trickier than one might suppose because I had also added red lentils to the mix per Noha's recipe.  So I was forced to scoop out a few beans at a time to shell them.  Even after shelling, it took nearly four more hours of simmering before most of the beans were soft enough to mash and the rest were at least soft enough to chew.  At that point, I decanted them, sprinkled a bit of lemon juice on the top to prevent oxidation, and refrigerated them.

It was a lot of work, but so far Eric and I have had three meals of fuul.  The batch I made tastes pretty much like the fuul I'd made from canned beans, though the texture is a bit rougher (due to the beans that never did completely soften).  I've been trying different ways of flavoring it, all of which were successful.  Best of all, fuul is extremely filling; one doesn't get hungry quickly after a meal of fuul, and one tends to want less food for the rest of the day after eating it.  Although I will go on looking for a source of dried, smaller fava beans, the Goya beans are a workable solution, and I expect we will be eating a lot of fuul from now on.

EDIT:  (1/17/2017)  Corrected the price on the canned fava beans at Wegmans to $1.79.  Now they're $1.89 a can, anyway.

Western Beans, Part II

Today for lunch I made another batch of lightly boiled fava beans.  This time, I added smoked bacon, a gift from some vegetarian friends, and green onions to the batch, and covered them with about an inch of water.

I did not succeed in gently heating them in the water for hours, as Bach suggested in "Carolingian Foodways", but I turned them down to a simmer and simmered them for about 10 minutes.  Then I stirred in some English mustard and some salt, and heated them in a bit more water before draining and serving them.

Fresh out of the pot, they were pretty bland, but my husband and I made some post-cooking additions that made them quite tasty, namely:

• More salt.
• Butter (Bach expressly suggests doing this, if the bacon used is not very fatty).
• A little garlic powder.

My husband suggested that the next batch should be simmered longer (true enough, but it was getting late for lunch, and we were both hungry) and that a lot more onions should be added.  He also suggested adding dill, which I have mixed feelings about.  (Dill is certainly a period addition, but I don't like the flavor of it very much.)   I also think adding fresh garlic would be useful, and will do so next time.  Perhaps that's getting a bit fancy for what was very basic food in period, but onions and garlic were certainly available, and people do tend to use what resources they have to improve their food.  

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. 

A Different Sort of Breakfast

Ful medames  (source:  Wikimedia Commons)

My latest food experiment has involved a modern ethnic cuisine instead of reconstruction of an ancient one. 

The dish in question is ful medames (the name is spelled a number of ways, but this one seems to be the most common in English language sources) and it is a popular breakfast dish in Egypt, the Sudan, and neighboring regions.  It could well be ancient in origin; "medames" supposedly comes from an Coptic word meaning "buried" which, in turn, may suggest that they were originally prepared by burying a pot of beans in close proximity with live coals (or containing heated rocks). Confirmation of the antiquity of any food type or recipe is, however, difficult where written sources or archaeology can't help out.

Modern ful (as the dish is sometimes called) is simply fava beans, boiled until they are soft, and then mixed with flavorings, usually olive oil and lemon juice.  Common additions to the recipe include mashed garlic, cayenne, and tomatoes or tomato sauce.  They are often eaten with eggs; the eggs may be hard boiled as shown in the picture here, but might also be fried or poached. They may also be eaten with flatbread or in a pita.

I became curious about ful when I started looking for quick, economical, low-carbohydrate lunch alternatives to sandwiches. There are many recipes for how to prepare it on the Internet; this one from Saveur caught my eye because it calls for canned fava beans and does not require soaking dried beans, which requires advance planning, as well as a source of dried beans.  My local supermarket carries canned fava beans, so I began with that.

What I didn't realize is that "fava beans" (or broad beans as they are sometimes called) come in different sizes.  The size used in ful medames is small, like a pinto bean.  What my supermarket had was the larger bean, more like a lima bean.   When I boiled the canned large size beans, the insides of the beans became soft, but the outer coating remained tough and the two tended to separate.  So my ful, though tasty, had many tough shells, a bit like old Scotch tape in texture, in it.  I picked out as many as I could while I was mixing in the flavorings, but I couldn't get them all.

This was frustrating, since I really liked the result, and my husband found it acceptable. The taste of the beans themselves was rather delicate, unlike Great Northern beans or pinto beans (so I'm not interested in using those easy-to-find varieties as a substitute).

Turning to other possibilities, I learned that Amazon.com carries canned small-size fava beans, and this variety sells for a reasonable 89 cents USD per 15-ounce can.  Unfortunately, shipping costs make the total cost prohibitive for me. 

I understand that "Middle Eastern" groceries are likely to stock this product. However, there are none located near me; the nearest I've learned of via the Internet are in downtown Philadelphia and are inconveniently located for regular shopping.   For now, I will continue to look for a closer source, but I may have to resign myself to making ful an occasional treat instead of a regular part of my diet.