Typical fūl medames breakfast as served by an Egyptian street vendor with bread and pickled vegetables, as well as fresh rocket (arugula) leaves on the side.

Some writers have suggested that ful medames dated all the way back to Ancient Egypt.







Ful

in hieroglyphs

Some evidence of the use of ful is a cache of 2,600 dried fava beans unearthed at a late Neolithic site on the outskirts of Nazareth.[1]

This cooking method is mentioned in the Talmud Yerushalmi, indicating that the method was used in Horn of African and 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, cured beef (basturma), fried or boiled eggs, tomato sauce, garlic sauce, tahini, fresh lemon juice, chili peppers, or other ingredients.

In the Middle Ages, the making of fūl in Cairo 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 al-Muayyad above the 11th century Bab Zuweila gate. During the day, bath attendants stoked the fires heating the qidras, which are 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, in order to provide breakfast for Cairo's population. Cookshops throughout Cairo would send their minions to the Princess Baths to buy their wholesale fūl.[2]

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