the.com/broad bean
The oldest cultivated bean, fuzzy-lined like it's keeping its seeds in velvet bunk beds.
means A large, flat, edible bean (Vicia faba) eaten fresh or dried, also known as the fava bean.
from "Broad" is the plain Old English word for wide, here describing the bean's flat, wide shape — Vicia faba pods do indeed splay broader than a slender green bean. The companion name "fava" comes via Italian from Latin faba, "bean," a root so old it surfaces across the Romance languages and may be cousin to other Indo-European bean-words. This is one of humanity's most ancient crops, cultivated around the Mediterranean and Near East long before the New World beans arrived — so when English needed to distinguish it, it simply called it the wide one.
- ancient crop
- Eaten since 6500 BC, predating wheat in some regions
- genetic risk
- Can trigger favism, a dangerous reaction in some people
- another name
- Known as fava, from the Latin faba
- frost lover
- Thrives in cold, often sown before winter
- superstition
- Pythagoras famously forbade his followers from eating them
fava bean — vicia faba, staple crop in mediterranean and middle eastern cuisines for millennia
ful medames — egyptian national dish made from stewed fava beans, eaten for breakfast across egypt
habas a la andaluza — spanish tapas dish of broad beans from andalusia region, traditionally served with jamón