Bean and Legume

This homely dish is a favorite in Syria and Lebanon. Good-quality canned chickpeas will do. If you are using them, drain a 14-ounce can and put them in with the rice.

In Egypt this is prepared in the spring, when fava beans are very young and tender. It is served hot as an accompaniment to meat, or cold with yogurt and a salad. Egyptians do not remove the skins of the beans.

A number of popular Lebanese dishes which go under the name of fatta (see page 222) involve yogurt and a bed of soaked toasted or fried bread. This one is served for breakfast accompanied by scallions and green peppers cut into strips.

In Morocco it is poor food eaten hot with bread. A grander version with saffron is served as a first course. You may use canned chickpeas. The same can also be done with white cannelini beans, dried or canned.

A good partner to omelets, little spicy sausages, and fried or broiled eggplant.

A lentil-and-spinach dish was prepared in medieval Persia to heal the sick. For the cure to be effective, the ingredients had to be bought with money begged in the streets. Here is a modern version.

Beans cooked in olive oil and eaten at room temperature are a Turkish staple. The mottled pink borlotti beans (they are called barbunya, which is also the name for red mullets) are a special treat. The Turkish ones obtainable here need to be picked over for foreign matter. There are also good-quality canned varieties which you can use.

This is good hot or cold, with plenty of raw olive oil.

This is sometimes made with lettuce leaves.

This too is for vegetables to be eaten cold.

A Persian filling of meat and rice with yellow split peas is cooked in a sweet-and-sour sauce and served hot with plain rice.

Turlu is a Turkish dish of mixed seasonal vegetables cooked in olive oil. The winter turlu consists of root vegetables and beans.

A tbikha is a Tunisian dish which mixes fresh vegetables with pulses such as chickpeas and dried fava beans.

Use olive oil and add lemon juice if you want to eat this cold.

Combinations of fresh and dry vegetables are called tbikhas in North Africa. All kinds of vegetables—peppers, carrots, turnips, cardoons, spinach—are cooked together with chickpeas and dried beans. This dish can be made hot and peppery with harissa, but it is very good without.

A Persian dish.

Fava beans are the most important vegetable of Egypt. Buy young, tender ones in their season. If they are very young, you can cook them in their pods, which you cut into pieces. Some supermarkets sell young fava beans already shelled in packets, which do not need to be skinned. Older beans have tough skins as well as tough pods. The skinned frozen ones you can buy in Middle Eastern stores are particularly good.

Chicory is one of the vegetables believed to have been eaten in ancient Egypt. It has a pleasant, slightly bitter taste when it is cooked. In this Lebanese mountain dish, wild chicory is used.

The combination of spinach with chickpeas is common throughout the Middle East, but the flavors here are Egyptian. You may use good-quality canned chickpeas. It is good served with yogurt.

The Copts of Egypt observe a long and arduous fast during Lent—El Soum el Kibir—when they abstain from every kind of animal food, such as meat, eggs, milk, butter, and cheese, and eat only bread and vegetables, chiefly fava beans. Artichoke hearts and fava beans in oil is a favorite Lenten dish, also popular with the Greeks of Egypt. These two vegetables are partnered in every Middle Eastern country, and indeed all around the Mediterranean, but this dish with almonds is uncommon and particularly appealing. You can find frozen artichoke hearts and bottoms from Egypt that are difficult to tell from fresh ones, and frozen skinned fava (or broad) beans in Middle Eastern stores. But if you want to use fresh ones, see the box on the opposite page for preparing artichoke hearts or bottoms. If your fava beans are young and tender, you do not need to skin them.