Fava Beans: A Syrian Favourite - an extract from The Seed Detective

A Syrian Favourite

The fava or broad bean, Vicia faba, is one of the oldest cultivated crops in the world and it was at the top of my wish list. My travels through Syria took me to Palmyra, a ruined Roman city in the centre of the country – a magnificent oasis surrounded by endless scrub, mountains and desert. When I visited, the city was devoid of tourists, who had been advised either not to come to the country or to leave as soon as possible. So, we had this amazing location pretty much to ourselves. Next to the ruined city was an empty restaurant serving the ubiquitous tourist buffet, which included a salad of fava beans. They were pale green, enormous – larger than my thumb – and delicious. I asked the chef if he had any dried beans I could try and grow back home. He gladly gave me a good handful which, you’ve guessed it, now grow happily in my own garden. He had been cultivating this bean for years on his farm in the oasis, as had his father and his grandfather before him.

Syria is where many of the first eight crops to be domesticated came from. Known as Founder Crops, these are einkorn and emmer wheat, barley, peas, lentils, chickpeas, flax and bitter vetch, which is closely related to the fava bean.¹ This process of domestication started about 12,000 years ago and one of the earliest archaeological sites revealing cultivation is at Tell Abu Hureyra, a settlement on the south side of the river Euphrates, just 75 miles east of Aleppo. The settlement dates back nearly 13,000 years and beans excavated there were found to be almost 10,000 years old. Sadly, this remarkable place has been inundated by the waters of Lake Assad after the Tabqa Dam was completed in 1974.

To date, the parent of the fava bean has yet to be found.² The native wild bean is believed extinct; maybe this should not be a surprise.³ I imagine that countless generations of farmers selected the best beans for the following year’s crop and would have removed less prolific wild varieties because they would have been prone to shattering, an event where the seed pod bursts open when the beans are dry and ripe – something farmers wanted to breed out of the domesticated crop so they could harvest the pods intact. Perhaps one day an intrepid plant hunter will chance upon an isolated population of wild fava bean in the uninhabited badlands of northern Syria, Anatolia or Iraq.

The debate about just when and where the fava or broad bean started life is far from over. Multiple domestications could have taken place over millennia, including in South Asia.⁴ Over the thousands of years that this amazing pulse has been cultivated, there will have been countless local adaptions through domestication. Palmyra was founded more than 2,300 years ago and I have no doubt that the bean I was given had been grown locally for countless generations. The natural philosopher Pliny the Elder (23–79 ce) described the richness of the soil in the surrounding oasis and, with no evidence to back me up, I like to think that the large bean I brought home could be one of the oldest varieties under cultivation. Its short, fat pods, yielding a maximum of three seeds, show similar traits to other known ancient varieties.

Over centuries of breeding, farmers would have selected seed from larger pods with more seed in them for both yield and culinary worth. The short-podded fava bean is also known as the field bean. It is grown in the U.K. primarily as a fodder crop and for export to the Middle East for human consumption. The seeds are also much smaller than the one I was given in Palmyra. In the U.K., all types of fava beans eaten fresh are called broad beans. Exactly why is etymologically unclear. The Latin for bean is faba and in Italian, fava, which was anglicised to mean ‘broad’ in 1896.⁵  Many broad beans have longer pods with up to eight seeds – sometimes more. I was to come across a wonderful example of this type later in my travels across Syria.

I can only hope that the resilience of those Palmyra farmers who remained and survived the catastrophe of the civil war will have enabled them to continue to grow and harvest this remarkable bean. At least it is safe in my little corner of Wales and is also now being grown by a few Syrian refugees in Canada, parts of Western Europe and the U.K., for whom it has great cultural significance and is the basis of much fine Syrian cuisine.

This is an extract from The Seed Detective (Chelsea Green Publishing UK, September 2022) by Adam Alexander and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

References:

1. Dorian Q. Fuller, George Willcox and Robin G. Allaby, ‘Early Agricultural Pathways: Moving Outside the “Core Area” Hypothesis in Southwest Asia’, Journal of Experimental Botany 63, no. 2 (January 2012): 617–33, https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb/err307.

2. Valentina Caracuta et al., ‘14,000-Year-Old Seeds Indicate the Levantine Origin of the Lost Progenitor of Faba Bean’, Scientific Reports 6 (November 2016): 37399, https://doi.org/10.1038/srep37399.

3. Oleg Kosterin, ‘The “Lost Ancestor” of the Broad Bean (Vicia faba L.) and the Origin of Plant Cultivation in the Near East’ [in Russian], Vavilov Journal of Genetics and Breeding 18, no. 4 (2014): 831–40, https://doi.org/10.18699/VJ15.118.

4. Fuller, Willcox and Allaby, ‘Early Agricultural Pathways’: 617–33.

5. More on the etymology behind naming plants: ‘Fava (n.)’, Etymology Online, last accessed 14 March 2022, https://www.etymonline.com/word/fava.

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