The Slow Two Weeks: On Podding Peas and the Older Life of the Broad Bean

There is a particular sound that a fresh pea makes when it hits the side of an enamel bowl. It is a small dry click, followed by a very slight roll, and if you are podding peas at any speed you produce it about four hundred times an hour. It is one of the most satisfying kitchen sounds in existence, and it is also, increasingly, one of the rarest, because almost nobody pods peas any more.

For most of the year and for most of the world, peas arrive frozen in bags. This is not, in any principled sense, a bad thing. Flash-frozen peas are picked young and processed within hours, and they are often, by the time they reach a January kitchen in Manchester or Marseille, in better condition than the fresh ones lying about on the same day. But for a brief window of early summer, the pods themselves appear at the market — waist-high crates of them at the stall — and someone in the family has to sit down at the kitchen table with a colander and open them one at a time.

Broad beans are the same, only more so. A kilo of broad beans in the pod produces, if you are lucky, three hundred grams of beans. If you then blanch them and slip them out of their pale second skin — as most of the Mediterranean traditions require — you are down to perhaps two hundred and fifty. This is an outrageous ratio. It also means that the fresh broad bean, more than almost any other vegetable, is a dish you make when you have time on your hands and someone to sit with.

The fortnight in which you can do this in northern Europe is now. Peas and broad beans are the last vegetables of spring properly considered, before the tomato and the courgette and the aubergine take over the kitchen for the summer. They are green and grassy and sweet, and they belong to a slightly older way of eating that is quietly disappearing.

There is a Roman tradition, held over from May Day but which drifts, in the cooler north, into July, of eating raw broad beans with a wedge of pecorino romano and a glass of red wine. The beans are still in their pods on the table. Each person opens one, thumbs out the beans, eats them with a small chunk of the sharp sheep's cheese, and takes a sip of the wine. That is the dish. There is no cooking, no reduction, no plating. The beans have to be young enough that the second skin is still soft, which is roughly a two-week window in any given place. Older than that and you need to blanch and slip them.

In Spain the same young beans become habitas con jamón, a Sunday-lunch dish across Andalusia and Extremadura in which the beans are briefly sautéed in olive oil with strips of cured ham and, in some versions, a spoonful of sherry. The ham and the bean have almost no shared culinary ancestry, but they turn out — as everyone who tries it discovers — to be one of those pairings that seem inevitable in retrospect. In Portugal the same beans go into favada, a heavier stew with chorizo and coriander, more of a lunch than an appetizer.

In France the equivalent obsession has always been the pea. Petits pois à la française — braised with the outer leaves of a lettuce, small spring onions, butter, and a whisper of sugar — was the aristocratic dish of the seventeenth century. Louis XIV, it is said, became briefly deranged about them. Madame de Maintenon wrote to a friend, in the middle of a pea-eating summer at Versailles, that the impatience to eat them, the pleasure of having eaten them, and the desire to eat them again were the three questions her princes had been discussing for the last four days. An entire court in the grip of a vegetable. It is difficult to imagine the same letter being written about, say, a swede.

The English version of the same tradition — pea and mint soup, peas with a chunk of ham, mushy peas alongside fish and chips — is less theatrical but structurally identical. The pea is the summer green thing. You eat it while you can.

But this is only half of the story of these two vegetables, and arguably the shorter half.

Because the broad bean, in particular, has a second and much longer life, in which nothing at all is thrown away and nobody sits at a kitchen table popping pods. In the second life, the bean is dried. And in that state it has been feeding the eastern and southern Mediterranean for something like six thousand years.

Ful medames is the Egyptian national dish. It is a slow-cooked stew of dried broad beans, olive oil, garlic, cumin, and lemon, served with warm flatbread at breakfast, and it has been served, more or less unchanged, since pharaonic times. Dried fava beans have been found in tombs. The dish is eaten before dawn in Ramadan and every other morning of the year across Cairo, Alexandria, Khartoum, Addis Ababa, Sanaa, and every city in between. It is one of the great sustaining dishes of the world, and it does not care in the slightest whether the beans are fresh — in fact it would prefer them not to be.

In Morocco the dried bean becomes bissara, a thick soup with olive oil and cumin, sold at street stalls and eaten with the same flat bread. In Egypt the dried fava becomes ta'ameya, the older, greener, more fragrant ancestor of the falafel that everywhere else makes with chickpeas. In Greece, confusingly, the yellow split pea preparation of Santorini is also called fava, and has nothing to do with the broad bean at all, but is served in the same way — puréed, drizzled with olive oil, eaten with bread.

Two entirely different vegetables, in effect. The fresh broad bean is a delicate, briefly-available luxury, eaten with cheese and wine on a May afternoon. The dried broad bean is a peasant staple that has been feeding entire civilisations for as long as agriculture has existed. They are the same species. They occupy almost no shared imaginative space.

There is a small strangeness that connects them, which is worth mentioning because it is genuinely peculiar.

The Pythagoreans, in the sixth century BC, famously refused to eat broad beans. There are various theories about why. One is that they believed the beans contained the souls of the dead, and to eat one was to swallow an ancestor. Another is that the flowers of the plant have small black marks that resemble the Greek letters used to spell out grief. Another, and probably the most useful, is that they had noticed a real medical phenomenon that we now call favism: an inherited enzyme deficiency, most common in Mediterranean populations, that causes severe hemolytic anaemia in some people when they eat broad beans. Roughly one in ten men of southern Italian, Greek or Middle Eastern descent still carries it. The ancient Mediterranean was, in other words, entirely correct to be a little wary of the bean. Some people cannot safely eat it. This is not superstition; it is genetics.

The taboo faded but the wariness lingers, in a distant way, in the elaborate rituals around preparing the fresh bean — the double-podding, the blanching, the careful discarding of anything not perfectly green. There is a memory in the kitchen, older than anyone can now trace, that the bean must be handled with a certain respect.

The Louis XIV story, incidentally, is said to end with him made ill by a pea binge. He ate several plates of them at supper, felt unwell, ate several more, and had to be put to bed. The chronicler notes it with the same faint bemusement he uses for the king's other excesses. The pea, like the bean, does not entirely repay unbridled enthusiasm.

What I like about broad beans and peas as a July subject is the way they force the kitchen to slow down. You cannot rush a bowl of pods. There is a specific pleasure — one of the last available in modern cooking — in the slow work of opening them, thumbing out the small green bodies, hearing the pea click into the bowl, watching the pile of empty pods grow next to the pile of pea. You do it in company or you do it while listening to something on the radio. Half an hour goes by. You have prepared enough peas for four people. You have not looked at your phone.

Everything else in the summer garden is about to come in a rush. The tomato and the courgette and the aubergine and the peach and the fig will require, from now until October, a different kind of cooking — quick, hot, abundant, generous. The pea and the bean are the interruption before that. They are the small careful thing you do at the kitchen table, one pod at a time, before the noise of the summer harvest begins.

Eat them now. Pod them slowly. And, if you have any left over, dry them for the winter, because that is the older and longer story into which the fresh two weeks briefly intrudes.