Mostly The Martock

Fava Bean, from the 16th C *Book of Flower Studies* in the Cloisters

It should shock no one who knows me that I can get a bee in my bonnet and not rest until I have an answer to my dilemma. If you has told me, when I was 16 years old, standing in the Jewel, and buying* way more seeds than I could possibly plant in the area my parents allotted for me in the garden, that I was ever going to be confused and falling into a rabbit hole about fava beans when I was a Woman of a Certain Age, I would have looked at you like you were out of your mind. In fact, at 16, I did not know what a fava bean was. Mom was of Norwegian descent. There was not a lot of bean cooking in her repertoire.

Seriously. Look for Norwegian recipes featuring beans. This is the internet. I’ll wait.

Not a lot, are there? If you spread your net a little wider, to include all legumes, you’ll catch some pea recipes. You might find some recipes for brown beans, but those tend to be from the Norwegian diaspora. And, since I have no idea how far into the future someone might be reading this, I can only say that I hope you can find more than I did. Modern Norwegian cooking has influences from outside Norway, so things drift into the cuisine. Beans are delicious and more people should eat them.

Especially fava, because they seem like a good fit for the Scandinavian climate.

So, anyway, my experience with eating beans was pretty limited until the point in time I was cooking as an independent adult. I ran into fava beans eventually, and I eventually became interested in historical varieties, and I eventually learned that the martock is a pre-1603 variety of fava bean. I considered getting some a few years ago, but I went for carlin peas, instead.

The Great Seed Loss has Led to the Great Seed Purchase

I’ve mentioned before that I lost huge amounts of seeds at some point in that first Pandemic Winter. I’ve been diligently trying to replace things, and today, I got word that a small sample of carlin peas is on the way to me. I am so glad. I thought I lost them forever.

But I decided that this year, I’d also allow myself the martock. I rather wish I had decided that BEFORE I bought a new packet of Windsor Broad, but it’s not tragic that I have two varieties.** They are available through a US retailer now, and I treated myself. I figured I especially deserve a treat because I did not buy myself those spendy saffron crocuses.***

But then I found a martock page on Ark of Taste that just insisted that the proper martock has a crimson flower. WTF? I’ve been tempted to grow crimson-flowered fava, but I wanted to do it more as a fun thing some off year. Down the rabbit hole I went.

So I dug into some sources, looking for pre-1603 color renditions of fava beans; of those I have found, they show the usual white-with-dark-interior flower. Naturally, the disclaimer applies: I did not search every book I have and every web site I could think of, but I did search enough to feel comfortable in believing that a scarlet-flowered broad bean wasn’t the only broad bean in England, in 1603. In fact, here is an earlier fava bean, from an English book:

Fava bean from *The Tudor Pattern Book,* about 1520. In the Bodleian.

It’s worth remembering that many of the herbals were copied; the fava bean from Rembert Dodoens (1554) is essentially the same as the one from Fuchs, shown below. It’s possible that the predominant fava flower is white with markings because the herbals all copied the same model, but I’ve little expectation that artists in the 16th c. never saw fava flowers–it’s not like elephants or rhubarb–so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that this is what the favas looked like.

It’s not true that there is no mention of red-flowered fava’s, though. The 1597 printing of Gerard’s Herbal states plainly that there is a red-flowing fava that produces an unpleasant tasting, pea-sized, black bean. The plant is smaller and has tendrils, like a pea plant. It’s labeled as Faba sylvestris, The wilde Beane. Now, that right there is reason enough to see if I can get a hold of those crimson-flowered fava’s, although 1) the seeds of crimson-flowered favas are reputed to be green and 2) modern research indicates that there may be no such thing as a wild fava bean but there are some fava-like vetches, so the issue could just be the way that classifications have changed.

Bonus!

From the Cloisters: How to Propagate the Martock Bean, a very pretty film tutorial.

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*Well, selecting. My mom bought them. Bless her, she did not stop me, even though I ~~bought~~ selected so many seeds that we would have had to tear up the entire yard to plant them. Strangely, that is exactly what I just did: I bought so many seeds that I’d have to tear up all my grass to plant it all. Shocker, right?

**After all, I have learned a lot about runner beans and I am working to restrain myself from buying a white flowering version.–I have already got scarlet, painted lady, and black coat as period varieties. I don’t need to grow a white. I don’t. I do not.–

***Nah, no amount of martock is going to make up for not having those spendy saffron crocuses.