Fava

Fava belongs to the Aegean and Istanbul tradition of zeytinyağlılar — vegetables and pulses cooked in generous olive oil and eaten cold — and is also known in Turkish as bakla ezmesi (mashed broad beans). It is documented as a staple of İzmir, the wider Aegean coast, and the meyhane culture of Istanbul, where it sits on nearly every cold-meze platter. Older accounts trace the dish to Byzantine and taverne cooking of the eastern Mediterranean, though firm dating is thin; what is well attested is that pulses pounded smooth and set in oil have long been a Mediterranean meze form. While the canonical version uses dried broad beans (bakla), a great many Turkish households and restaurants in fact make it from yellow split peas (sarı bezelye) or yellow lentils, which are cheaper and cook down even smoother. The closely related Greek fava — most famously fava Santorinis, an EU Protected Designation of Origin product since 2010 made not from broad beans at all but from the seeds of Lathyrus clymenum grown in Santorini's volcanic soil — shares the name and the legume-purée idea but is served loose and warm rather than chilled into sliceable squares.

Cool and dense, the slice holds its shape on the fork yet melts the moment it hits the tongue — a fine, smooth purée with no graininess if the beans were cooked all the way down. The bean itself is mild and faintly sweet; what carries it is the olive oil worked through to a creamy body, a clean hit of lemon, the green snap of raw dill, and the sharp bite of sliced raw onion on top. Served cold, it should taste of olive oil first and bean second. If the square is rubbery or weeps liquid, it was either under-cooked or set too thin.

The firm, sliceable set is starch chemistry, not gelatin. As the beans simmer, their starch granules swell and burst, releasing amylose into the liquid; as the purée cools, those linear amylose chains re-associate through hydrogen bonding into a three-dimensional network — retrogradation — that traps the water and oil and locks the mass into a cuttable solid. Legume protein (legumin) interacts with the amylose to reinforce this network, so broad beans and split peas, both high in starch, set firmer than a watery vegetable would. Cooking the beans fully is what makes the purée smooth; under-cooked granules leave grit and a weak set. Olive oil is emulsified into the hot purée so that, on cooling, it is held within the gel rather than weeping out — the same reason the dish is served cold and never reheated, which would soften the network and bleed the oil.