Favò

Favò is one of the lesser-known typical first courses of Valdostan cuisine, recorded in regional sources as a minestra di fave — a fava-bean soup — that originated in Ozein, a small village in the commune of Aymavilles south-west of Aosta; its patois name is Faveau. Its name comes straight from the bean: fava (fave) gives faveau and the contracted favò. As with almost all Alpine peasant cooking, no single inventor or founding date survives; it grew out of the long mountain logic of cucina povera, where dried broad beans — laid down as a high-protein winter store — were stretched with pasta, bread and the valley's fat cheese into a substantial meal. It rests on the same pillars as much of the region's food: Fontina, the raw cow's-milk cheese documented in the valley since at least the 15th century and DOP since 1996, and the home-made sausage the patois calls saouseusse. The dish is celebrated each year at a two-day village festival in Ozein, which has kept it on the regional map.

Thick and clinging rather than brothy — a spoonful holds together. The fava beans have gone soft and floury, breaking down to thicken the pot into something between a soup and a stew; the short pasta is tender and slick with cheese, and the Fontina pulls in long strings through the whole dish. Browned sausage gives deep, savoury, faintly fatty bursts, the sage-and-garlic butter runs warm and aromatic underneath, and the bread cubes stay crisp at the edges where they have soaked up just enough of the base to turn chewy-soft inside. The flavour is rich, lactic and earthy, the beans nutty and the cheese pungent; a good one is unctuous but still has body, a poor one is either thin and watery or so heavy with bread and cheese that it sets into a stodgy mass.

The thickening is driven by the beans. Dried fava beans are dense packages of stored starch and protein behind a tough seed coat; the overnight soak and long simmer rehydrate them and gelatinise that starch, so the cell walls soften and break and the beans partly dissolve, releasing starch into the liquid to thicken the whole pot — the reason no flour or roux is needed. Browning the sausage runs the Maillard reaction across its surface, building meaty, roasted flavour compounds, while frying the bread and butter cubes both crisps the bread (driven off water plus surface Maillard) and creates a textural counterpoint; the sage and garlic are bloomed in hot butter so their fat-soluble aromatics dissolve into the fat and carry through the dish. Fontina is one of the great melting cheeses — young, moist and low in acid — so at the pot's heat it flows and binds rather than tightening into rubber, and stirred in off direct high heat it strings and emulsifies into the starchy liquid instead of splitting. The fried bread then soaks up the savoury base and softens, completing the move from loose components to a single thick, set dish.