Fennel-Spiced Fava Beans

Fava beans (here the dried kind, locally also called 罗汉豆) have long been a Shaoxing staple, and simmering them with fennel and other spices into a wine-snack is old local practice. What made 茴香豆 famous nationwide is literature. Lu Xun set his 1919 story 《孔乙己》 — first published in the magazine 《新青年》 — in a Shaoxing-style tavern, and the threadbare scholar Kong Yiji spends his coppers there on warm wine and a small dish of 茴香豆. In the story's best-loved passages he shields the dish from the village children with his hand, muttering "not many left… hardly any" (不多不多！多乎哉？不多也), and earnestly asks the narrator whether he knows that the character 回 (as in the 茴 of 茴香豆) "has four ways of being written." The Xianheng Tavern (咸亨酒店) that anchors the tale is a real Shaoxing establishment, opened in 1894 (the 甲午 year of the Guangxu reign) by Lu Xun's clansman; carried by his fiction, both the tavern and its fava beans became enduring cultural emblems of Shaoxing.

The skin is wrinkled and slightly tough, and gives a faint resistance before the bean inside yields — firm, chewy, never powdery. The first taste is salty and savory; underneath comes a faint sweet return, and over all of it floats the warm fragrance of fennel, star anise and cinnamon, soaked all the way into the flesh. They are made to be eaten slowly, a few at a time between sips of warm yellow wine, which is exactly how Kong Yiji ate them.

Drying concentrates and toughens the bean; the cook's job is to rehydrate it and then drive flavor in without letting it fall apart. The dried favas are soaked until plump, then brought up over high heat for a brief boil — about fifteen minutes — until the skins crinkle and dimple, the sign that they are softened through. Only then go in the salt and spices, and the heat drops to a long, gentle simmer that lets the seasoning migrate from skin into flesh while the bean tightens rather than disintegrates; the water is cooked nearly dry and the beans cooled covered so they keep absorbing. The aroma is straightforward botany: fennel and star anise both carry anethole (trans-anethole is the dominant compound of star-anise oil), while cinnamon's scent is cinnamaldehyde — together the warm, sweet-spice backbone that defines the bean.