Dried broad beans soften into a miracle ingredient with a smooth and comforting texture that’s perfect for a winter soup
About 14 miles west of Leicester there is a hamlet called Barton in the Beans. I have visited only by Google Street View but it is mentioned in the Doomsday Book as Bartone, which signified a barley enclosure or farm owned by the lord of a manor. It is noted as having a population of three households in 1086, putting it in the smallest 20% of settlements recorded (although, rest assured, the lord of the manor, Hugh of Grandmesnil, and his family had oodles of other land). Bartone became Barton in Fabis, fabis being the latin for beans, in this case vicia faba – broad, fava or faba beans – and then later Barton in the Beans: production perpetuated in a name. Importantly, though, bean cultivation in the area – and the consumption of broad and field beans by humans and animals – predates the name, going back to the iron age, and possibly even the bronze age.
170 miles south, in Somerset, a variety of broad beans took the name of the village where they originated; Martock beans became a staple not only for fasting and bean feasting, but were a fundamental part of the medieval survival diet. They were eaten both fresh and dried, meaning simmered for soups and stews, baked in the oven or ground into flour. According to Marwood Yeatman, in his book The Last Food of England, the Martock bean was mentioned in the manorial rolls of 1273, and also in a saying that goes: “If you shake a Martock man, he rattles.”
