Ful mudammes (or medames) often described as Egypt’s national dish, certainly occupies a place of primacy in that country, and has done so for a very long time.
Jill Tilsley-Benham (1989) points out that it is a standard dish for breakfast (including the evening ‘break-fast’ of ramadan), but is also eaten as a snack (mezze) or a main meal. Egyptian immigrant workers in the Persian Gulf have been responsible in recent decades for spreading its currency eastwards. Lane (1860) had referred to the practice of leaving the beans to cook overnight in a pear-shaped earthenware pot which was ‘buried, all but the neck, in the hot ashes of an oven or a [Turkish] bath, and having the mouth closely stopped: they are eaten with linseed-oil, or butter, and generally with a little lime-juice’.
