In England, the season for fresh broad beans is very short, and it rarely coincides with Pesach. Some time between the beginning of May and the middle of June, weekend papers and supermarket food magazines feature recipes for salads and risottos made with the glistening, vivid green, freshly shelled beans. The accompanying pictures offer scenes of long, sunny afternoons in English gardens, often alongside images of cut-glass bowls of strawberries and cream and the grass courts of Wimbledon.
My need for broad beans is more urgent, and the desired finished product far less aesthetically pleasing. Tradition, inherited via marriage from generations of proud Moroccan Jews, dictates that the first course at the Pesach seder be a rich soup thick with broad beans, potatoes and fresh coriander, simmered for hours until the flavours meld into a deeply savoury, brownish magic. Not for us the thin chicken broth of my own Eastern European ancestors, afloat with gravity-defying clouds of matzoh meal and egg; not for us the jokes about kneidlach as heavy as cannon balls, the struggle to extract lumps of mushy carrot from the detritus of stringy chicken meat at the bottom of the bowl. No. Our battles are waged in the week before the seder, as we anxiously scour the displays outside every greengrocer in North London for the sought-after velvety, bulging pods.
This year, Pesach is late: at the end of April, two weeks after Easter, and well into the season when it is possible that greengrocers will stock not only imported fresh broad beans from sunnier Southern European countries, but local varieties grown by adventurous British farmers in the grip of global warming and an enthusiasm for “the Mediterranean diet”.
I mention the broad beans in a phone call to my friend in Israel, in between asking about her children and their seder plans. They are OK, she assures me, but she is having the seder with her in-laws and needs to try and avoid getting into a political argument. Her eldest daughter is volunteering in a day-care centre for children displaced by the Hezbollah rocket attacks on towns and villages in the North of Israel. Six months on from what the BBC persists in calling “the war in Gaza”, they are still unable to go back to their homes. Her work environment is increasingly tense since some of her colleagues were kicked out of a meeting for expressing sympathy for Palestinian victims of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Her brother-in-law, an oncologist in one of Israel’s largest hospitals, receives regular messages from friends in Rafiah – Palestinians who attended his clinic for treatment before the war, and who are now trapped in Gaza, their communications grim lists of how many members of their extended family are now dead, injured, or missing. On her mobile phone, my friend tells me, is the last voicemail she received from a former art history student of hers, sharing his delight at visiting the Prado in Madrid. He was killed in the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival on 7th October. His friend was wounded and taken hostage and nobody knows if he is alive or dead.
It is difficult to know how to end this conversation. We are both too heartbroken and cynical to resort to cliches such as “let’s hope for more peaceful times”. Our decades of political activism make it impossible for us to resign ourselves to doing nothing, but equally impossible for us to believe that any real change will come from attending vigils and demonstrations with the same placards we have been waving for over thirty years. Things, we agree, can’t get much worse. But we know that they can. Grateful for the love and care of friends and relatives thousands of miles away who can offer emotional and physical shelter when needed, and painfully aware of how lucky we are to have escaped the fate of those who will never see their loved-ones again, we hang up and I go back to sourcing broad beans.
There are three large greengrocers on our local high street, and they are my first port of call, far more likely than any supermarket to stock the requisite quantity of fresh broad beans. Most of them are owned and staffed by Iranians. During last year’s women’s protests against the Iranian regime, they displayed the old pre-revolutionary flag with the golden lion, and some of them took part in a convoy of cars to a solidarity demonstration in central London, shouting the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” as they drove down the road with flags waving from their windows. Often, when I go in to buy Greek olive oil, Lebanese tahini, goats milk labaneh, or the small cucumbers and generous bunches of fresh parsley and coriander that are so superior to the supermarket varieties, they speak to me in Persian, no doubt assuming, based on either my purchases or my dark colouring, that I hail from their part of the world.
There are significant differences between Persian and Moroccan cuisine, but no doubt there would be universal agreement on the need to double-shell the broad beans. You might be able to get away with leaving the inner peel on some of the smallest, freshest beans after removing all the beans from their pods. But even for a recipe like the Pesach soup, that requires hours of slow cooking, the result will be far superior without this extra membrane. The time required to shell them, therefore, is almost as much a cause for anxiety as the quest to obtain sufficient quantities of the unshelled beans. After several years of meeting this challenge, I have become adept at estimating how many kilos of unshelled beans are necessary to produce one large pot of soup; yet even so, the ratio never ceases to fill me, and anyone witnessing this project, with awe. Surely there is something edible one could make with all those heaps of empty husks?
A week before the seder, when it is too early to buy the broad beans but not too early to start looking for them, I text my cousin in Israel to check that they are all OK. It is two in the morning in London, and Iran has launched a drone and missile attack on Israel. Sirens sounded in Jerusalem and in the southern city near his kibbutz. They took the children into the sealed room, as instructed, and listened to the explosions of the missiles being intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defence system. It’s been a very strange night, he says, but they are fine; more worried about repercussions from the morally bankrupt and intransigent Israeli government than about further missile attacks; as are the residents of Tehran, according to the news footage which shows them stocking up on bottled water and toilet paper. A couple of hours later I call a friend in Tel Aviv who I know has been up all night watching the news. She is wondering whether to go ahead with her plans to attend a rally calling for a cease-fire and hostage deal later that day, and tells me that she too has stocked up on bottled water and toilet paper. And tins of tuna, we joke. Don’t forget the tins of tuna. She asks if I have heard from our Palestinian friend in the USA whose family live in Southern Gaza. I tell her that last time he emailed me, they were still alive. But unlike Tehran and Tel Aviv, there are no safe rooms, bomb shelters or supermarkets stocked with tuna and bottled water in Gaza. We say this, even though there is no need to say it. We say lots of things that there is no need to say, just to remind ourselves what it is that still needs saying.
Two days later, I head to the Iranian greengrocer on the high street, where I spied a promisingly full crate of fresh broad beans the previous week. They probably come from Italy or Southern France, where they are more likely to be blanched and served with fresh cheese than cooked to within an inch of their lives in a massive pot with potatoes and roughly chopped bunches of coriander. I stuff nearly the whole crate’s worth into three large plastic bags, which the Iranian girl at the cash register weighs for me, confirming, as she hands me the card machine, that there are just over four kilos there. She calls out in Persian to the woman at the next till, who is weighing out green almonds for another customer. I don’t know what you do with those; what seasonal, cultural, or religious tradition do they serve? What nostalgic yearning do they satisfy for the expat community living in this little corner of North London? I wonder, and I want to ask the older Iranian woman buying them: What do you do with those? Do you eat them raw? Do you cook them? But it feels like just another of those things that you don’t need to say, or that it is too uncomfortable to ask. I pay for my two bunches of fresh coriander and my four kilos of fresh broad beans, and I walk home to begin the seder preparations.
Judith Suissa is a recovering academic living in London. She lived in Israel for twenty years and is fascinated by questions of belonging, home, and displacement. She has published widely in her academic field of philosophy of education but recently left academia in order to focus on her own writing.