The pot that cooks all night

Almost every cook in Cairo knows how stewed fava is supposed to be made. Dried beans, soaked, then cooked low in a heavy pot from late evening until morning, with patience and very little attention. The method is no secret. Grandmothers recite it without thinking.

And yet the good version is hard to find. Most of what gets served at breakfast is something faster: a pressure cooker, a tin, a shortcut that gets the plates out by seven without anyone staying up. It is edible. It is cheaper. It is quicker. And it is clearly worse, the way food is worse when the time has been taken out of it.

Nobody taking the shortcut thinks they are ruining anything. Each step looks like a small, sensible improvement. An hour saved here, a little gas there, a cheaper sack of beans. But the overnight pot was never an inefficiency waiting to be fixed. The slowness was one of the ingredients.

That is the strange thing about quality in so many trades. The method is known. Anyone could follow it. What is rare is the willingness to keep doing it the inconvenient way when every pressure, from cost to habit to the customer in a hurry, pushes towards the easier one.

Make it faster, make it cheaper, make it simpler to repeat, and it almost always becomes a little less good. Usually nobody can say which step did it.

The pot on the stove is just the easiest place to watch it happen.