Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp., the cowpea, domesticated in sub-Saharan Africa from the wild V. unguiculata var. spontanea; the black-eyed pea is one of its seed types, and the yardlong bean of Asia is its Sesquipedalis Group, a vegetable form selected for its long green pods
The cowpea is Africa's own pulse. Its wild ancestor, Vigna unguiculata var. spontanea, grows as a weed of field margins right across the continent between the Sahara and the Kalahari, and it crosses freely with the cultivated plant, which makes the question of where and when the crop was first domesticated harder to settle than it is for most. The archaeological record begins in central Ghana. Charred seeds from rock shelters of the Kintampo culture, dated to between about 1830 and 1595 BCE, are the oldest domesticated cowpeas yet found, and the people who left them were farmers of pearl millet as well as foragers of the forest margin.
Genetics suggests that the story has two beginnings. When Bao-Lam Huynh and his colleagues genotyped a world collection of cultivated cowpeas in 2013, the African landraces fell into a western and an eastern gene pool, each most closely related to the wild cowpeas of its own region, and a larger study by Haizheng Xiong and colleagues in 2016 found the same division. The reading now most widely held is that the cowpea was domesticated twice, in West Africa and in East Africa, and that the two pools later met and mixed, much as the common bean was domesticated separately in Mesoamerica and in the Andes. Ira Herniter, María Muñoz-Amatriaín, and Timothy Close, combining the genetic, linguistic, and archaeological evidence in 2020, placed both domestications before 2500 BCE and judged the western one the greater. The languages point the same way. Christopher Ehret reconstructs a word for the cowpea, *-kunde, in Proto-Bantu, which he dates to around 3000 BCE in the borderlands of what are now Nigeria and Cameroon, before its speakers began to spread across central and southern Africa. Southern Africa, rich as it is in wild cowpeas, is not thought to have domesticated the plant, since its common word for it, *-emba, arrived with the Bantu farmers who brought the crop.
What came out of domestication is one of the most adaptable of all pulses. The cowpea grows in heat, drought, and thin sandy soil where beans and peas fail; it fixes its own nitrogen; and almost every part of it is eaten. The dry seed is the staple, but the young pods are cooked as a vegetable, the leaves are a pot-herb, above all in East Africa, and the dry haulms feed livestock. It is often grown between the rows of sorghum, millet, or maize, which it feeds and shelters from weeds. Much later, and far from Africa, a second transformation took place, when Asian farmers selecting for long, tender, green pods produced the yardlong bean, the Sesquipedalis Group, so unlike the grain cowpea in the field and in the kitchen that botanists long treated it as a species of its own.
The cowpea left Africa early, and in more than one direction. Herniter and his colleagues trace the West African cowpea east across the Sahel to the Sudan and Ethiopia, and from there along three roads. One ran south to meet the East African domestication. One ran north down the Nile to Egypt and the Mediterranean, where Greek and Latin writers describe pulses that most translators take to be the cowpea, although F. B. J. Heinrich and D. A. Wilkins have argued that the Roman phaselus was nothing of the kind; the Greek word for the edible pod, lobion, lived on as the Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew lūbiyā. The third road crossed to India, most probably by sea by way of southern Arabia, and the cowpea was being grown at Daimabad in the Deccan between about 1500 and 1200 BCE.
From India it spread east. In China it was jiangdou, and Li Shizhen, completing his Bencao Gangmu in 1578, described pods two feet long and called it the best of all beans. Somewhere in South or Southeast Asia or southern China, farmers selecting for long green pods made the yardlong bean, which, to judge by its Tagalog name, Hokkien traders carried to the Philippines, and which is now one of the everyday green vegetables of the whole region.
The Atlantic crossing came with the slave trade. Brazilian agronomists date the cowpea's arrival in Bahia to the second half of the sixteenth century, and the English found it already established when they wrote of it in Virginia in 1666 and in Jamaica, where Hans Sloane, visiting in 1687 and 1688, described the black-eyed 'calavances'. It was the food of the Middle Passage and of the plantations, and the enslaved grew it in their own gardens across the American South, the Caribbean, and Brazil, where it is still the bean of the Northeast. Genetic studies show two separate introductions to the Americas: the cowpeas of Brazil and the American Southeast descend from sub-Saharan African stock, whilst those of Cuba and the American Southwest descend from Mediterranean cowpeas carried by the Spanish, which several Uto-Aztecan languages of Sonora and Arizona call yorimuni, roughly 'the outsiders' bean'.
The techniques crossed with the plant. The Yoruba way of skinning the bean and grinding it to a paste reached Bahia as acarajé; the West African habit of cooking cowpeas and rice in one pot reached Carolina as Hoppin' John and Guyana as cook-up rice; and the black-eyed peas that the American South eats for luck on New Year's Day have a curious parallel, which some have suggested as a source, in the Sephardic custom of eating them at Rosh Hashanah.
The cowpea is the most important pulse of Africa, and most of the crop never leaves the continent. West and Central Africa grow the great bulk of the world's dry cowpeas, and Nigeria harvests more than any other country and still buys more, for the drier Sahelian states, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali among them, sell their surplus south to the crowded, humid coast. Almost all of it is grown by smallholders, and its tolerance of heat and drought has made it one of the crops on which breeders are staking most as the Sahel's climate grows harsher: more than eight hundred improved varieties have been developed from the genebank of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture at Ibadan.
The cooking is as various as the continent. West Africa soaks, skins, and grinds the bean into fritters, steamed puddings, and smooth soups, cooks it whole with rice, and dries it into flour for dumplings; East and southern Africa eat the leaves as a green and dry them against the lean months. Elsewhere the cowpea is a regional staple rather than a national one, but where it is eaten it is eaten with conviction: in the Brazilian Northeast, where feijão-de-corda is the everyday bean; in the American South, where black-eyed peas and greens on New Year's Day are close to obligatory; in Egypt and Cyprus; and across India, where it is lobia, chavli, karamani, and payar.
The yardlong bean leads a separate life as a vegetable. China, Southeast Asia, and South Asia grow it in quantity for its green pods, which go into stir-fries, sour soups, curries, and salads from Sichuan to Sri Lanka, and it is a fixture of Indo-Caribbean cooking in Trinidad and Guyana, where it is bodi and bora. In the kitchen the two cowpeas scarcely meet. One is a dried pulse and the other a fresh green bean, and a cook who knows one well may never have been told that it is the same plant as the other.
Historical Journey of Cowpea
Kintampo & Central Ghana — c. 1800 BCE
The oldest domesticated cowpeas yet found anywhere come from rock shelters of the Kintampo culture in central Ghana, where charred seeds recovered by Catherine D'Andrea and her colleagues have been dated to between about 1830 and 1595 BCE. The Kintampo people lived where the forest gives way to savanna, and they were farmers as well as foragers: they grew pearl millet, used the oil palm, and planted the cowpea, which was already a domesticated plant by the time its seeds were charred in their hearths. The domestication itself is older, and it need not have happened here. The wild cowpea grows as a weed right across Africa between the Sahara and the Kalahari; genetic studies find the cultivated cowpeas of West Africa most closely related to the wild plants of West Africa; and Ira Herniter and his colleagues, weighing the genetic, linguistic, and archaeological evidence together in 2020, place the first domestication somewhere in West Africa before 2500 BCE. Kintampo is where the evidence begins, not necessarily where the plant did.
Ghana still cooks the cowpea in the ways the savanna taught it. Tubaani, a batter of cowpea flour whisked with water and a pinch of potash and steamed in leaf parcels, is a dish of the Dagomba, the Mamprusi, and the Gonja, and of the Zongo quarters of the southern cities. Waakye, rice and cowpeas boiled with dried sorghum leaves until they turn the colour of mahogany, carries a northern name as well: Hausa calls both the bean and the dish wake. In Accra the beans go into red red, stewed in palm oil and eaten beside fried ripe plantain.
Daimabad & the Deccan — c. 1500 BCE
The cowpea reached India remarkably early, and it arrived as a finished crop. The earliest secure evidence in the subcontinent comes from Daimabad, a Chalcolithic settlement on the Pravara river in what is now Maharashtra, from levels dated between about 1500 and 1200 BCE; older finds at Hulas, in the upper Ganga plain, are disputed. That makes the Indian cowpea very nearly as old as the Ghanaian, which is less of a paradox than it looks, since African crops often appear in the archaeological record of India before they do at home, where far less has been excavated. How it came is argued over. Roger Blench judged the likeliest road to be by sea, by way of southern Arabia and the monsoon crossing to India's west coast, and Herniter and his colleagues agree; a study of Asian cowpeas published in 2025 found Ethiopian accessions clustering with those of South Asia and suggested an early crossing from East Africa. Either way the cowpea came with the other African crops of the same age, sorghum, pearl millet, and the hyacinth bean, and like them it stayed.
Maharashtra has never stopped cooking it. Chavli, as Marathi calls the bean, goes into chavlichi usal, cowpeas simmered in a thin gravy of onion, dry coconut, and goda masala, the dark, sweet-scented spice blend of the Marathi kitchen, soured with kokum, rounded with a little jaggery, and eaten with bhakri or chapati.
Lake Victoria & the East African Highlands — Before c. 1000 BCE
Genetic studies of the cultivated cowpea keep finding two families, not one. When Bao-Lam Huynh and his colleagues genotyped a world collection of cowpeas in 2013, the African landraces fell into a West African and an East African gene pool, each most closely related to the wild cowpeas of its own region, and a larger study by Haizheng Xiong and colleagues in 2016 found the same division. The reading now most widely held is that the cowpea was domesticated twice, once in the west and once in the east, much as the common bean was domesticated separately in Mesoamerica and in the Andes, and that the two pools later met and mixed. No ancient cowpea has yet been recovered in East Africa to confirm it, and where in the east the second domestication happened is not known; the atlas places the point in the Lake Victoria basin, where the cowpea leaf is one of the commonest greens in the pot. The date is a placement as well. Christopher Ehret finds a word for the cowpea of Southern Cushitic origin, *salakw-, in some of the region's languages, which may mean that it was grown here before Bantu-speaking farmers arrived in the first millennium BCE.
East Africa eats the cowpea as much for its leaves as for its seeds. Swahili kunde, which descends from a Proto-Bantu word, names both the plant and the dish: young cowpea leaves, picked through the rains, softened in boiling water, and stewed with onion and tomato, finished in western Kenya with milk or cream, and eaten with ugali. Luo cooks call the same leaves boo and Luhya cooks likhuvi, and many households dry them in the sun to keep for the months when the fields are bare.
Nok, Zaria & Northern Nigeria — c. 1000 BCE
Nigeria grows more cowpeas than any other country, and it has grown them for a very long time. The oldest in the country come from sites of the Nok culture, the people of central Nigeria best known for their terracotta heads, who flourished from the middle of the second millennium BCE to about the turn of the era. Archaeobotanists of the Nok project at Goethe University Frankfurt, sorting more than eleven thousand plant remains from fifty sites, found pearl millet in overwhelming quantity and the cowpea second, and they reconstruct a farming system in which the two were grown together. A millet and a cowpea in the same field is still the basis of farming across the northern savanna.
The north is now the cowpea's heartland. Hausa farmers intercrop it with sorghum, millet, and groundnuts, the grain markets of Kano trade it in bulk, and Hausa gives the bean its everyday name, wake. The most characteristic northern dish is dan wake, whose name means 'son of beans': small dumplings of cowpea flour stiffened with baobab-leaf powder and a little potash, boiled, and dressed with oil, sliced onion, and yaji, the peppery spice blend made with roasted groundnut. It is said to have come into northern Nigeria from Niger, where it is eaten in just the same way, and it belongs to the Hausa-speaking country on both sides of the border.
Alexandria & Lower Egypt — c. 180 CE
How early the cowpea reached Egypt is contested. The German botanist Georg Schweinfurth identified it in tombs of the Fifth Dynasty, around 2500 BCE, and the identification is still repeated, but it is a nineteenth-century one that modern archaeobotany has not confirmed, and the atlas does not rest a date on it. The firmer ground is textual. Galen, the physician from Pergamon, writing in the later second century CE, discusses a pulse he calls dolichos and says that its green pods, eaten whole, are called lobia; in a neighbouring passage, on a pulse he calls phaselus, he mentions it in the diet of a doctor practising in Alexandria. Most translators read both as the cowpea. The reading is not settled: F. B. J. Heinrich and D. A. Wilkins, reviewing every Greek and Latin use of phaselus in 2014, concluded that the Romans ate neither the kidney bean nor the cowpea under that name. What is not in doubt is the fate of the word lobia, which became the Arabic lūbiyā.
Herniter and his colleagues think the cowpea came north down the Nile from the Sudan, where the West African cowpea had arrived across the Sahel, and Egypt has kept it at the centre of home cooking. Lubia, black-eyed peas stewed in tomato sauce with onion and garlic, often with a little beef, is one of the standing dishes of the Egyptian week, eaten over rice cooked with toasted vermicelli.
Travancore, Cochin & Malabar — c. 1000 CE
From the Deccan the cowpea spread through the whole of the peninsula, and in Kerala it became one of the pulses of the feast. When it arrived is not recorded, and the date of the point is a placement. Malayalam calls the red-seeded cowpea vanpayar, and it is the pulse of olan, the mildest dish on the Onam sadya: ash gourd and cowpeas cooked in coconut milk with nothing more than green chilli, finished with a spoonful of raw coconut oil and a few curry leaves, and left pale on purpose, without the turmeric, chilli powder, or mustard-seed tempering that colours the dishes around it on the leaf.
Kerala grows the long-podded form of the plant as well, the yardlong bean it calls achinga payar, and cooks it as a vegetable, stir-fried with coconut in a thoran or with shallots and chilli in a mezhukkupuratti, so that both halves of the cowpea's history meet in one kitchen.
Ile-Ife, Lagos & Yorubaland — c. 1200 CE
The cowpea was growing at Ile-Ife, the sacred city of the Yoruba, when the city was at its height. Amanda Logan, Gérard Chouin, Adisa Ogunfolakan, and their colleagues, publishing the first plant remains from medieval Ife in 2024, found cowpea alongside pearl millet, sorghum, oil palm, and okra at the Oduduwa site, in the same medieval deposits that yielded wheat and cotton carried across the Sahara, the cotton from contexts of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The Yoruba call the bean ẹ̀wà, and around it they built one of the great pulse cuisines of the world, whose central technique is to soak the beans, rub off their skins, and grind them to a paste. Whipped full of air and dropped into hot oil, the paste becomes àkàrà; wrapped in leaves with pepper and palm oil and steamed, it becomes mọ́ínmọ́ín; cooked down into a smooth yellow soup, it becomes gbẹ̀gìrì, eaten with ewedu and stew over àmàlà.
Lagos adds two dishes that came from outside and stayed. Ewa agoyin, beans boiled until they collapse and eaten under a dark sauce of palm oil fried with dried peppers and a great deal of onion, takes its name from the Agoyin, people from what are now Benin and Togo who brought it to the streets of the city. Frejon, beans cooked to a purée in coconut milk and eaten on Good Friday, came back from Brazil in the nineteenth century with the Aguda, freed Africans and their descendants who returned to Lagos and settled in its Brazilian Quarter; its name is the Portuguese feijão. The Yoruba fritter had long since gone the other way, to Bahia, with the captives of the Atlantic trade.
Dakar & the Upper Guinea Coast — c. 1350 CE
On the Atlantic coast of West Africa the cowpea is the ñebbe of Wolof, the word French took from Senegal as niébé and now uses for the plant across the whole of francophone Africa. It was an old crop here long before any written record, and the date of the point is a placement, set at the rise of the Jolof state in the fourteenth century; the plant is certainly older. This is the coast the Portuguese called Guinea, from the Senegal river to Sierra Leone, and from the sixteenth century it was one of the great sources of the Atlantic slave trade. Its people were rice farmers, whose knowledge the planters of Carolina came to prize, and the cowpea crossed the ocean with them as the provisions of the ships.
Dakar eats it for breakfast. Ndambé is a stew of cowpeas cooked down with onion, garlic, a little tomato, and chilli, sharpened with vinegar and sometimes filled out with sweet potato, and the street vendors of the city split a baguette, fill it with ndambé, and hand it over with a smear of mayonnaise and a dash of hot sauce as pain ndambé. The fritter that the Yoruba call àkàrà is accara here, eaten with a hot sauce of onion and tomato.
Salvador & Bahia, Brazil — c. 1570 CE
Brazilian agronomists date the cowpea's arrival to the second half of the sixteenth century, when Portuguese colonists brought it to Bahia. From 1549 Salvador was the capital of the colony, and its trade with West Africa, from Guinea to Angola, was constant; the cowpea came as a provision of that trade and was planted by the people it brought. Genetic studies agree on the source. The cowpeas of South America are most closely related to those of sub-Saharan Africa, whereas those of Cuba and the American Southwest descend from Mediterranean stock carried by the Spanish.
Two centuries later Bahia received more than the bean. From the late eighteenth century the city's enslaved population was drawn heavily from Yorubaland and Dahomey, and they brought the Yoruba way of skinning, grinding, and whipping the cowpea. Acarajé keeps the Yoruba name, from àkàrà, and very nearly the Yoruba object: the fritter is fried in dendê, red palm oil, split, and filled with vatapá, dried shrimp, and pepper sauce. It is the food of the orixá Iansã in Candomblé, and the baianas de acarajé who sell it in white lace were registered as Brazilian intangible cultural heritage in 2005. Bahia still calls the cowpea feijão-fradinho.
Hunan, Fujian & Southern China — 1578 CE
The yardlong bean is a cowpea that Asia remade. Its pods, thin, pliant, and forty or fifty centimetres long, are picked green and eaten as a vegetable, and it is so unlike the African grain cowpea that botanists long gave it a species of its own; it is now classed as a cultivar group, Vigna unguiculata Sesquipedalis Group, from the Latin for a foot and a half. Genetic studies agree that it was selected in Asia from grain cowpeas that had come east from India, through a second bottleneck of choosing for long and tender pods, and that its genome now stands apart from the rest of the species. Where in Asia that happened is not known, since there are almost no archaeobotanical remains of the cowpea from Asia to say; Herniter and his colleagues favour Southeast Asia. This second origin is placed where the long pod is first described.
Li Shizhen, completing his Bencao Gangmu in 1578, wrote that the cowpea, jiangdou, was sown everywhere in the third and fourth months, some kinds with vines more than ten feet long and some short; that its pods came white, red, purple, and mottled, and that 'the long ones reach two feet'; and that young it served as a vegetable and old it was kept for its seed. 'This bean may be a vegetable, a fruit, or a grain,' he wrote, 'the most useful of all and the best of beans, and yet the herbals left it out: why?' Ming writers of the same period begin to call the long-podded kind the 'skirt-sash bean', for pods that hang like ribbons. In southern China it is now the everyday summer bean. Hunan and Sichuan pickle it in brine until it sours, and sour long beans stir-fried with minced pork and chilli, suan doujiao rou mo, is one of the standing dishes of the home kitchen.
Manila & Luzon — c. 1600 CE
In the Philippines the yardlong bean is sitaw, and the name points to where it came from. Tagalog took it from Hokkien, the language of the Fujianese traders who had sailed to Luzon for centuries before the Spanish arrived and who, from the 1580s, filled the Parián, the Chinese quarter outside the walls of Spanish Manila; linguists derive it either from chhiⁿ-tāu, green bean, or from si-tāu, silk-thread bean. When the bean itself arrived is not recorded, and the date of the point is a placement. What is certain is that it became one of the vegetables Filipino cooking would be lost without. It goes into sinigang, the sour tamarind broth, and into kare-kare, the oxtail stew thickened with ground peanuts, and it has its own adobong sitaw, in which the beans, cut into finger lengths, are braised with pork belly in vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, and bay until the liquid is almost gone: the method of the national adobo, applied to a vegetable.
Charleston & the Carolina Lowcountry — c. 1700 CE
The cowpea was in English North America before the English knew where it had come from. A Virginia law of 1666 fixing the value of goods paid as taxes already lists it; archaeologists have found it at the Upper Creek town of Fusihatchee, in what is now Alabama, by 1670; and John Lawson, surveyor-general of North Carolina, recorded it around 1700. Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, who lived sixteen years in French Louisiana, knew better: the small brown beans with a black ring round the eye, he wrote, came from the English of Carolina, 'whither they had been brought from Guinea'. They came as the food of the Middle Passage and of the plantations, and the enslaved grew them in their own gardens across the South. The English name followed. Its first known appearance is in a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Taylor on 8 October 1797, in which he counted 'a great deal more on our southern cowpea' than on all the field peas he had brought from England.
In the Lowcountry the cowpea met the rice that enslaved West Africans grew for Carolina's planters, and the two went into one pot. Hoppin' John, cowpeas cooked with smoked pork and eaten with rice, was first printed as a recipe in Sarah Rutledge's The Carolina Housewife of 1847, and it is eaten across the South on New Year's Day for luck. In the Lowcountry and coastal Georgia it is still made with the small local field peas, and black-eyed peas are the norm elsewhere. The chef Sean Brock, who worked with growers to bring it back into cultivation, argues that the original was made with the Sea Island red pea, a small red cowpea usually traced to Sierra Leone.
Fortaleza & the Sertão of Ceará — c. 1700 CE
From Bahia the cowpea spread across Brazil, and it found its true home in the dry backlands of the Northeast, the sertão, which the cattle frontier opened from the late seventeenth century; it was being grown in Piauí, next door to Ceará, by 1697, and the date of the point is a placement for that expansion. The cowpea suits the sertão as it suits the Sahel, with its heat, its droughts, and its thin soils, and the North and Northeast still grow most of Brazil's crop, under names of their own: feijão-de-corda, probably for its long, string-like pods, and feijão-macassar. It is eaten dried and, in season, fresh from the pod as feijão-verde.
Ceará's great dish is baião de dois: cowpeas and rice cooked in one pot, the rice going into the beans' own broth so that no water is wasted, finished with cubes of queijo coalho and a spoonful of manteiga da terra, the clarified butter of the backlands. The folklorist Gustavo Barroso recorded it in 1940, and in 1950 the song 'Baião de Dois', by Humberto Teixeira, a son of Ceará, and Luiz Gonzaga, the king of the baião, the music and dance of the Northeast, helped carry the name to the rest of the country.
Demerara, Berbice & the Guyana Coast — 18th century CE
The Dutch plantation colonies on the Guyana coast, Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice, were worked by enslaved Africans, among them many from the Gold Coast; Coffy, the Akan cooper who led the Berbice rising of 1763 and is now a national hero of Guyana, was one. They grew the cowpea as they had grown it at home, and Guyanese histories date the rice that was planted to feed them to 1738. The date of the point is a placement for the eighteenth-century colony in which the two were first grown side by side.
Rice and black-eyed peas are still cooked together in Guyana, in the country's great one-pot dish, cook-up rice: the peas and the rice simmered in coconut milk with salted meat or chicken, thyme, and hot pepper until the grains have taken up the liquid. It is eaten on any day, and on Old Year's Night, 31 December, it is cooked in a great many houses to bring luck into the year. Guyanese writers trace the custom to the enslaved Africans who cooked black-eyed peas and rice to see the year in, and the same belief runs through the Hoppin' John of the Carolinas.
Austin, Dallas & Texas — c. 1830 CE
The black-eyed pea went west with the cotton frontier. Planters from the older Southern states moved into east Texas from the 1820s, bringing enslaved people with them, and the pea came with both; the date of the point is a placement for that migration. Texas took up the black-eyed pea as its New Year's food as the rest of the South did, and in the twentieth century it gave the pea a new dish. The Handbook of Texas credits Texas caviar to Helen Corbitt, a New Yorker who came to teach at the University of Texas at Austin in 1940 and, asked to cook a convention dinner using only Texas products, served black-eyed peas in a dressing of oil, vinegar, garlic, and onion. Later tellings move the first serving to a New Year's Eve at the Houston Country Club, where she worked from 1942. From 1955 Corbitt ran the restaurants of Neiman Marcus in Dallas, and the pickled black-eyed pea went with her into Texan entertaining, where it has stayed.
Nicosia & Cyprus — 19th century CE
Cyprus calls the cowpea louvi, from the medieval Greek lobion, the pod-word that Galen had used and Arabic had borrowed. The island's cowpeas belong to the Mediterranean stock that geneticists find distinct from the West African, the same stock that the Spanish later carried to Cuba and the American Southwest. The bean is one of the most dependable crops of the dry island, and the Cyprus Food Museum, which records the island's traditional recipes, documents the everyday dish from the nineteenth century onwards; the date of the point follows that record, and the plant is certainly older here.
Louvi me lahana is that everyday dish: the peas boiled until nearly soft, the first water poured away, and chard, lahana, or wild greens added to cook alongside them, then dressed at the table with olive oil, lemon juice, and salt and eaten with tomatoes, olives, and bread. Being meatless, it serves both the Orthodox fasting days and the ordinary week.
