Vigna radiata (the mung bean, green gram, or moong), domesticated from the wild V. radiata var. sublobata; not to be confused with its close Indian relative V. mungo (black gram or urad), nor with V. angularis (adzuki)
Origin: The Indian subcontinent, with two archaeologically distinct centres: the north-western plains of Gujarat, Rajasthan, and the Harappan world, and, separately, the peninsular Deccan of southern India, each drawing on its own local population of the wild progenitor <em>Vigna radiata</em> var. <em>sublobata</em>
The mung bean is a small plant with a large reach. Vigna radiata is an erect, hairy, warm-season annual that grows barely a metre high, fixes its own nitrogen, tolerates poor soil and short water, and comes to harvest in as little as sixty days, which is why it has been for four thousand years the crop that Indian farmers slot between the main cereals rather than in place of them. Its seed is tiny, olive-green, and squarish, and unlike almost every other pulse it needs no soaking and cooks to tenderness in twenty minutes, a property that has done more to spread it than any deliberate act of trade.
It was domesticated in India from the wild V. radiata var. sublobata, a sprawling, small-seeded, hard-coated plant still found across the subcontinent and on into Southeast Asia and northern Australia. The archaeobotanical record points to two centres rather than one. In the north-west, mung appears in Harappan and post-Harappan levels in Gujarat and Rajasthan from around 2500 to 2000 BCE; in the peninsular south, at Chalcolithic sites of the Deccan such as Navdatoli and in the Karnataka ashmounds, it appears in a separate sequence from roughly 1600 BCE, and the two regions drew on genetically distinct wild populations. This entry accordingly shows two Indian origins, which is unusual for a pulse and is the reason the north Indian and south Indian mung kitchens are so different in technique.
One clarification is necessary before anything else, because English confuses the two constantly. Vigna mungo, the black gram or urad, is a separate species with a black seed coat, a slimy mucilaginous cooking quality, and an entirely different culinary role: it is the pulse of dal makhani, of the fermented idli and dosa batter, and of papad. Mung, V. radiata, is green, clean-cooking, and non-mucilaginous. They were domesticated in the same region at roughly the same time and are often grown in the same field, and the shared syllable in 'mung' and 'mungo' is an accident of transliteration rather than a statement of identity.
What makes the mung bean unusual amongst pulses is that it is not one ingredient but at least five, and the forms are not interchangeable. The whole green bean is soaked and boiled, or sprouted. Split and hulled, it becomes the pale yellow moong dal dhuli that cooks to a purée in twenty minutes and is the invalid's food, the infant's first solid, and the base of khichdi across the subcontinent. Split with the skin left on, it is moong chilka, nuttier and firmer. Ground to flour it makes batters and sweets. And washed for its starch it yields the translucent gel that sets into Korean nokdumuk and is extruded into the cellophane noodles of China, Korea, and Southeast Asia, which are made from mung starch and from nothing else.
The mung bean left India in two directions and became a different food in each. Overland to the north-west it travelled the routes through Bactria and Sogdiana that carried everything else, and settled into Central Asian cooking as mash, a word Persian and the Turkic languages share, where it is cooked with rice and mutton fat into the thick soups of the Uzbek and Tajik table and, further west on the Iranian plateau, into the herb-thickened ash. That transmission is old, and it stayed a soup pulse the whole way: nowhere between the Indus and the Caspian is mung sprouted or made into starch.
Eastward the story is entirely different, because China did something to the plant that India never had. Mung reached China by the last centuries BCE, and Chinese cooks discovered that a bean germinated in the dark for four days becomes a wholly different vegetable: crisp, watery, mild, and available in winter when nothing grows. Sprouting is a Chinese invention and one of the great pieces of pre-modern food technology, a way of making a fresh green vegetable out of a dry store in a heated room, and it spread from China across the whole of East and Southeast Asia. The second Chinese invention was extraction: mung starch, washed out of the ground bean and dried, sets to a clear elastic gel and can be extruded into threads that stay firm in soup, which is the origin of the cellophane noodle. Between them these two techniques account for the great majority of the mung beans eaten outside the subcontinent, and neither has any traditional foothold in India at all.
From China the sprout and the starch went to Korea, where nokdu became a cuisine of its own in the ground-bean pancake bindaetteok and the set jelly nokdumuk; and southward into Vietnam, where đậu xanh fills the Tết rice cake and sweetens the chè. Maritime trade out of southern India carried the bean the other way into Southeast Asia, where Malay and Javanese cooks made it a sweet porridge in coconut milk, and where it reached the Philippines and became monggo, the Friday stew of a Catholic country observing meatless days. In Siam it met the Portuguese-influenced confectionery of the Ayutthaya court and was moulded and painted into miniature fruits. Overland and much earlier, the bean had also worked its way east down the Gangetic plain into Bengal, which alone amongst mung-eating regions dry-roasts the split pulse in a bare pan before boiling it, and on from the delta across the Arakan hills into Myanmar, which now grows more mung beans than any other country on earth and eats them boiled whole for breakfast and fried into fritters. Sri Lanka, reached early across the Palk Strait, took a third path again: it never adopted splitting and hulling at all, and dresses the whole boiled bean with freshly scraped coconut.
The last movements are colonial and modern. Indentured labourers carried moong dal from India to Fiji, Mauritius, and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century, and Indo-Fijian dhal is the direct descendant. East Africa took up the crop for the same reasons Indian farmers had, as a short-season pulse that asks little, and Kenya and Tanzania now grow ndengu both to eat and to export. And Australia, which has the wild progenitor growing natively in the north and no tradition of eating the cultivated bean whatever, became one of the world's largest exporters of it, growing mung on the Queensland and New South Wales black soils almost entirely for Asian markets.
Myanmar is the largest producer of mung beans in the world and India the largest consumer, and between them, with China, they account for the great bulk of a crop grown across some seven million hectares. Australia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Argentina grow it substantially for export rather than for domestic use, which makes mung one of the few pulses whose international trade runs largely from countries that do not eat it to countries that do.
In the kitchen the forms remain firmly separate by region, and the split is close to absolute. The Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, and Iran use the bean itself, whole or split, and never sprout it or extract its starch. East and Southeast Asia use the sprout, the starch, and the sweetened paste, and only rarely cook the plain bean as a savoury pulse. The consequence is that a cook who knows mung as moong dal and a cook who knows it as sukju namul or as cellophane noodles may not recognise that they are discussing the same plant.
The subcontinental repertoire rests on the split hulled bean, which cooks faster than any other pulse and digests more easily, so that moong dal khichdi is what is given in India to the sick, to the very young, and to the very old, and is the food of fasting and convalescence as much as of the ordinary table. Alongside it stand the tempered dals of the north, the Andhra pesarattu made from a batter of soaked whole green beans, the Bengali bhaja muger dal in which the split bean is roasted dry before it is boiled, the sprouted-bean salads of Gujarat and Maharashtra, and the ghee-heavy festival sweet moong dal halwa. Sri Lanka sits a little apart from all of them, keeping the bean whole and dressing it with scraped coconut rather than with ghee or a tempering. Eastward the bean is chiefly a sweet: the cooling lǜdòu tāng that Chinese households drink through the summer, the Vietnamese chè, the Indonesian and Malaysian bubur kacang hijau, and the mung paste that fills mooncakes and hopia. The sprout is a vegetable in its own right across the whole region, and the starch noodle is the backbone of a hundred dishes from Sichuan to Seoul. Only the Philippines and Myanmar comfortably do both, cooking the whole bean as a savoury stew and sweetening it besides.
Historical Journey of Mung Bean
Gujarat, Rajasthan & the Harappan Plains — c. 2500 BCE
The mung bean was domesticated in India, and the north-western plains are the older of its two cradles. Carbonised seeds appear in Harappan and immediately post-Harappan levels across Gujarat and Rajasthan from about 2500 BCE, taken from the local population of the wild Vigna radiata var. sublobata, and the plant recommended itself for reasons that have not changed since: it fixes its own nitrogen, tolerates thin soil and short water, and comes to harvest in sixty days, which lets a farmer take a crop from a field between two cereals rather than instead of one. Sanskrit calls it mudga, and the medical literature singles it out early. Ayurveda classifies mung as the most digestible and the most sattvic of all pulses, balancing to all three doshas, and prescribes it for the sick, the convalescent, the weaning infant, and the very old; the thin dal water given in a fever and the soft khichdi given to a child are both a thousand years old as medicine before they were ever comfort food. That reputation made it the pulse of fasting as well, permitted on days when others are not. The northern kitchen works above all with moong dal dhuli, the split and hulled yellow bean that collapses to a purée in twenty minutes without soaking: it is tempered with cumin and ghee into the everyday dal, cooked with rice into khichdi, and, at festivals, roasted slowly in a great deal of ghee and sugar into the dense, grainy moong dal halwa of the Rajasthani winter.
The Deccan, Andhra & Peninsular India — c. 1600 BCE
Southern India domesticated the mung bean separately. The archaeobotanical sequence in the peninsula runs on its own track, with mung appearing at Chalcolithic sites of the Deccan such as Navdatoli and amongst the Neolithic ashmound settlements of Karnataka from roughly 1600 BCE, drawn from a genetically distinct population of the same wild ancestor; the north-western and southern cradles are separated by a thousand kilometres and by nine hundred years, and neither is derived from the other. The consequence is visible on the plate, because the south works the bean quite differently. Where the north splits and hulls it into a fast-cooking yellow dal, the south more often uses the whole green bean, soaked and ground raw into a batter, which is a technique the north scarcely employs. The great example is the Andhra pesarattu: whole green mung soaked overnight, ground with green chilli and ginger into a slack batter, and spread thin on a griddle into a crisp-edged green crêpe, which unlike its cousin the dosa is not fermented at all and can therefore be made the same day. It is eaten for breakfast with ginger chutney and, in its Telugu form MLA pesarattu, stuffed with a spiced semolina upma. Beside it stand the sprouted-bean salads of Gujarat and Maharashtra, the pesara punugulu fritters, and the mung payasam of the Kerala feast.
The Ganges Delta & Bengal — c. 400 BCE
The mung bean moved east down the Gangetic plain with the rest of the north Indian agricultural package, reaching the alluvial country of the lower Ganges and the delta well before the middle of the first millennium BCE, and Bengal then did something to it that no other region did. Everywhere else the split bean goes into the pot as it comes. In Bengal it is first turned in a dry, heavy pan over a low flame, without a drop of fat, until it colours to pale honey and smells of toasted nuts, and only then washed and boiled. The roasting changes the pulse outright: it firms each grain so that the dal cooks loose and separate rather than collapsing into the smooth purée of a north Indian moong dal dhuli, and it replaces the mild grassiness of plain moong with a deep nuttiness. The result, bhaja muger dal, is the everyday dal of the Bengali table, cooked thin, tempered with whole cumin, bay, and dried chilli, seasoned with the pinch of sugar that Bengal applies to savoury food with a confidence that startles the rest of India, and served early in the meal over rice with a fried vegetable beside it rather than alongside everything at once. The same roasted dal, cooked down with the small, fragrant gobindobhog rice, becomes bhoger khichuri, which is offered at the Durga Puja pandal and distributed as prasad in quantities running to many thousands of servings; on those October days it is very likely the most widely eaten mung dish on earth. Bengal is also the point from which the bean moved on: east across the delta and the Arakan hills into the Ayeyarwady basin, and, in the nineteenth century, out of the Calcutta emigration depot with the indentured.
Anuradhapura & the Dry Zone of Lanka — c. 300 BCE
Mung crossed the Palk Strait from the peninsula early and settled into the island's dry zone, where the rain-fed chena plots of the north-central plain, cultivated between the great irrigation tanks of the Anuradhapura kingdom, wanted precisely what the bean offers: a crop that takes a short and uncertain rain, asks nothing of the soil, and finishes before the ground bakes dry. What Sri Lanka did not take from the mainland is the habit of splitting and hulling. The island keeps the bean whole, which is what mung ata means, the seed entire, and it pairs it not with ghee nor with a tempering of spices but with coconut, which serves Sinhala cooking as fat, dairy, and seasoning at once. Mung ata itself is the plainest expression of this: whole beans boiled until they just give, drained hot, and turned through freshly scraped coconut with salt and lime so that the coconut warms without cooking. It is eaten by hand at breakfast, sweetened at the table with kithul treacle or made savoury with lunu miris or pol sambol according to preference, and it carries an association well beyond its modest place on the plate, being a temple and alms food given at dana and taken on poya days. The mung flour sweets belong to the same tradition: mung kavum and the small moulded mung guli, roasted mung flour bound with kithul jaggery, appear at Avurudu, the Sinhala and Tamil New Year in April, alongside the rest of the festival table.
Chang'an & Han China — c. 200 BCE
China received the mung bean by the last centuries BCE, along the overland routes that carried everything else westward and eastward, and then did two things to it that India never had. The first is sprouting. A dry bean germinated in the dark for four days becomes an entirely different food: crisp, watery, mild, and, decisively, available in the middle of winter when nothing at all is growing. This is amongst the great pieces of pre-modern food technology, a method of manufacturing a fresh green vegetable out of a dry store and a warm room, and it is a Chinese invention that spread from here across the whole of East and Southeast Asia. The second is starch extraction: the ground bean is washed, the starch settled out and dried, and the resulting powder sets into a clear elastic gel or is extruded into the fine translucent threads that Chinese calls fěnsī, powder thread, and English calls cellophane or glass noodles. They are made from mung starch and from very little else, and they hold their bite in soup where a wheat noodle would collapse, which is why they turn up in a hundred dishes including the Sichuanese mǎyǐ shàng shù, ants climbing a tree. The whole bean, meanwhile, is boiled with rock sugar into lǜdòu tāng, which Chinese medicine classifies as strongly cooling and which is drunk through the summer against heatstroke, issued to outdoor workers in a heatwave, and credited from the Tang period onward with countering poison.
Samarkand, Bactria & Sogdiana — c. 100 BCE
North-west out of India the mung bean travelled the passes into Bactria and Sogdiana on the same roads that carried silk and lapis, and it settled into Central Asian cooking under a name it kept the whole way: mash, a word shared across Persian, Tajik, Uzbek, and the Turkic languages from the Indus to Anatolia, which is a fair sign that the bean made the journey once and stayed. What is striking about this westward transmission is how little travelled with it. Neither sprouting nor starch extraction, the two Chinese techniques that define mung cookery to the east, has any traditional foothold anywhere between the Indus and the Caspian; from India to Uzbekistan the bean is boiled, and that is all. What Central Asia does with it is put it in the pot with rice and a great deal of fat-tailed mutton. Mashkhurda, the thick mung and rice soup of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, is the everyday winter food of the region, cooked slowly with mutton, onion, tomato, and cumin until the beans burst and thicken the whole, and finished at the table with a spoonful of soured milk, suzma or qatiq, stirred through. A drier version cooked down until the liquid is absorbed becomes mashkichiri, a mung pilaf of the same family as plov and eaten in the same way.
The Iranian Plateau & Sasanian Persia — c. 600 CE
Westward from Sogdiana the mung bean reached the Iranian plateau, where Persian took the same word, mash, and folded the pulse into the country's oldest and most characteristic dish form: the ash, the thick pottage of herbs, pulses, and grain that is the ancestor of a great many soups from the Balkans to Bengal, and from which the word ash-paz, cook, and ash-khaneh, kitchen, are both derived. Ash-e mash is amongst the plainest members of the family and one of the oldest: mung simmered with rice or barley and a great weight of chopped herbs, soured with kashk or with vinegar, and finished with fried mint and crisp onion. In Iran the bean carries the same medicinal reputation it does in India, being regarded as cooling and light, and ash-e mash is what is cooked for someone recovering from illness or for a woman after childbirth; it is also a food of religious vow, cooked in quantity and distributed as nazri. Beyond the ash, mung appears in the Iranian kitchen as a simple boiled bean dressed with oil and herbs, and it is the pulse used in Gilan and Mazandaran for the thick, sour, herb-heavy soups of the Caspian provinces.
The Korean Peninsula — c. 700 CE
Korea took the mung bean from China with both Chinese techniques attached, and then built more on them than anywhere else outside India. Nokdu, the green bean, is ground wet into a batter for bindaetteok, the thick, coarse, deeply savoury pancake of Pyongyang origin that is fried in a generous quantity of oil with pork, kimchi, and bracken worked through it; it is the food of Gwangjang market in Seoul, where the beans are still ground to order on stone mills in the aisle, and it belongs to the ancestral memorial table as much as to the street. The extracted starch is set into nokdumuk, a pale, wobbling, almost flavourless jelly cut into batons and dressed with soy, sesame, and toasted seaweed as tangpyeongchae, a dish with an unusually specific political origin, having been named for the eighteenth-century king Yeongjo's policy of impartiality between court factions, the colours of the garnish standing for the parties he meant to reconcile. And the sprout, sukju namul, blanched briefly and dressed with sesame oil, garlic, and salt, is one of the fixed namul of the Korean table and of the bowl of bibimbap. The sprout's Korean name is itself a piece of history: it is said to commemorate Sin Suk-ju, a fifteenth-century official whose loyalties turned as quickly as a bean sprout wilts in the pan.
The Red River Delta & Vietnam — c. 1000 CE
Vietnamese calls the mung bean đậu xanh, green bean, and uses it more as a sweet and a filling than as a pulse. Its most important appearance is inside something else: bánh chưng, the square cake of glutinous rice wrapped in dong leaves and boiled for half a day, is built around a core of mashed mung bean and pork belly, and it is the indispensable food of Tết. The legend attached to it is a founding one, in which the eighteenth Hùng king sets his sons to find the finest dish in the land and the youngest, too poor to hunt for rarities, presents a square cake of rice, mung, and pork representing the earth and a round one representing the sky, and is given the throne for it; the story is late but the cake is genuinely ancient, and its making is a family undertaking in the days before the new year. Beyond it the bean is sweetened: chè đậu xanh, the loose, soupy mung pudding served warm or over ice with coconut cream, is one of the commonest of the whole chè family, and bánh đậu xanh, the pressed cakes of mung flour, sugar, and fat from Hải Dương, are the standard gift to take with tea. The sprout appears on every plate of herbs beside a bowl of phở, and the mung starch noodle, miến, carries its own soups.
The Ayeyarwady Basin & Myanmar — c. 1100 CE
Myanmar grows more mung beans than any other country on earth, and has done so for long enough that the crop is woven through the ordinary day rather than reserved for any occasion. The bean came overland from Bengal, across the delta and the Arakan hills that have carried traffic between the two great river countries for as long as either has been settled, and it found in Upper Burma a better home than it had left. The dry zone of the central Ayeyarwady basin suits the plant exactly, since it wants little water and finishes fast, and the great bulk of the harvest is exported to India and China whilst the country eats a very great deal of it besides. Burmese cookery uses the bean in every form it has. Pè byouk, whole mung beans boiled soft and dressed with oil, salt, and fried onion, is a breakfast eaten with tea or heaped over sticky rice; pè kyaw, thin fritters of split mung in a rice-flour batter, are fried crisp and broken over the national dish mohinga; ground mung thickens the fish soups and the noodle broths; and the sprout and the glass noodle both appear in the salads that are the glory of the Burmese table. The bean also carries the country's Buddhist alms-round and monastery cooking, being cheap, quick, and entirely acceptable in a vegetarian kitchen. Burmese practice sits unusually between the two great mung traditions: it cooks the whole bean as a savoury pulse in the Indian manner and uses the sprout and the starch in the Chinese manner, which is what one would expect of a country lying directly between them.
Java & the Malay Archipelago — c. 1200 CE
Maritime trade out of southern India carried the mung bean into the Malay archipelago, where it became kacang hijau and where, as across most of Southeast Asia, it is chiefly a sweet. Bubur kacang hijau is the definitive form: whole green beans simmered with pandan and palm sugar until they burst and thicken, poured into a bowl and flooded with thick coconut milk, and eaten warm at breakfast, as a mid-morning snack from a street cart, or last thing at night. It is sold from the bubur carts of every Javanese town, made in quantity for communal meals, and cooked at home in a large pot to be eaten over a day; in Malaysia it appears under the same name and in Singapore it is the tau suan family's near relation. Beside it Indonesia uses the bean in onde-onde and other filled glutinous-rice sweets, presses it into the folded bakpia pastries of Yogyakarta, and grows the sprout, tauge, as a standard vegetable that goes into gado-gado, ketoprak, and every plate of fried noodles. The starch noodle, soun, carries its own dishes. What the archipelago does not much do is cook mung as a savoury pulse, which remains the mark of the Indian and Central Asian side of the plant's world.
Luzon & the Philippine Archipelago — c. 1500 CE
The Philippines calls the mung bean monggo, a name that arrived through Spanish from the Portuguese trade and so descends, at three removes, from the Sanskrit mudga, completing a circle back to where the plant began. What the country did with it is unusual in Southeast Asia, because the Philippines cooks mung as a savoury stew rather than as a sweet, and it does so on a fixed day. Ginisang munggo is the Friday dish of a Catholic country that historically abstained from meat on Fridays and in Lent: the beans are boiled soft, then sautéed into a base of garlic, onion, and tomato, thickened with their own starch, and finished with bitter ampalaya leaves or spinach and, in the observant version, with prawns or smoked fish rather than pork. The association is strong enough that Filipinos speak of Friday as monggo day, and many households cook it weekly without any longer attaching a religious reason to it. Sweet uses exist alongside: mung paste fills hopia munggo, the flaky little pastry of the Chinese-Filipino bakeries, and the sprout, toge, goes into lumpia and fried noodles. Between the savoury stew and the sweet filling the Philippines is one of the few places that comfortably works both halves of the bean's divided world.
Ayutthaya & the Siamese Court — c. 1600 CE
Siam's mung beans met an outside influence at the Ayutthaya court and produced something found nowhere else. Maria Guyomar de Pinha, born at Ayutthaya in the seventeenth century to a Japanese-Portuguese-Bengali family and married to the Greek adventurer Constantine Phaulkon, is credited by Thai tradition with introducing to the palace kitchens the egg-yolk and sugar confectionery of Portugal, and the sweets she is said to have taught remain the aristocratic core of the Thai dessert repertoire: foi thong, thong yip, and thong yot, all of them golden and all of them Portuguese in method. Mung bean entered that repertoire as the material for modelling. Look choup are miniature fruits and vegetables, chillies, mangosteens, mangoes, and aubergines, made from a stiff paste of ground mung bean, coconut milk, and sugar, moulded by hand, painted with food colouring, and then dipped repeatedly in agar jelly until they carry a glassy shell; they are amongst the most labour-intensive sweets in Asia and are made for weddings, ordinations, and New Year. It is the same instinct that produced the marzipan fruits of Palermo and Toledo, arrived at by a different route and with a different pulse, and it is the clearest case anywhere of the mung bean being valued for its texture rather than its flavour.
Viti Levu & Indo-Fijian Fiji — c. 1879 CE
The Leonidas landed the first indentured Indian labourers at Levuka in May 1879, and over the following thirty-seven years some sixty thousand followed to work the Fijian cane fields under the girmit contracts; their descendants make up a very large share of the country's population today. Almost all of them were recruited in the eastern Gangetic districts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and shipped out of the Calcutta depot, which is why the Indo-Fijian kitchen descends from the eastern Indian one and not from any other. What they carried with them, besides their labour, was a kitchen, and the pulses were amongst the first things to be re-established, since dal is the one component of an Indian meal that cannot be improvised from local substitutes. Moong dal travelled particularly well, being cheap, fast-cooking, and light, and Indo-Fijian cooking adapted it to what the islands actually grew. The result is a dhal quite distinct from anything on the subcontinent: the split beans are cooked down as they would be in any village of the eastern Gangetic plain, but finished with the thick coconut milk that is the fat of the Pacific rather than with ghee, and tempered with curry leaf, mustard seed, and the local bongo chilli. It is eaten with roti and with cassava as readily as with rice. The same pattern of Indian pulse and island fat repeats across the indenture diaspora, in Mauritius, in Trinidad, and in Guyana, and it is one of the clearest culinary signatures the system left behind.
Kenya, Tanzania & the East African Drylands — c. 1900 CE
East Africa took up the mung bean for exactly the reasons Indian farmers had four thousand years earlier. The semi-arid country of eastern Kenya and central Tanzania is marginal for maize and reliable for very little, and a pulse that finishes in sixty to ninety days, fixes its own nitrogen, and survives on a short and unpredictable rain is precisely what such land wants; mung arrived with Indian Ocean trade and with the South Asian communities established along the coast and the Uganda Railway, and spread inland through the twentieth century as a smallholder crop. Kenya calls it ndengu, or pojo on the coast, and it is now grown across Machakos, Kitui, Makueni, and the Eastern counties both for the domestic table and, increasingly, for export to India, so that the region has joined the small group of producers whose crop feeds someone else's cuisine. What Kenya cooks is its own: ndengu boiled until soft and then stewed down into a thick coconut and tomato sauce with onion, garlic, and a little curry powder, a dish that owes its coconut to the Swahili coast, its spicing to the Indian presence, and its status as an everyday vegetarian main to the fact that it is a great deal cheaper than meat. It is eaten with chapati, with ugali, or with rice.
