the Sri Lankan mung bean breakfast: whole green beans boiled until they just yield, then tossed hot with freshly scraped coconut, salt, and lime, and eaten with kithul treacle or a chilli sambol
Origin: Sri Lanka
From the journey of Mung Bean.
Sri Lanka keeps the mung bean whole. The island never took up the mainland habit of splitting and hulling it into a fast yellow dal, and the word ata means precisely that: the seed, entire and unbroken. What the island does instead is pair it with coconut, which is the fat, the dairy, and the seasoning of Sinhala cooking all at once, and the pairing is close to invariable. Beans are boiled until they just give, drained whilst still hot, and turned through freshly scraped coconut with salt and a squeeze of lime, so that the coconut warms without cooking and coats every bean. The crop belongs to the dry zone. The rain-fed chena plots of the north-central plain, cultivated between the great irrigation tanks of the Anuradhapura kingdom, want exactly what mung offers: a crop that will take a short and uncertain rain, ask nothing of the soil, and finish before the ground bakes dry. Mung has accordingly been an island pulse for a very long time, and it carries a weight of association well beyond its modest place on the plate. It is a temple food and an alms food, given at dana and taken on poya days, and it is the plain, blameless dish that a household offers when something richer would be inappropriate. It is also breakfast, eaten by hand, either sweetened with a spoonful of kithul treacle or made savoury with lunu miris or pol sambol alongside, which is a choice the eater makes at the table rather than the cook in the kitchen. The mung flour sweets belong to the same tradition and appear at Avurudu, the Sinhala and Tamil New Year in April, when mung kavum and the small moulded mung guli, made of roasted mung flour bound with kithul jaggery, sit on the New Year table with the rest of the sweets.
Freshly scraped coconut is what the dish is made of and there is no honest substitute; frozen grated coconut, which thaws close to fresh, is far better than the desiccated sort. If desiccated is all there is, rehydrate 80 g in 60 ml of warm water for 15 minutes and squeeze it lightly before use, and accept that the texture will be coarser. Use whole green mung, not the split hulled yellow moong dal, which disintegrates, and not urad (Vigna mungo, black gram), which is a different species. A close Burmese relative, pè byouk, boils the same whole bean and dresses it with oil and fried shallot instead of coconut, which is a fair illustration of how far a pulse travels on the strength of a local fat. Some households add a knotted stalk of lemongrass or a curry leaf sprig to the cooking water, and some finish the dish with a spoonful of coconut oil. Mung ata is at its best within an hour or two of being made; refrigerated, the coconut stiffens and dulls, so cook the beans ahead if it suits and dress them only when they are wanted, warming them briefly in a steamer first.
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