Vegetarian recipes from Kenya

Meatless Kenyan cooking rests on three pillars: maize, beans and leafy greens. Maize is eaten as flour cooked in water to a firm paste, as in ugali with sukuma wiki, where it acts as a neutral base for collard greens sweated with onion and tomato. Beans appear in two forms: whole and simmered in coconut milk for maharagwe, or combined with maize kernels in githeri, a long-cooked one-pot dish that stands as a full meal. Seasoning stays short: onion, tomato, a little chilli, sometimes coriander.

A meal is built around a starch and a sauce, with something raw to cut through it. Kachumbari plays that part: tomato, rinsed red onion, lime, served alongside almost everything and never as a dish of its own. The layered flatbread Kenyan chapati comes from the coast and its South Asian influence, and replaces ugali when you want to mop up sauce. Sweetness sits outside the meal: it arrives with tea, in the form of mandazi, fried and scented with cardamom and coconut. The main fats are vegetable oil and, on the coast, coconut milk.