Black-eyed Pea The so-called black-eyed pea or cowpea is not really a pea, but an African relative of the mung bean that was known to Greece and Rome and brought to the southern United States with the slave trade It has an eye-like anthocyanin pigmentation around the hilum, and a distinctive aroma A variety that produces a very long pod and small seeds is the yard-long bean, a common green vegetable in China (p 336) Pigeon Pea Pigeon pea is a distant relative of the common bean, native to India, and now grown throughout the tropics In India it’s called toor dal or redgram because the tough seed coat of many varieties is reddish brown, though it’s most often hulled and split, and the cotyledons are yellow It’s been cultivated for around 2,000 years, and is made into a simple porridge Like the other grams, it contains little in the way of antinutritional factors Mung Bean, Black Gram, Azuki The Grams The legume genus Vigna, which is native to the Old World, provides the smallseeded “grams” of India and a few other Asian and African seeds Most of them have the advantages of being small, quick-cooking, and relatively free of antinutritional and discomforting compounds Green gram, or mung beans, are native to India, spread early on to China, and are now the most widely grown of this group thanks to the popularity of their sprouts Black gram or urad dal is the most prized of the legumes in India, where it has been cultivated for more than 5,000 years and is eaten whole, split and dehulled, and ground into flour for cakes and breads Rice beans are eaten primarily in Thailand and elsewhere in Indochina The African bambara groundnut resembles the peanut in being borne underground and containing oil, but it isn’t nearly as rich as the peanut In ...Mung Bean, Black Gram, Azuki The Grams The legume genus Vigna, which is native to the Old World, provides the smallseeded “grams” of India and a few other Asian and African seeds Most of them have the advantages of being small, quick-cooking, and. .. advantages of being small, quick-cooking, and relatively free of antinutritional and discomforting compounds Green gram, or mung beans, are native to India, spread early on to China, and are now the most widely grown of this... thanks to the popularity of their sprouts Black gram or urad dal is the most prized of the legumes in India, where it has been cultivated for more than 5,000 years and is eaten whole, split and dehulled,