Limbu Kitchen Staple · Fermented Soybean

Kinema

Photo: Chhatra Magar / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

Its name comes from Limbu words meaning roughly 'fermented' and 'smell' (or, in another reading, 'flavor') — an unusually honest name for a dish whose stickiness and pungency are exactly the point.

Kinema is made by boiling soybeans for hours, lightly crushing them, and packing them into a bamboo container lined with fern leaves to ferment for a day or two with no starter culture needed. The sticky, strongly aromatic result is simmered into a soupy curry with onion, tomato and chili and ladled over rice at homes and tea-shops through Nepal's eastern hills.

Why it's made this way: The Limbu and Rai people of eastern Nepal are credited with developing kinema, and it remains a marker of Limbu and Kirat identity around Ilam and Dharan today.