Vitumbua.

The Swahili plural gives the game away about how these are eaten. A single one is a kitumbua and nobody ever asks for one — the word almost always turns up as vitumbua, by the plateful, because they come off the pan in batches of seven or nine and disappear at about the same rate. They are morning food, sold from covered baskets and small stalls at the roadside from Mombasa down through Tanga, Dar es Salaam and the islands, usually beside a flask of chai and a pile of mandazi.

The division of labour between those two is worth knowing. Mandazi are wheat, cut into triangles and deep-fried, and they are eaten across most of East Africa including well inland. Vitumbua are rice and coconut, cooked in a dimpled pan rather than a deep fryer, and they stay close to the coast where both ingredients are cheap and local. Where mandazi are chewy and bready, vitumbua are soft and slightly custardy inside with a rim that shatters. They are also, incidentally, gluten-free without anyone having designed them that way.

The pan is the one real obstacle for a cook outside the region. On the coast it is a heavy cast-iron plate with seven or nine round depressions, sold in every market, and it exists precisely because this batter is too loose to hold a shape in a flat pan. The good news is that the Danish aebleskiver pan and the South Indian paniyaram or appe pan are the same tool under different names, which makes vitumbua much easier to attempt in an unfamiliar kitchen than they used to be. Failing that, a well-oiled non-stick pan and a metal ring will get you close enough to understand the dish.