Khanom Mo Kaeng

Khanom Mo Kaeng (ขนมหม้อแกง) is a Thai sweet made by combining eggs, coconut milk, and sugar, with a browned surface. Some versions add mung beans, taro, or other ingredients to the moist, custard-like batter. The light-brown baked surface and the aroma of fried shallots give it a character different from Western puddings made with milk and eggs.

Phetchaburi Province in central Thailand is especially renowned for this sweet. Mo kaeng is also known for being baked and sold in shallow containers. When it is cut, a moist batter containing beans or tubers appears beneath the browned top.

Mo kaeng baked in a shallow container, with fried shallots scattered on top. Photographed at a market in Uttaradit, northern Thailand, in 2011. Photo: Takeaway / CC BY-SA 3.0 / Original, unmodified.

What is Phetchaburi’s sugar made from?

A landscape with sugar palms in Phetchaburi. Photographed on December 26, 2009.

Photo: SIAMSEARCH / CC BY 3.0 / Original. Full size, unmodified.

In the past, boiled-down palm sugar in Phetchaburi was packed into small earthenware pots and sold. Space was left below the mouth of each pot to keep stacked pots from sticking together with sugar.

In Phetchaburi, sugar from the sugar palms that grow abundantly in the province supports sweet-making. Palm sugar from Ban Lat District is an essential ingredient when describing the local Khanom Mo Kaeng. The batter contains two gifts from palms: sugar from the sugar palm and coconut milk made from the coconut palm.

The sugar does more than add sweetness; it also carries regional differences in flavor. Sweets made only with white sugar and sweets made with local palm sugar differ in aroma and flavor, and Phetchaburi’s sweets became known in connection with the character of that sugar. The combination of sugars and the choice of beans or tubers added to the batter vary from shop to shop and from household to household.

At Khanom Mo Kaeng Mae Yai in Ayutthaya, the method has been passed down from the family to the shop. The shop owner’s husband learned to make mo kaeng from his wife’s mother, and together with his wife, who had helped her mother since childhood, he expanded the lineup to other Thai sweets as well. The shop tops its three kinds of mo kaeng—egg, mung bean, and taro—with foi thong, a Thai egg sweet made in fine threads. Besides the choice of beans or tubers, finishes that add another egg sweet on top have also emerged.

Adding beans and baking the surface

For mo kaeng with mung beans, the beans are softened before being combined with the eggs and coconut milk. Unlike a custard in which the egg mixture is simply steamed until set, the batter also contains the bean particles and starch. There are also versions made with taro and versions centered on eggs, and beans or tubers add body to the smooth egg batter.

One mung bean recipe (ingredient proportions and method) describes cooking the combined batter in a brass pan while stirring until it thickens, transferring it to a shallow square mold, and baking it with heat from above. This is a two-stage heating process: the batter is first thickened in the pan, and then the top is browned. Fried shallots are scattered on top, and the sweet is cooled and then cut into squares. Some taro formulas add rice flour or pandan, so the composition of the batter changes depending on whether beans or tubers are used.

The shallots are not mere decoration. The aroma of fried shallots is layered over the sweet fragrance of sugar and coconut in the batter. Combining sweetness with the aroma of frying is one of the characteristics of this sweet.

Traditions about court sweets, and a local specialty

The origin of mo kaeng is told in connection with the court of the Ayutthaya period and Maria Guyomar, known as Thao Thong Kip Ma. She is known as the person who brought an egg-sweet culture connected to Portugal to Thailand, and mo kaeng is sometimes counted as part of that lineage.

The alternative name Kumphamat is also tied to a tradition associated with a “golden pot.” How today’s formulas with beans or tubers came about is not clear, but the story connecting the court and egg sweets continues to be told as the origin of mo kaeng. Today’s mo kaeng is a sweet that has developed not only through these memories of court sweets but also through the beans and tubers available in the provinces, palm sugar, and takeaway sales.

Glossary