Sweat potatoes

As children, we licked our lips in anticipation when we realised that a main component of our Dinner would be “Sweat” Potatoes. We would be hoping that the sweet potatoes would include the lovely yellow one, like the yolk of an egg – earning it the name of “fowl egg potato”.

The name “sweat” potato, came from the method of cooking. It was a kind of steaming with very little water, covered with a banana leaf or cocoa bush. As the little bit of water boiled, and the steam rose up and condensed, droplets fell back on the potatoes, like beads of sweat.

We also liked to roast the potatoes in the ashes at the base of the coal pot. However, if it could be avoided, sweet potatoes were never cooked in “boilene” for they would give the pot a ‘sweety’ flavor.

My Father, Claude Sullivan, loved a ‘boilene’, and since I could not eat without sweet potato, he had to resort to cooking it on the side. Sometimes, he tried a short cut, and cooked the sweet potatoes in the same pot. It used to disgust him so much, because it made his boilene ‘sweety, sweety”, as he used to say, and he couldn’t enjoy it. I am smiling, because I still see the look of disgust and regret on his face when he spoke about his “sweety, sweety” boilene.

Nelcia says her Mother had a very hard task cooking, all in one pot, for several children with different tastes, because, for example, she could not eat “empty” flour dumplings, another would not eat coconut. However, “Sweat” Potatoes met everyone’s approval.

In those days, every kitchen garden included a sweet potato patch, so that the children could roast potatoes when they got hungry, along with roast plantains and grindy. That was the afternoon snack. It was not Corn Curls. We were short of money, but we were self sufficient. We could go to the garden and dig a sweet potato, and the firewood or the coal pot was there ever burning for us to roast and enjoy.

Sometimes, we could enjoy a slice of sweet potato pudding, or a ‘ducuna’. This latter delicacy was made from a mixture of grated potato, grated coconut, milk, sugar and spices. A small amount of this mixture was put on banana leaves, patted into an oblong shape, tied with banana string and boiled.

Now, we do not even have such good varieties of potatoes any more, and those yellow ones are rich in nutrients. We have lost so much of our indigenous varieties of root crops. Is anyone thinking of saving what remains, or getting back what we have lost?