Ducana

Antigua's steamed parcel of grated sweet potato and coconut sweetened and spiced, tied in banana leaf and boiled beside salt fish

Origin: St John's & Antigua

From the journey of Sweet Potato.

Ducana is grated sweet potato and coconut, sweetened, spiced, bound with a little flour, wrapped in a banana leaf, and boiled. It is eaten with salt fish and chop-up, a mash of aubergine, okra, and spinach, and the combination is one of the fixed plates of the Antiguan and Barbudan kitchen. The name and the method both point back to West Africa. Steamed or boiled parcels of grated starch wrapped in leaves are found across the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin, and the technique came to the Eastern Caribbean with enslaved people who applied it to what was growing there. The sweet potato they found was already established: it is a South American plant, carried into the Caribbean before Columbus and encountered by the Spanish on Hispaniola in 1492, where the Taíno name batata gave the word potato to most European languages long before the Andean tuber reached them. The grating is the labour and the point. The sweet potato is grated on the fine side rather than mashed, which gives a slightly granular, translucent, chewy texture quite unlike a purée, and it is mixed with fresh grated coconut, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla. Some households add grated pumpkin or a little cassava. The leaf matters as much as the filling. Banana leaves are passed over a flame to make them supple, and the parcel is tied at both ends so that it can be boiled rather than steamed, which is the older method and the one the name carries. Foil works and is what most kitchens now use, at the cost of the faint green scent that the leaf gives.

Ingredients

Filling

  • 900 g sweet potato, peeled and finely grated
  • 200 g fresh coconut, finely grated
  • 150 g brown sugar
  • 120 g plain flour
  • 1 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1 tsp ground nutmeg
  • 0.5 tsp salt
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 80 g raisins
  • 150 ml coconut milk

To wrap

  • 8 banana leaves, cut into 25cm squares
  • 1 kitchen string

Method

  1. Pass the banana leaf squares over an open flame or dip them in boiling water until they darken and go supple.
  2. Untreated banana leaf splits along the ribs the moment it is folded, and the parcel then fills with water.
  3. Grate the sweet potato on the fine side of a box grater rather than processing it.
  4. Grating rather than mashing is the whole texture of a ducana; a purée gives something closer to a pudding.
  5. Mix the grated sweet potato with the grated coconut, sugar, flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, vanilla, and raisins.
  6. Work in the coconut milk a little at a time until the mixture just holds together in a spoon; it should be stiff rather than pourable.
  7. Put a heaped spoonful into the centre of each leaf square.
  8. Fold the leaf over into a flat rectangular parcel, fold both ends underneath, and tie firmly with string across both directions.
  9. Tie them tightly. These are boiled rather than steamed, and a loose parcel takes in water and the filling washes out.
  10. Lower the parcels into a large pan of boiling water and cook for forty-five to fifty minutes.
  11. Lift one out and open it to check: the filling should be set, firm, and translucent rather than milky.
  12. Rest the parcels for ten minutes before opening, and serve warm with salt fish and chop-up.

Notes

Grate the sweet potato finely and do not purée it. The mixture should be stiff enough to hold its shape. Soften the leaves over a flame and tie the parcels tightly, since they are boiled. Fresh grated coconut is much better than desiccated, which needs soaking in the coconut milk first. Foil is a common modern substitute and works, though the leaf gives a scent that foil does not. They keep for three days and are reheated by boiling for ten minutes.

The Gastrographer

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