FOOD SPECIAL... SWEET POTATO Slow Roast

FOOD SWEET POTATO Slow Roast

The sweet potato makes for a great street snack. It’s also a versatile ingredient in Gujarati undhiyu, Bengali pantuas and Argentinian dulce de batatas

Street food does not have a healthy reputation. If it’s not cool and liquid and teeming with bacteria, it’s hot and greasy and packed with transfats and instant heartburn. But there are some which are good in both nutritional and hygiene terms, and taste good too: bananas, boiled eggs and peanuts which you peel as you eat, and sweet potatoes slow-roasted on a sigri, then peeled in front of you, cut into soft chunks and dusted with chaat masala for a saltyspicy-sweet snack.
None of these are the elaborate concoctions that people usually mean when they refer to street food, but they are among the cheapest of foods, and among the most important for people who really eat in the street, not from choice, but because they must. It makes them all the more important for the feeding and health of cities, but it also has the unfortunate effect of making them relatively less valued. Because they are so common and so cheap, we forget how good they are.
Sweet potatoes, in particular, rarely receive much attention in India, except perhaps now at the turn of the year, as evenings get colder and a sigri is an attention magnet on the street. We are drawn to its glow, and the cart piled with the lumpy lengths of tubers, which the vendor puts to roast among the embers. It is this slow roasting that develops their earthy sweet taste, with extra smoky flavour from the coals, and the chaat masala sprinkled on for further sparks of flavour.
It is deeply satisfying, as only something starchy can be, but not boring either, as starchy tubers often are. There are many varieties of sweet potatoes, a sign of how long they have been cultivated. Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto in his book Food: A History notes that they are the oldest cultivated crop in their New World homeland in the Andes and “perhaps the earliest anywhere”. Their characteristics can differ quite a bit, but most of them when roasted give that combination of sweet-savoury taste and creamy soft texture.
Add the fact that sweet potatoes have among the best nutritional profiles of any vegetable, with high levels of complex carbohydrates (fitness freaks often eat them before workouts), beta carotene, vitamins C and B and many other essential nutrients, and you can see why they are a vital food for vast numbers of people in the tropical, densely populated parts of the world where sweet potato vines grow fast, needing little attention and facing few pests. Even their arrow-shaped leaves make for an excellent and nutritious green vegetable when plucked young and cooked, for example, in stir-fries.
But sweet potatoes get so little attention in India that many regular vegetable sellers don’t keep them. Near where I live there are three vendors, two of who stock the more expensive ‘English’ vegetables, like broccoli, babycorn and red peppers, but neither keeps sweet potatoes. It is only the third, who caters to less affluent and older customers, who keeps sweet potatoes, along with other desi vegetables, like goosefoot (bathua) and amaranth (chauli) leaves.
Sweet potatoes do find their way into some traditional dishes, like undhiyu,
the wonderful Gujarati medley of winter vegetables covered with chutney and cooked together in a closed pot. Sweet potatoes do very well here, since they offer a slightly different texture and taste, yet not so distinct as to clash with the other flavours in the dish. Sweet potatoes also benefit from their slightly alien status to qualify as one of the non-traditional vegetables that can be eaten during upvas fasts, when grains and regular vegetables aren’t consumed.
For this reason you can find shakharkhand (or ratalu, a term used for several kinds of tubers) dishes at restaurants that specialise in upvas dishes, but otherwise you will rarely find sweet potatoes on Indian menus. (One exception is Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda Café, one of the best small food places anywhere in the country, which has a wonderful sweet potato and pumpkin salad with sesame-soy dressing). Yet I think that such a valuable and versatile vegetable must receive better treatment in many homes, and one confirmation I get is from Chitrita Banerji, the Bengali food writer, who tells me that her family has a couple of special sweet potato preparations.
One of these, from her mother’s family, is “a sweet-sour dish (an ambal) made with sweet potatoes, white radish, and boris (Hindi wadi) made from whipped urad dal, all in a tamarind sauce.” She says the boris, or dried dal dumplings, would absorb the tangy tamarind sauce, and I can see how, along with the cooked radish and sweet potatoes, this would make it one of those dishes, like undhiyu, where the contrasting textures of the ingredients is part of the pleasure of eating them.
But in addition to this, Chitrita adds, “Bengalis can't approach any food without thinking of sweets, so we make pantuas out of sweet potatoes.” Pantuas are deep fried sweet balls like gulab jamuns, but instead of the khoya (reduced milk solids) that would go into gulab jamuns, or the chhana (curd cheese) that most pantuas are made from, these are made from mashed sweet potatoes, shaped into balls, fried in ghee and dunked in syrup.
She says these have a divine taste, and I can believe it, since sweet potatoes are also made into many luscious sweet dishes, like dulce de batatas, a halva like sweet potato paste from Argentina, or the sweet potato pie that Americans make for Thanksgiving. I am sure readers would know many such uses, both sweet and savoury for sweet potatoes in Indian homes, and I would really like to hear about more uses for such an outstanding, if too little appreciated, vegetable.
Vikram Doctor CDET121207