Our taste buds are alight with flavours over the Christmas season. 

Often, we transition from sweet to savoury, even tart flavours, and sometimes all in one day.   This series brilliantly reflects this as we’ve shared recipes such as Guyanese black cake and Grenadian salt ham. We also featured something to quench your thirst, a Dominican sorrel recipe.

As Christmas draws nearer, we continue our trek up north to the beautiful island of St Vincent and the Grenadines. We’ll take a look at a toothsome dessert that is widely popular on the island. It’s called ducuna.

Many other countries offer a dessert that bears some similarities to ducana.  For example, Trinidad and Tobago’s pastel and paime, then there’s Aruba’s ayaca and even more closely BVI’s dukuna and Montserrat’s duckna.  Though you may have your traditional way of preparing it, we encourage you to try like the people of St Vincent and the Grenadines do this year.

Also, because we know it’s pretty common for healthy eating to go out the window during this time of the year, you should know there is some benefit in eating ducunas. How so? Well, its main ingredient is sweet potatoes, and sweet potatoes offer a healthy dosage of fibre, iron, calcium, selenium, and vitamins B and C.  Additionally, the well-loved root vegetable is rich in beta-carotene.

So, let’s examine the Vincy way of preparing tasty ducunas.

A St Vincent and the Grenadines ducuna recipe

Ingredients

Five large sweet potatoes (grated)

1 ½ cups sugar

One medium coconut (grated)

¼ tsp salt

One tannia (grated)

½ tsp black pepper

¼ tsp cinnamon

Steamed banana leaves

Method

Combine grated sweet potatoes, tannia and coconut in a large bowl.  Next, add sugar, salt, cinnamon and pepper, mixing thoroughly.  Scoop a cup of the dough and place it on a steamed banana leaf.  Wrap the dough in the leaf tightly, and cut creating individual squares.  Tie each square with a string. 

Place the squares in the boiling water until it is cooked.

Once firm, remove from water and cool. 

Note: Tannia is optional.  You can use 1 ¼ cups of flour as a substitute.

—–

We hope you enjoy St. Vincent’s yummy ducunas. You can now add this to the Guyanese black cake, Dominican sorrel and Grenadian salt ham recipes. To pick up ingredients for this and any other recipes shared, search your Findyello supermarket and grocers-retail listing to find a supermarket near you.

For our upcoming regional Christmas recipe, we head down to Trinidad and Tobago. Trinis love their decadent Ponche de Crème, and we have a feeling so will you.   

Does your country have a recipe that you would like to share?  We want to hear it. Drop us a comment on Facebook or Instagram.  

From us to you, happy holidays!