Sweet cream of beans

Ingredients

• Red beans — soaked overnight400 g
• Coconut milk800 ml
• Evaporated milk370 ml
• Sweet potato500 g
• Sugar250 g
• Cinnamon sticks3
• Cloves6
• Raisins100 g
• Vanilla1 tsp
• Butter40 g
• Milk biscuits — to serve150 g
• Salt1 pinch

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Boil the soaked beans in fresh water for an hour, until completely soft.

   65 min

2. 2

   Blend the beans with some of their liquid to a smooth mass.

   8 min

3. 3

   Press the mass through a sieve with a spoon and discard the skins left behind.

   12 min

4. 4

   Return it to the heat and add the coconut and evaporated milk, cinnamon, cloves and sugar.

   8 min

5. 5

   Cook twenty minutes on a low heat, stirring so it does not catch.

   22 min

6. 6

   Add the sweet potato in pieces and the raisins and cook twenty minutes more, until the potato is tender.

   22 min

7. 7

   Stir in the vanilla, butter and a pinch of salt, chill it and serve it cold with biscuits.

   15 min

About the dish

The beans are cooked down, blended and sieved. The skins stay in the sieve, and without that step the cream is grainy rather than velvet.

The sweet potato goes in in pieces and is not mashed. It stays as chunks in the cream, the only solid element in a liquid dessert.

It is made for Holy Week and hardly at any other time. In the Dominican Republic it is a dish of the calendar, handed round to neighbours in tubs.

Worth knowing

• — Stir constantly through the last twenty minutes. A sweet mass catches on the bottom faster than any porridge.
• — The cream thickens on cooling. Hot it should look slightly thin, and overnight it reaches the right body.
• — It is served cold rather than warm. Warm, habichuelas con dulce taste simply of sweet beans and the whole point is lost.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

480 kcal

Protein

12 g

Fat

18 g

Carbs

68 g

More from Dominican Republic

• Dominican sancocho — A thick soup of several meats and root vegetables. Celebration food, cooked for a crowd.
• Mangú — Mashed boiled green plantain with pickled onion, egg, fried cheese and salami.
• Pollo guisado — Chicken braised in caramelised sugar with vegetables, the Dominican weekday lunch.