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The Caribbean · Volume 12, The Sofrito, the Libreta and the Ninety Miles to Miami

Pan patato

Sibanicú, Camagüey

Pan patato: a dense golden baked sweet in a tin, cut in squares, two lifted out to show the moist orange and cream crumb with coconut.

Illustration

Pan patato is a dense baked sweet of grated cooked boniato, the Cuban white sweet potato, with yuca, calabaza and grated coconut, sweetened with honey or sugar and enriched with fat. It belongs to Sibanicú, and José Martí wrote it down in his notes on Camagüey, in volume 22 of his complete works, page 214: "Pan-patato: rallaban el boniato cocido, lo mezclaban con calabaza, o yuca, u otra vianda, o coco rallado; y luego le echaban miel de abejas, o azúcar, y manteca." They grated the cooked boniato, mixed it with calabaza or yuca or coconut, added honey or sugar and lard, baked it in greased pans surrounded by heat, and it lasted four to six days. "Así aprovechaban el boniato malo." It was how they used the bad boniato.

The Camagüeyan Martí scholar Luis Álvarez says it is the only recipe in Martí's work. The quantities here are the provincial Culinary Association's, from Yudeini Pérez Mauriño's book, as A la mesa Cuba printed them in 2015. Island clock. Her version uses butter where Martí has lard. CiberCuba, writing from exile in 2026, says it is still made in Sibanicú and in Minas, each family with its own touch.

As tradition built it

A Sibanicú sweet that keeps four to six days.

Ingredients

  • 1000g boniato, cooked
  • 1500g yuca
  • 750g calabaza
  • 2 cups grated coconut
  • 500g sugar
  • to taste honey
  • 10g salt
  • 115g butter, or lard as Martí has it

Method

  1. Grate the cooked boniato and mix it with the yuca, the calabaza and the grated coconut.
  2. Add the sugar, the honey and the salt, and work it to an even mass.
  3. Grease a mould with some of the butter and work the rest into the mass.
  4. Press the mass into the mould and bake it 20 minutes.

Notes

The book gives no oven temperature and does not say whether the yuca and calabaza are grated raw or cooked; Martí says only that the boniato is cooked. The blog that first published the book gives the calabaza as two thirds of a kilo. Cuba a Pulso, a site whose provenance we could not establish, bakes a much smaller batch at 180°C for 30 minutes.

What a modern chef changes

Heat from above as well as below, as Martí's pans had it

Rung 05

Method

  1. Cook the yuca and the calabaza before you grate them, as the boniato is, so the mass bakes through in the book's short time and nothing is raw at the centre.
  2. Use lard, as Martí did. It sets firmer than butter when the sweet cools, and the sweet was made to keep.
  3. Bake it in a cast iron pot with a lid in the Big Green Egg, heat round it and above it: "rodeados de calor", surrounded by heat. Rung 05, the caja china's logic, heat from above, used for a cake.
  4. Cut it the next day. A dense starch sweet sets as it cools and slices clean once it has.
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