Doce de papaya

Fruit at the heart of Cape Verdean sweets

Turismo de Cabo Verde, the national tourism website, calls fruit the pillar of Cape Verdean sweets, with sweets ranging from papaya to coconut, peanut, guava and tamarind. The same guide notes that papaya is present on the islands, often with an impressive number of fruits on each tree.

The University of Évora dissertation adds that, besides eating papaya fresh, Cape Verdean households have a tradition of turning it into sweets, jams and caramelised products. This home preserving is mostly done by women, on most farms, and brings in extra income for families, according to the study.

A fruit grown for the table and the pot

The dissertation, a 2013 study of papaya grown on Santiago, ranks papaya third among Cape Verdean fruit crops by number of trees, citing the 2004 agricultural census, and says papaya and banana are the only two fruits that supply the market all year round. On Santiago, production is concentrated in Ribeira dos Picos, in the municipality of Santa Cruz.

The Local kind, which the dissertation calls the most widespread, grows almost spontaneously. Its trees are very tall and its large fruit has lower commercial value, but it is widely used for the sweets and confectionery that women make, a source of income for the family. The smaller Solo variety, with fruit of 300 to 400 grams, was introduced in the 1990s under government programmes.

Eaten with cheese

Expresso das Ilhas, in a 2017 guide to local products, says that in Cape Verdean cooking cheese is served at breakfast as a source of protein and as a dessert, cut in slices and accompanied by doce de papaia, marmelada (quince paste) or goiabada (guava paste). Wikipedia’s article on Cape Verdean cuisine lists goat’s cheese with papaya jam among the islands’ dishes.

The cheese is local. Goat’s milk predominates in the archipelago, Turismo de Cabo Verde says, and Expresso das Ilhas names Santo Antão, Boa Vista, Fogo and Maio as the islands that make cheese. Cheese also appears in another Cape Verdean dessert, pudim de queijo.

In Emblem World, doce de papaya sits in the Cabo Verde dessert collection, where people discover and rate local sweets.