Meaning
A sweet steamed pudding of grated cornmeal or sweet potato with coconut, sugar, and warm spices, wrapped in a banana leaf and boiled in the parcel. Also called 'blue drawers' or 'tie-a-leaf', dukunu takes its faint colour and fragrance from the leaf it cooks in, and it is a beloved traditional treat descended from West African cookery. One of the oldest sweets on the island, it is turned out for gatherings, Sundays, and special days, tender and lightly spiced.
Examples
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Granny mek dukunu fi Sunday.
Grandma made dukunu for Sunday.
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Di dukunu sweet an soft.
The pudding is sweet and soft.
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Wi call it blue drawers sometime.
We sometimes call it 'blue drawers'.
Origin
From a West African word for a boiled cornmeal dumpling; related dishes and names survive across West Africa and the Caribbean, a direct food legacy of the enslaved.
How it’s used
The banana-leaf wrapping gives it its shape and its nicknames. A cherished part of Jamaican home cooking.
Gloss adapted from A Learner's Glossary of Jamaican, Open Grammar Project, licensed under CC BY 4.0. View the source work · CC BY 4.0