I’d eaten sweet potatoes for a lot of years. Mostly smothered in butter and sprinkled with salt as the side to a roast of pork. Then I came to San Miguel de Allende and my tongue got all twisted around.

In Mexico, the locals eat sweet potatoes as dessert. I thought sweet potatoes were sweet but not that sweet. Mexicans, though, have a solution. They soak their sweet potatoes in syrup. Not for me I thought. And it took me years to ever dare to try one that way.

The clincher came on a burro trek with Denver Reyes, chef/owner of Los Olivos in Colonia San Antonio. We were up in the hills, a few clicks south of San Miguel, gazing over acres of blue sage and looking for just one single peyote plant when Denver started kicking at the stones around a pretty flower with fancy foliage that I thought was morning glory.

He crouched down on his knees and started to claw at the ground. A few scrapes and a couple of tugs later and Denver held up a string of burgundy colored roots.

“Camote”, the chef declared, “what you call sweet potato”. 

“I used to pick them as a kid”, said Denver, who’d spent his early years scurrying up the hills around San Miguel. “Not very big”, he continued, referring to the bulges in the roots that were smaller than my baby finger, “but this is before the scientists got a hold of them.”

I was hooked. Here was I, a guy preaching the “eat local” gospel and here was a vegetable that, not only was local, but was native to that golden place in the world that I’d chosen to spend most of my golden years. 

The next week, I had my first camote, Mexican style.

In Mexico City there are camoteros, guys who haul a shiny metal cart, equipped with a towering exhaust pipe, through the colonias. The cart is filled with crackling mesquite that cooks the camotes. The exhaust pipe does something else though that’s as magical to Mexicans as the taste of those camotes. The camotero pulls a cord and the steam from the pipe lets out this “come and get these goodies” whistle.

The high-pitched sound reminds me of my wake-up call on childhood mornings, the sound from the kettle telling my mother it was time to make tea.

I don’t know of any metal carts with steam whistles in San Miguel de Allende. In my town, you go to the camotes, the camotes don’t come to you. For many San Miguelenses that place to go is the tianguis de los martes.

Camotes are an essential ingredient of Dia de los Muertos for some San Miguel families. On the last Tuesday of October, women form a line at the market to take home a fat plastic bag of camotes to share with their family or perhaps the guests that may come to their home to visit their altar.

I joined that line this year.

The word camote comes from the local Nahuatl language and translates as “edible root”, proof that these lumps of underground ugliness have been consumed here for centuries.

 Sweet potatoes come in a multitude of colors but most of the 40 million tons that are harvested in Mexico are what Denver and I found in the hills, what we call the purple sweet potato north of the border. It’s also what the red-aproned camotero at the Tuesday market chooses for his camotes enmielados.

The syrup that the camotero uses is made from cones of piloncillo, an unrefined cane sugar with a taste somewhere between brown sugar and molasses. The spicing in the syrup is difficult to pin down and I like the mystery. There’s definitely cinnamon, probably star anise and cloves, possibly nothing else.

The caramel syrup is too sweet for some, including Don Day’s Wife, but I could pour it over almost any dessert known to Mexico, perhaps even known to mankind.

The San Miguel camotero sells his camotes by the kilo. I purchased mine by pointing at the most clean-cut looking one that was just the right size to share with my housekeeper.

The canotero placed it in a plastic bag and then held up his ladle and asked, “Miel?”

I replied, “Por favor” and he carefully manoeuvred the ladle into the corner of the aluminum tray and, even more carefully, poured it into the bag.

The camotero looked at me again. “Mas miel?”, and again I nodded and said “Si”.

He wasn,t through yet. “Una mas”, I heard. What’s the dividing line between grateful and greed? My head bobbed up and down one last time.

The camotero knotted my first bag and then double bagged the lot. There would be no syrup on the bolo of cheese in my bag that I bought at the Oaxacan food stand next door. I said goodbye with the guilty but gloating feeling that this should all be costing more than 18 pesos.

I walked home, struggled to open the bag and squeeze every dribble of the miel from it, then split the comate into two bowls and, because there was no condensed milk or whipping cream in the house, poured a little coffee cream on top.

Nice. And the peel, as always, was my favorite part.

They’re a lot too starchy for some palates, a lot too sweet for others, and will never make my top ten of desserts. But comates enmielados is a Mexican tradition and Mexico is a very important part of my life. 

I’ll be back at the Tuesday market for another very sweet potato long before next year’s Dia de Los Muertos. You too?