The most typical of Dominican dishes during Lent and especially during Easter Week is “habichuelas con dulce,” a sweetened bean soup-like dessert, a treat for old and young.
In the hustle and bustle of countryside kitchens, things can go wrong in a hurry, and over the Easter weekend, a dozen or so children have been taken to the Robert Reid Cabral Children’s Hospital in Santo Domingo for burns caused by spilled hot habichuelas con dulce. Most of the burns were from getting too close to the heat source, oftentimes a wood-burning stove called an “anafe” or a more traditional “fogon” which also uses wood or charcoal for heating the dish, usually in large aluminum pots.
With the usual hurried movements of a kitchen, with children anxious to get their dish of the treat, accidents happen. Children at play in a kitchen also caused several incidents, and in one case, the boiling water cause serious second and third degree burns on a child that needed to be hospitalized for treatment.
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Listin Diario
10 April 2023