What is the dish shown in the “Sunset Limited”

Question

In the movie, "The Sunset Limited" Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson eat a dish which I'm dying to know what it is.
They say it has molasses, rutabaga, bananas and mangoes in it, and it's sort of liquid. Can anyone try and say what that is, and where I can find a complete recipe to make such a recipe? (If you are up for the challenge, maybe you can create one yourselves to include the ingredients above.)

This is the bit I am talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfH9SclYNVg&t=13m20s.

Also including a readable text link to the novel transcript.

Asked by hizki

Answer

A synopsis of the play says this about the dish:

In the second movement, White agrees to eat a meal of multi-cultural soul-food Black prepares for him, relishing it and Black's stories of prison life.

In Black's description in the clip you linked, he says that he learned to prepare it "right here in the ghetto" and that "there are a lot of different influences" from people that come from all over the world. It sounds like the dish is a metaphor for Black's world, or perhaps for his view of the world. Black also says that it gets better after a couple days, that you have to heat it up a few times to get the flavors right, "like chilli." This may be a continuation of the food as life metaphor, but if you take it literally you'd have to guess that the dish itself is a kind of stew.

So, given those clues, if you wanted to make something similar to what Black prepared, I think you'd start by thinking of stew recipes. Ingredients include molasses, banana, rutabaga, and mango, so you've got a mix of starch and sweet. Black and White share this as a meal, not a dessert, so I think you'd want to balance that sweetness with something savory and salty, maybe a ham hock. Onion would also add a savory-sweet flavor that could work with both smoky ham and the sweet ingredients. From there you could add other ingredients, probably whatever you have on hand -- corn, okra, carrots, raisins...

Answered by Caleb

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