FOOD RESOURCE COLLEGE OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SCIENCES, OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
COLEUS
Excerpts from Hawkes, Alex D. 1968. A World of Vegetable Cookery. Simon and Schuster, New York.
Coleus is a sizable genus of the Mint Family, especially numnerous in the tropics of Africa and Indonesia. Many horticulturally evolved Coleus with showy multicolored big soft leaves have long been grown as prized ornamentals in our gardens and greenhouses, and it is not generally known that the group is also of importance abroiad as a vegetable.
The most important of the edible Coleus is the Hausa Potato (Coleus rotundifolius), a perennial plant widespread from Nigeria to Java. In many of the countries over this gigantic range it has long been extensively cultivated for the smallish round tubers which are produced in profusion. The flavor of these "potatoes" is rather pleasant, a bit spicy, and the texture is moist and grainy.
In Indonesia several other kinds of Coleus are cultivatedm not only for the subterranean tubers which the plants bear, but also for the edible juvenile shoots with their accompanying leaves.
