The plant has another common name, Air Potato, because the fruits resemble a small potato growing on the stem of the vine and not underground like a regular potato.
In early Spring I planted some of the tiny "potatoes" in pots so I could bring them in on cold nights, and hoped for the best. They started sprouting rather quickly and as the soil began to warm up later on in the Spring I planted them outside under a home made trellis right next to my Mango Melons . Unfortunately as the season progressed so did the aggressive Morning Glory's and they covered up the cinnamon Vine pretty well so I never got a chance to see the flowers or to smell them to see if they smelled like Cinnamon or not. Like most people who work 5 days a week, my garden falls prey to all the opportunistic plants whose seeds have been waiting all winter to explode into growth, and I don't always have time to clean them out.
As the summer progressed I would check the vines now and again and finally one day I started to see some '"potatoes" forming on the vines. Very excited I cleaned the Morning Glory away from the vines to give them as much sun as possible to help them grow and in a few weeks they were ready to taste.
The "potatoes" are very small and can be eaten raw or cooked. I tried both. Raw, they had that potato crunch when biting into them and had a white flesh the same consistency as a potato also. I grabbed a palm full of the "potatoes", threw them in a pot, added water and brought them to a boil and cooked then till they were soft. To my amazement they tasted just like a potato! So, of course I grabbed some Organic Butter, salt and pepper and seasoned them as I would a regular potato. They were good! Unfortunately I had barely two bites before these small veggies were gone. Too bad they don't get bigger, I could make a meal out of them.
Supposedly the roots get big like a potato and are also edible. After taking all I could get from one of the vines, I dug it up to check out the roots, unfortunately they ware very small and not worth taking. Maybe the plant needs to be a few years old for the roots to get large enough to eat. I will see next year if the plants survive the Winter.
I didn't eat most of the Air Potatoes, I saved them to plant next year to increase my yield. So glad to have a new Edible in my garden!
Peace
