The Caribbean · Volume 14, The First Free Kitchen in the Americas
Soup joumou
Ouest, Haiti
Illustration
- Time
- Hands on 2 hours 15 · Waiting 4 hours
- Researched
- Researched from 67 sources in the brief
No Haitian-press or scholarly source consulted for this chapter gives a single codified recipe with exact quantities, and UNESCO's own listing text stays deliberately general for exactly this reason: the soup varies household to household and there is no one "official" version, whatever the popular imagination of a single independence-day recipe might suggest.
As tradition built it
Soup joumou
Eaten 1 January, Independence Day; UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage 2021; serves 8, about 2 hours 15 minutes, plus at least 4 hours marinating.
Ingredients
- 1.1 to 1.4kg (2½ to 3lb) giraumon (turban-type winter squash, calabaza-adjacent), puréed into the stock
- 450g (1lb), cubed beef, marinated in epis and cleaned in citrus before cooking
- 3 cups, shredded cabbage
- 2 large carrots
- 2 turnip
- 2 potato
- 3 stalks celery
- 1 leek
- 1 onion
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1 whole Scotch bonnet, left intact rather than burst, for aroma without overwhelming heat
- 3 cups macaroni or vermicelli, added late so it does not overcook
- to taste salt
- to taste black pepper
Method
- Marinate the beef in epis and citrus juice for several hours, in the same way griot is marinated below.
- Simmer the beef until tender, then remove and set aside, reserving the cooking liquid.
- Cook the squash in the same liquid until soft enough to purée, then blend it back into the pot for the soup's body and colour.
- Add the remaining vegetables, the cabbage, carrots, turnip, potato, celery, leek, onion and garlic, and simmer until tender.
- Return the beef to the pot, add the macaroni or vermicelli in the last few minutes of cooking, and finish with the whole Scotch bonnet, removed before serving unless real heat is wanted.
What a modern chef changes
Exact Tenderness, Silky Squash Base
Rungs 1 and 6
Method
- Marinate the beef in a properly built batch of epis (Rung 1), then cook it sous vide to a fully tender, fall-apart texture rather than the pink-to-grey range a stovetop simmer risks either underdoing or overcooking. Rung 6.
- Purée the cooked squash in a high power blender and pass it through a chinois for a genuinely silky, restaurant-grade body, rather than the coarser texture a hand masher or standard blender leaves.
- Serve the vegetables as a garnish rather than folding everything into one pot, plating the clarified squash base with the sous vide beef and neatly cut vegetables arranged rather than submerged, in the spirit of the composed, "dumpling-bobbing" soup joumou served at Kann in Portland, a documented example of a named kitchen moving this exact dish from home-style stew toward a plated dish without changing what it fundamentally is.