Pom

Suriname

Illustration

by Suriname

From 1639 the colony, English then Dutch, admitted Sephardi Jews fleeing Europe and Brazil, a further wave arriving in 1652 under Francis Willoughby and settling at Jodensavanne, Jewish Savanna. By the late seventeenth century Jewish planters held around 40 plantations; by 1730, 115 of Suriname's roughly 400 plantations were Jewish-owned, an unusually large and semi-autonomous planter community with its own synagogue, cemeteries and legal privileges, in decline by 1765 to 1775 as residents drifted to the new capital, Paramaribo. This community sits at the root of two genuinely contested origin stories: pom, said by some to descend from a Sephardi Sabbath dish called sofrito, made with potato and reworked with pomtajer once in Suriname because potatoes grew poorly there; and pastei, whose pastry form is credited variously to Jewish-Portuguese, general Dutch and English inheritance, the last theory tracing specifically to England's brief occupation of Suriname, 1799 to 1816. None of the three theories for either dish rests on a primary source strong enough to settle the question.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Pom

First written recipes date only to 1914

Ingredients

Pomtajer cream

1kg pomtajer, grated, frozen
400g basmati rice, cooked
3 tbsp brown sugar
3 tbsp Knorr Aromat
150g butter
1 orange, juiced

Chicken filling

2, large onion
3 cloves garlic
400g chicken thigh fillet
1½ tbsp tomato purée
6 tbsp Pom Trafasie spice mix (commercial Surinamese)
1 bunch celery
2 tomatoes
8 pieces, or 3 tbsp piccalilli mixed pickles or piccalilli

Method

Work 1kg grated frozen pomtajer, 400g cooked basmati rice, brown sugar, Knorr Aromat, butter and the juice of an orange to a cream.
Separately, fry onion and garlic with 400g chicken thigh fillet, tomato purée, a commercial Surinamese "Pom Trafasie" spice mix, celery, tomatoes and mixed pickles or piccalilli, and simmer briefly.
Combine the two mixes in a buttered baking dish.
Bake at 200°C, one to one and a half hours in a conventional oven, or 25 to 30 minutes fan-assisted, until the top is golden and the edges dark brown.

Notes

Descent is contested: on one account the dish reworks a Sephardi Sabbath potato dish with pomtajer once potatoes proved hard to grow in Suriname; on another it is simply a Creole adaptation of European colonial cooking to what the country actually had.

What a modern chef changes

Sous vide confit chicken, silked pomtajer cream, Big Green Egg finish

Rung 06

Method

Confit the chicken thigh sous vide before it goes into the spiced mixture, so it holds through the long second bake without drying, a real problem the traditional method's own extended oven time otherwise risks.
Pass a portion of the grated pomtajer through a high-power blender and then a chinois for a genuinely silkier cream base, folded back through the coarser grated remainder for a two-texture result the single-preparation traditional method does not attempt.
Finish the top under the Big Green Egg's direct heat for a final, hard caramelisation closer to what a wood-fired hearth would once have given the dish's browned edges than a domestic oven's gentler finish allows.

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