Soup Joumou

Haiti's independence soup: giraumon squash puréed into a beef and vegetable broth with pasta, eaten every first of January since 1804

Origin: Port-au-Prince & Haiti

From the journey of Pumpkin & Squash.

Soup joumou is eaten in Haiti on the first of January, which is Independence Day, and the reason is explicit. Under French colonial rule the squash soup was a dish of the planter class and enslaved people were forbidden to eat it. When Haiti declared independence on 1 January 1804, after the only successful slave revolution in history, the soup was eaten by everyone, and it has been eaten on that date every year since. UNESCO inscribed the making and sharing of it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2021. The squash is joumou, the West Indian pumpkin or calabaza, Cucurbita moschata, which is dense, deep orange, and far less watery than a European pumpkin. It is boiled until collapsing and then puréed and returned to the pot, where it thickens the broth into something silky and pale orange. Everything else, beef, potato, carrot, turnip, cabbage, celery, and short pasta, cooks in that thickened liquid. The pasta is the element visitors query. Short macaroni or vermicelli is standard and has been for a long time; it is a French colonial inheritance sitting in a dish about the end of French rule, which is the kind of complication that food history produces regularly and that flattening the story would lose. Households make it in enormous quantity and carry bowls to neighbours through the morning of the first, and the Haitian diaspora keeps the practice in Montreal, Miami, and New York. There is no correct recipe: every family's differs, and the differences are the point of the conversation over the bowl.

Ingredients

Beef

  • 1 kg beef shin or chuck, in cubes

To prepare

  • 2 limes, juiced, for washing

Marinade

  • 4 tbsp epis or green seasoning
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper

Squash

  • 1.2 kg calabaza or butternut squash, peeled and in chunks

Broth

  • 3 litres water

Vegetables

  • 3 potatoes, in chunks
  • 3 carrots, in thick rounds
  • 2 turnips, quartered
  • 0.25 white cabbage, shredded
  • 2 celery sticks, sliced
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 6 garlic cloves, crushed

Pasta

  • 150 g short macaroni or vermicelli

Aromatics

  • 4 sprigs thyme
  • 4 whole cloves
  • 1 whole scotch bonnet, left unbroken

To finish

  • 2 limes, juiced
  • 60 g butter

Seasoning

  • 1 salt, to taste

Method

  1. Wash the beef in cold water with the lime juice, rinse, then marinate it with the epis, salt, and pepper for at least an hour and preferably overnight.
  2. Put the beef and its marinade into a large pot with the water and bring to a simmer, skimming for the first fifteen minutes.
  3. Simmer for an hour and a quarter until the beef is nearly tender.
  4. Meanwhile boil the squash in a separate pan with a little water until completely soft, then blend it to a smooth purée with some of its cooking water.
  5. Purée the squash separately and add it as a liquid. Cooking it in the pot and mashing it in leaves lumps, and the whole texture of the soup is its smoothness.
  6. Stir the squash purée into the beef pot and add the onion, garlic, celery, thyme, and cloves.
  7. Add the carrots and turnips and simmer for twenty minutes, then the potatoes and cabbage for a further fifteen.
  8. Drop in the whole scotch bonnet and let it sit on the surface, lifting it out before it splits.
  9. Add the pasta and cook for the time on the packet, stirring so it does not sink and catch.
  10. Watch the pot from here. The squash makes it thick and it will stick to the base the moment it is left alone.
  11. Take it off the heat, stir in the butter and the lime juice, and taste for salt.
  12. Rest for ten minutes and serve in deep bowls with bread, making sure everyone gets beef, vegetables, and pasta.

Notes

Purée the squash separately and stir it in. Calabaza is the correct squash and butternut is the closest widely available substitute; a watery European pumpkin gives a thin soup. Stir often once the squash is in. The scotch bonnet goes in whole and comes out whole. Lime and butter at the end lift the whole pot and are not optional. It is made in far larger quantity than a household needs, because giving bowls away on the morning of the first of January is the point of it.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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