From: Shelley Corbin <shelley@listenupdetroit.com>
To: shelley corbin
Sent: Wednesday, December 27, 2006 11:50 AM


[align=center]Celebrate Jan 1st with Haiti's soup Joumou! [/align]
The recipe is at the bottom, perhaps vegetarians can forgo the meat.

http://www.soupsong.com/zdec02.html

Revolution, Independence, and the New Year: Haiti's Soup Joumou

(e-SoupSong 32: December 1, 2002)

ONCE UPON A TIME, the people of Haiti had special cause to celebrate on
New Year's Day. It was January 1, 1804, and after a savage 13-year
struggle against the French, they had at last achieved
independence.

What better way to celebrate than with the very soup they had been
forbidden as slaves to eat? Ahhh, soup made from joumou, the delicious
and aromatic pumpkin, so different from their usual daily allotment of
precisely one ounce of salted meat or fish and one bottle of lemonade.
During the independence celebration that happy day, so the story goes, a
huge kettle of pumpkin soup was made in the city of Gonaïves, and
everyone present was served a bowl. Why? A special communion to forever
forge the bonds of brotherhood and commit to a bright national future.


I wish it had been that easy. Haiti: that "pearl of the Antilles"; that "only successful slave uprising in the history of the world"; that "eldest daughter of France
and Africa" that rejected its European heritage--it hasn't been an easy
road. In fact, it's been said that far more blood has spilled there than
sweat, and there's no counting the buckets of sweat that were shed by
700,000 slaves over 100 years on some 7,000 sugar, coffee, cocoa,
cotton, and indigo plantations.

What nation today is routinely excluded from travel guides on the
Caribbean? Haiti.

What nation has the lowest literacy rate in the Amerikas? Haiti.

What people, caught in the crosshairs of historical karma and
environmental disaster, have the lowest daily calorie intake in the
western hemisphere? Haitians.

From the time King Ferdinand of Spain congratulated Columbus on his
Christmas day landfall near Cap Ha?tien then declared open season on
West Africans for his New World sugar plantations there, Haiti has been
a land of warm and gracious people racked by violence and suffering.
Here's some history behind that heavily symbolic kettle of new year's
soup: After the 1492 landfall, Spain stayed long enough to kill off the
native Arawaks with Old World diseases, import sugar cane cuttings from
the Canary Islands, and establish plantations with African slaves...but
then left Haiti to the French in 1697 (Peace of Ryswyck) when she found
easier pickings elsewhere in the New World.

France wasted no time. Under Kings Louis XIV, XV, and XVI, she
transformed those depopulated mountains and valleys into cash crop
factories of sugar, indigo, and cotton. How? With 2,500 African slaves
in 1698...that jumped to 10,000 in 3 years...and to over 500,000 by
1791--culled largely from tribes in Congo, Angola, Dahomey, Guinea, and
Senegal. Their treatment was so horrific, so inhuman, that I haven't the
heart to tell. They died like flies and had to be constantly replaced by
new shipments from Africa.

So what happened in 1789 when the French people rose up and proclaimed
Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!? After all, the French National Assembly's
Declaration of the Rights of Man clearly stated, "Men are born and
remain free and equal in rights."

Oh, well. Ahem. National Assemblymen in Paris said, oh yes, we guess
that means Haiti too...or at least the freed mulattoes there, those fine
sons of Frenchmen and their African slaves. No way, said the racist
colonialists in Haiti--and they conducted such a tough lobby that the
National Assembly reversed itself in 1791.

Haiti's mulattoes could not believe their ears. It was the last straw.
They immediately joined their education, knowledge, and considerable
military experience to those 500,000 enslaved Africans--and Haiti
exploded in revolt. In August 1791, Vodou priest Boukman Duffy convened
slave rebel leaders in the forest overlooking Le Cap. Illuminated by
flashes of lightening, they made incantations...they slit the throat of
a pig and drank its blood...and they formally swore death to all blancs,
which they carried out to the letter with pruning hooks, machetes, and
fire. In November, Louis-Jacques Bauvais' mulatto troops attacked and
burned Port-au-Prince, slaughtering whites wherever they found them.
They sported white ears as cockades in their caps and committed
atrocities against women and children I just don't have the heart to
tell.

And that was just the start.

Great leaders arose to lead the revolution. Ill-fated Toussaint
L'Ouverture, who died in a French prison lamented by poet Wordsworth:
"Thy friends are exultations, agonies/And love, and man's unconquerable
mind." Henri Christophe. Jean-Jacques Dessalines. And these former
slaves led their people first against their colonial masters, in the
name of the French Republic. Then against Spain and England, who
pounced, chops slavering, when they saw the Pearl of the Antilles
slipping from French hands. Then, finally, against France herself, when
First Consul Napoleon sent brother-in-law Leclerc and 55,000 crack
officers and men instructed to, as he confided to foreign minister
Talleyrand, annihilate the government of blacks in Haiti and restore
slavery at the first opportunity. "Rid us of these gilded Africans,"
Napoleon later said, "and we shall have nothing more to wish."
Thirteen long years, all told, of tit-for-tat torched cities, slit
throats, scorched earth, attacks, betrayals, mass executions, sieges,
torture, encirclements, and despair, not to mention 10,000 deaths from
malaria and yellow fever. Dessalines' ultimate winning strategy: koupe
tèt, boule kay, cut off the heads, burn down. In the end, some 300,000
Haitians died and 50,000 French--and in the end, the French were
defeated. General Rochambeau was given 10 days to pack up his army and
ship home.

Which brings us back, harrowed, to the dawn of 1804 and that kettle of
soup joumou.

When the last French ship had cleared Le Cap, Dessalines sent word to
Gérin at Les Cayes: "There is no more doubt, mon cher général, the
country is ours, and the famous who-shall-have-it is settled." In
Gonaïves, he divided up the war chest--8 gourdes per man; he dispersed
his army to the principal towns; and he sat down with his generals "to
ratify in ink what they had written in blood."

On January 1, 1804, people started gathering at dawn at Gona?ves' Place
d'Armes. Dessalines mounted the Autel de la Patrie to speak. He recited
the cruelties of their enslavement in Kreyol, so everyone could
understand him, and he declared that Haitians would forever after live
free and die free. "Long live independence!" he shouted at the end of
the ceremony, having no idea what a difficult life it would be. Cannons
were fired; church bells, rung; people cheered; and, they say, kettles
of fragrant soup joumou perfumed the air, ready to be ladled up in a
mass communion.

It's a great image. No wonder this soup has become the touchstone of
Haiti's fervent wish for peace and freedom--its symbol of communion and
brotherhood--a beacon that shines through today's dark days of poverty
and continuing political strife. One thing is sure, on January 1,
Haitians around the world make it and eat it and share it precisely to
remember the past and to hope for the future.

Oh, and there are lots of other stories about soup joumou too. Some say,
pure and simple, it's a good luck charm for the new year--and you better
eat it cause it's bad luck if you don't. Others say, no, it's really to
cleanse and purify the body for the new year...and don't eat anything
else til midnight, when you can eat an orange and count your luck in the
coming year by its number of seeds. Others yet say it honors the Vodou
god Papa Loko, keeper of African spiritual traditions, and that it
reliably "lifts up a man's soul and makes him prophesy."

There's something to that last comment. This is a fabulous stuffed
soup--bright yellow-orange and sensuously African with an opulence of
meat, vegetables, and the Caribbean bite of lime and chilis. In Kreyol,
you'd say it was stuffed with vyann, joumou, kawot, seleri, zanyon,
nave, pomdete, malanga, and shou...and spiced with piman bouk, ten, lay,
and sitwon.

Soup Joumou (serves 6)
* meat rub made by grinding 4 garlic cloves, 1 teaspoon thyme, 1/4
teaspoon pepper, and 2 sliced scallions into 2 teaspoons of salt
* 1-pound piece of beef stew meat
* 3 quarts water (more, later in the cooking, as needed for a soupy
consistency)
* 1 scotch bonnet or habanero pepper, left whole with stem
* 2 pounds pumpkin (or winter squash like butternut), peeled and
chopped
* 2 carrots, peeled and sliced
* 2 stalks celery, sliced lengthwise and cut into pieces
* 1 large onion, cubed
* 2 medium turnips, peeled and cubed
* 2 medium potatoes, peeled and cubed
* 1 pound malanga, peeled and cubed (if not available, substitute 3
more potatoes)
* 1 pound cabbage, sliced fine and chopped
* 1/4 pound vermicelli or other thin pasta, broken into shorter
lengths
* 2 limes, juiced
1. Rub the meat with the spice paste and let marinate for at least an
hour.
2. Bring the water to a boil in a large soup pot, add the meat and chile
pepper, cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 2 hours.
3. Add the carrots and pumpkin, cover the pot, and cook until very
tender, about 20 minutes. Remove meat and pepper from the pot,
discarding the pepper. Puree the pumpkin and carrots in the broth and
pour back into the pot. When the meat is cool enough to handle, cut it
into cubes and add back into the pot.
4. Add the celery, onion, turnips, potato, and malango cubes to the
soup, bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Thin
the broth with as much water as needed--it should not be too thick.
5. Scrape in the cabbage and cook 15 more minutes. Thin again with
water, as needed. 6. Add the broken vermicelli and cook until it is
tender. Thin again with water, as needed.
7. Taste and correct for seasoning with salt and pepper. Stir in the
lime juice.
8. Turn off the heat, cover the pot, and let sit until ready to serve.

Best regards...and wishing you all the blessings of this holiday season!
Pat Solley

Resources: Alix's Corner at Discover Haiti website, Madison Smartt
Bell's All Soul's Rising, Roseline Ng Cheong-Lom's Haiti, Devra Dedeaux'
Sugar Reef Caribbean Cookbook, James Ferguson's Traveler's Literary
Companion to the Caribbean, Robert and Nancy Heinl's Written in Blood:
The Story of the Haitian People, 1492-1971, National Assembly of
France's "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,"
8/26/1789, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories, Mirta
Yurnet-Thomas' A Taste of Haiti, William Wordsworth's Collected Poetry,
and an assortment of encyclopedias, articles, and websites.