Leah Penniman’s Soup Joumou

Today I'm making soup shumu, which is the Haitian liberation dish, and I'm making it because it incorporates many of the vegetables that are ready to harvest this time of year, and because it helps me celebrate the freedom of my people. My name is Leah Penniman. I'm the founding co-director at Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York. We are a Black Indigenous-led community farm that's dedicated to ending racism in the food system. We grow vegetables, herbs, eggs, meats. All the food that we grow goes to a farm share CSA distribution program, and we provide doorstep delivery to families who need the food the most. So that's refugees, immigrants, people who are coming home from being incarcerated, and it operates on a sliding scale. So folks who are higher income will pay more, folks who are lower income will pay less, so the farmer still, you know, gets their wage, and the food is really treated as a right rather than a privilege reserved for the few. And we're a training farm, so we have several thousand people come through each year to learn farming skills, and we particularly focus on the African agrarian tradition. My first gardening memory is with my grandmother. When I was around five years old, I would help her in her strawberry patch, and we'd make jam together. So I've always had a fondness for growing things, even though my parents weren't farmers. So when I turned 16 and needed a summer job, I found a job at the Food Project outside of Boston being a farmer and totally fell in love. And I've been farming 23 years. I haven't missed a season. We really pay attention to the long-term health of the soil. I think that a big part of our role as farmers is to call carbon back into the soil, both to ameliorate climate change, but also to bring the life back into the soil ecosystem. I envision a food system that uses indigenous regenerative practices, you know, that calls the pollinators back into the fields and restores the diversity of crops that we once had. I cherish listening to the plants and what they have to tell me. Like, I think about pruning tomatoes and how you have to sacrifice these side suckers so that that main stem can grow and be strong. And that's a really important metaphor for me right now as an overextended person of how am I pruning off the non-essential things so that the most important things can thrive. And I feel like nature is always whispering these lessons and I love to listen to what she has to say. So at Soul Fire, twice a week, we have a community lunch where all of our staff, the farmers, the educators get together to eat. It's my turn to cook. So I'm making soup shumoo. All of the main ingredients in today's soup are from the farm. Kale, carrots, onions, garlic, potatoes, tomatoes, hot peppers, and chicken. So the only thing we're adding from the store today is the coconut milk and the spices. We'll do curly green kale today, as well as some carrots. And these are all seconds, so we've already harvested out the best ones to go to our CSA boxes and these are the ones that were left behind a little chewed but still delicious. The thing I love about soup shumoo is its story because during the time of enslavement, Black Haitians weren't allowed to taste or eat the shumoo pumpkin. It was a delicacy and they would prepare it for the enslavers, but they couldn't eat it themselves. So after winning our independence in 1804, we celebrated with the soup shumoo. And every New Year's Day, which is Independence Day, people will make the soup and they go visit one another at their houses carrying a bowl and tasting everybody's soup. And there's parties in the street and music. It's our liberation food. It's a harvest food. It's a joyful food. So this is a Caribbean recipe and the shumoo pumpkin grows really well in Zone 8-9. It doesn't grow so well up here, so you can substitute it with any other type of pumpkin or squash. I really like using acorn or capucha squash, but you can use butternut, really any kind of squash. My maternal lineage is Haitian and because of forced assimilation in the United States, a lot of our culinary ways and language were lost between my grandfather, who came as an 18-year-old, and me. So I don't speak Creole. You know, I didn't grow up eating soup shumoo. But after the earthquake in 2010 in Haiti, like so many Haitian Americans, my sister and I just realized that we needed to be connected and be supportive and started traveling to Haiti doing volunteer work with farmers around earthquake recovery. And we went for the New Year that first time and tasted soup shumoo. And it was such an uplifting experience to see, you know, barely a year after this devastating tragedy that had killed a third of the people in that community, that folks were carrying on their traditions of celebrating freedom and being generous with each other in terms of sharing their food. So ever since then, make soup shumoo. And if I'm not in Haiti for the New Year, we have a Haitian New Year here and invite Haitian community locally to enjoy the soup with us. I feel really blessed and privileged to be able to make this soup out of ingredients that grew, you know, within 200 feet of my door. Not only is it fresh and delicious, but I feel that there's this spiritual energy in the food that is imbued from the land and it makes it feel like every bite of the soup is a gift.