Soup joumou is the best soup I ever know. My mom used to make it so simple. But me, when I make it, I add a lot of vegetables. Celery, which is never enough, because celery makes it taste so good. And carrots, navèt, and cabbage, spring onion, and the joumou. First of all, I don’t want to make it wrong. And beef. I always do beef. Somebody else, somebody will do it with turkey neck or pork, but me, I’ll always use beef. The beef will have the bone and the marrow in there. So it gives good taste. I sauté my beef and boil it. Add my vegetables and my squash and put it through the blender. And with a lot of water. You always use hot water when you cook. It makes it taste better. And I don’t have to say all the spices that I have. But the only thing I make sure that I put in my soup is garlic and onion and celery.

Our parents didn’t really talk about the reason why we have it. They would just say, “Oh, we have soup joumou because of our independence.” But the reason I found out, you know, why it’s so significant is because when our ancestors was enslaved, they couldn’t have the joumou. So I actually kind of went through the internet and tried to find out why they couldn’t do it and also the significance of it. So I did a little bit more research as I got older, because, you know, when you’re younger, you really don’t ask your parents questions. But as you get older, you start to see how your culture, how you want to keep your culture, and actually teach it to your own children. And so that’s, for me, was how I actually learned about it, by doing my research. And every year, I learn something new, even though I know how they fought, I know how they won. But every year when you’re reading, there’s, you know, you pick up new things of how Haiti won their independence. And the soup is a major significant in the Haitian culture.

I can remember from probably the age of like seven or eight, from as long as I can remember, my grandma always prepared soup joumou on the first of January, the first of the year. And I can just remember eating, drinking this soup with my family. It was just a time where everybody came together. I just remember sharing soup and just learning about it and just spending time with my family, eating the soup. From when I first started eating it, I can always remember my mom, my aunts telling me the story of soup joumou and how it represents our independence and the resilience of Haitian people. So I can remember from the age of seven, honestly, always knowing how significant it is and what it means to my culture and the people of Haiti all together.

My aunts and my mom and my grandmother, during the holidays, would be in my grandparents’ home cooking the holiday dinner, and one of the staples was mac and cheese. And I was just fascinated by them in the kitchen. As we grew older and our family increased, my mom started having just her family for family holidays, and she would have her kids and grandkids, and my mom would cook the dinner, and the staple continued to be the macaroni and cheese. And so, as I grew older and I became an adult, and I got married and purchased a home, I started hosting the holiday dinners, and I asked my mom for the mac and cheese recipe, and she gave it to me, and I put my spin on it, and my family, the rest of our family would come over, and they would all love my macaroni and cheese.

Macaroni and cheese was a staple in our family, for family dinners, for Sunday dinners, and the people that made the mac and cheese when I was a young girl was my maternal grandmother, my mother, and her sisters. We would all gather in the kitchen, and the little kids, such as myself at the time, would be underfoot, just getting in the way mostly, but having fun, and it just brings back lots of good memories for us. Eventually, we got to participate a little bit in helping to get the mac and cheese ready, and what I mean by a little bit is very little, because we didn’t quite know what we were doing, but it was just fun to get involved.

Something that I remember about Amma’s greens is how savory they are, and it has the perfect amount of spice for everyone, and everyone’s always talking about how much they love them, anyone that has had them asks for more, gets more, and wants to know what she puts in it. I personally believe it’s just a lot of love, and just being a matriarch is what blesses those greens, because she could tell anybody that recipe, but it would never be the same if anyone else made it.

Oh, and those collard greens. I love collard greens. I mean, like, I remember my mom, she used to put ham hocks and, you know, bacon and stuff like that in the collard greens. But me, now, well, I used to put ham hocks and I used to put bacon in, but now most people that I’m around, they don’t eat meat. So I had to figure out a way to make it taste as good as my mom’s, but not as good as hers, but taste good, where, you know, people would love them.

The smell of black-eyed peas simmering on the stove takes me straight back to my father, James Irving Muckelvene, who my mom called Sweetheart, his family and friends called Rudy, and me and my sisters called him Daddy, and his grandbabies lovingly called him Genna. He was an amazing, remarkable man, gentle, giving, and full of warmth, and he loved to cook for all of us. And every New Year, or New Year’s Eve, he’d start a pot of black-eyed peas. So every New Year’s Eve, he’d start a pot of black-eyed peas, just before midnight. It was more than food, it was tradition, a kind of, not necessarily quiet because the smell was loud, but it was like a prayer over our home, and cooking those peas was his way of bringing goodness into the New Year.

I remember watching my mom make those delicious biscuits. I mean, like, wow. I mean, they were so delicious. We used to just come in that kitchen where she was cooking it because we could smell them. They smelled so good. And we would go in there, and she knew we would come in there and we would just sneak those biscuits, and I mean, like, those biscuits were delicious. I mean, I can cook some biscuits, but they don’t touch what my mom did.

My grandma Laura, mama’s mama, and I used to sit at the end of the table. She had this white tin pan, a big round tin pan, it was white, it was trimmed in red around the edges, and I would sit at the end of the table and watch her as she made her biscuits, because grandma would make biscuits every day. But grandma, the way she made her biscuits, she would mend them. She put the flour in, put the water in, and she would mend it, you know, with her hands, mix it up, but she wouldn’t roll it out like a lot of people did. I would sit and watch grandma take her hand, and once she get the consistency she wanted, she would pinch off her biscuits, pinch every one of them off, and they would turn out the same size, but then she’d put them in a pan, she’d pat them just a little bit. I used to watch grandma do it all the time, and that’s why I try to make my biscuits like grandma.

My grandparents used to do sharecropping, and so every November, of course, they would kill a pig. And so there are these moments where we would have crackling, and we would all get together whenever a pig was being killed because we knew we would have to hang the hearts and the liver and stuff on the clothesline. I don’t know if you know where they actually come from, but the chitlins, this is how we had to do it. We had to dig a really deep hole; my uncles dug it. We would have to hold clothespins. We would hold the clothespins, and my grandmother would pour boiling hot water to cleanse the chitlins. So the chitlins are really the intestines of a pig.

We had a thing called a wash pot where you would take it and boil your water extremely hot. It was a big old black pot we filled with hot water from a well. And you would let it boil and then you would take your chitlins from out of the pig. You would dig a hole and you would take the hot water from the wash pot and pour it through the chitlins. And the women would squeeze the chitlins and clean everything inside and out. They would do it over and over again until it was completely clean. Once you clean it real good, you go in the kitchen and you prepare it with water and steam it. Cut it up real good inside the pan and add your seasoning as well. Depends on what your seasoning and your taste was. A lot of times it’s like some vinegar, salt, pepper, and a little other seasonings on the side. That’s what your chitlins entailed of. Because at that time, a lot of families didn’t have enough to feed their family. And they had to share with others. And that was one of the meals they could make out of it. And they seemed to make that a forte. And people seemed to like it, so it just started to become one of the better meals at the table.

What I do is, I boil my sweet potatoes. I’ll get, you know, pretty close to done, and then I’ll take them out, I’ll peel them, afterwards they get, after I cook them, and then I cut them up and stuff. And then I’ll put them in my little dish. And then I would put, I put sugar, cinnamon. Then, and I have that cinnamon sugar too, so I use that, too. And I make sure that I put syrup in it, so that it can give it that good little taste. And then I let it cook for a while, and then I check it out. And then I put a little bit more cinnamon, and a little bit more of, I’m sorry, I forgot flavoring. Gotta have some vanilla flavoring. I put vanilla flavor in it.

Sweet potato jacks are sweet potatoes, almost like a sweet potato pie filling, but it’s rolled in dough, and it’s fried. We were only allowed to eat one sweet potato jack. And it’s amazing because even people that didn’t know me, I met someone, I worked with someone who had met my grandmother, because he had dated one of my family members, and he was like, “I had one of your grandmother’s sweet potato jacks.” I said, “You had one?” He said, “Actually, she let me have two.” I said, “Well, then she must have liked you because we could only have one.” Because there were so many of us, we couldn’t have just one. And so you would think, when grandma made it, she made it, so I don’t know, I think it was more the dough that she was, that she handmade and she would roll it out, place the sweet potato there, roll it, and some of it she would put in the oven, of course in grease, and flip it over and some on top of the stove. So, she was doing so many at one time, and everybody loves sweet potato jacks.