Why does Suriname eat the way it does?

Anyone who can eat roti, saoto and moksi alesi within a twenty minute walk in Paramaribo is not looking at a culinary coincidence. Every kitchen in this city stands for a group of people who were brought here, and for the date on which that happened. Food is therefore one of the best kept archives in the country, and it is the only archive you can taste.

The bottom layer is Indigenous and older than everything that followed. Lokono, Kaliña, Trio and Wayana lived here long before the first plantation and built their kitchen around bitter cassava, a tuber that is toxic raw. What matters is the technique, not the recipe: grating, pressing the juice out in a matapi (a woven tube stretched under weight), and baking the remaining flour into cassava bread. The pressed juice, slowly reduced, becomes kasripo, the dark syrup at the bottom of pepperpot. Fermented, cassava becomes kasiri. Everything that came later cooked on top of this layer.

Then comes the part that should not be written off as background colour. From the seventeenth century until abolition, an estimated 200,000 and more West Africans were shipped to Suriname to work the sugar, coffee and cotton plantations. What survived the crossing was rarely an ingredient and almost always a technique: pounding in a wooden mortar, one pot over the fire, the use of peanut and okra, the long braising of salted meat and salted fish. The plantation ration was rice, salt fish, salt meat and ground provisions. The Creole kitchen was built out of that, and it still shows: few ingredients, a lot of time, and flavour that comes from the method rather than the shopping.

Slavery was abolished on 1 July 1863, but free did not immediately mean free. Roughly 33,000 people were emancipated and then bound for another ten years to state supervision, compulsory paid work, usually on the same plantation, until 1873. Those ten years explain the rest of this story. Plantation owners knew to the year when their labour force would leave, and went looking for replacements in other parts of the world well in advance.

Alongside all of this, and emphatically not beneath it, stands the Maroon kitchen. Maroons escaped the plantations and from the seventeenth century built their own societies along the rivers of the interior. Peace treaties followed in 1760 with the Ndyuka, in 1762 with the Saamaka and in 1767 with the Matawai. Their kitchen developed outside the colonial household and therefore sits closer to West African and Indigenous practice: river fish, game, cassava in every form, peanut, palm fruits such as awarra and maripa, and their own handling of pepper. It is not a variant of the Creole kitchen, it is a separate tradition with a separate history.

The first indentured labourers were Chinese, and they arrived earlier than most people assume: a first small group in 1853, recruited via Java, followed by larger groups from 1858 through Macau and Hong Kong. In total there were only a few thousand, and yet their trace is everywhere. Many left the plantation as soon as their contract allowed and opened a shop. The Chinese corner shop became an institution that supplies the whole country with groceries, and the kitchen came with it: tjauwmin, moksi meti with its roast pork and duck, soy sauce and ginger that now sit in Creole pots as well.

On 5 June 1873 the Lalla Rookh docked in Paramaribo carrying roughly 400 indentured labourers from British India. It was no accident that this was the same year state supervision ended. Between 1873 and 1916 some 34,000 Hindustani indentured labourers arrived, on five year contracts with a right of return that most of them did not use. They brought the tawa, the thin roti, dhal, masala, cumin and coriander. The roti shop is their institution: nearly always family run, nearly always takeaway, and in Paramaribo clustered around the Maagdenstraat and in Latour.

On 9 August 1890 the first group of Javanese indentured labourers arrived, 94 people, recruited on Java in what was then the Dutch East Indies. Almost 33,000 followed up to 1939. Theirs is the most recognisable kitchen of all, precisely because it merged least: saoto, the clear chicken soup with fried onion, beansprouts and a boiled egg; bami; petjil with peanut sauce; telo, fried cassava with salt cod. The warung is the Javanese answer to the roti shop, and in Blauwgrond they stand in a row.

Older than all indentured migration is the Sephardic presence. Portuguese Jewish families settled along the Suriname River from the 1660s and founded Jodensavanne, where the Beracha VeShalom synagogue was consecrated in 1685. They held plantations and therefore kitchens, and the origin of pom is regularly attributed to that table. Regularly, but not certainly. Lebanese trading families came to Paramaribo from the late nineteenth century, mostly as merchants; their trace sits more strongly in the shopping street than on the menu, and where we have no source we write nothing.

What happened next is not that the kitchens melted together. They have gone on existing side by side and only cross at specific points. Moksi alesi is the most honest example: literally mixed rice, one pot of rice, beans, salted meat or fish and coconut, a Creole dish that does not hide the logic of the ration. Heri heri is the second: boiled ground provisions, cassava, sweet potato, plantain and tayer, with salt cod and egg. Those are ration ingredients too, which is exactly why the dish is on the table on 1 July, Keti Koti.

Pom is the celebration dish and at the same time the clearest example of how little is settled. Grated pomtajer, an American tuber of the genus Xanthosoma, with chicken, orange juice and salt, hours in the oven until the top crusts. The sources disagree about its origin: one account runs to the Portuguese Jewish community and a European baked dish remade with a local tuber, the other to the Creole kitchen of the city. We do not pick. At a birthday party in Paramaribo nobody makes an issue of it, and on this page naming two versions is more honest than choosing one.

For a visitor this means something very concrete. Within a few walkable kilometres of Paramaribo, six kitchens sit next to each other: Indigenous, Maroon, Creole, Chinese, Hindustani and Javanese, with the Portuguese Jewish thread running across them. They share a city but not their recipes. You can buy bara at a stall in the morning, eat saoto in a warung in Blauwgrond at midday and pick up moksi meti from a Chinese shop in the evening, and that is three separate migration histories in one day. There are few cities in the world where that is possible at this scale.