Surinam Cuisine: Patja

Who’s ready for a gadling cooking challenge?  Let’s even call it a crazy cultural cooking
challenge.  In this article that I stumbled on about
Surinamese food, more specifically
Patja, lies a recipe.  There are no
step-by-step cooking instructions on making the soup as the recipe is only known by the Surinamese Bush Negro
population and cannot be found in cookbooks. 

The overall idea of Patja is a strong bouillon made with either read or white meat.  Beef is the preferred
choice, but many tropical fish will also do the trick.  So if you have any spare jarakaba, red snapper, tilapia,
anumara, or krobia in the fridge, perhaps it’s time to experiment in the kitchen.  Now leftover fish from
isn’t going to do the trick alone as grated bitter cassava is also very important to the bouillon. To sum up
the very lenghty production, it seems as if anything goes with this soup, but if you’ve got the heart and time trying
to make it the very way the Bush Negro population does I’d be curious to know how it turns out. Sounds like it
could be tasty depending on which way you cook it, or something to never taste again.

If all else fails at least you’ll have one more little piece of info to stash away on the brain.