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Surinamese Foodways

National

⚠ POSSIBLY THE MOST PLURAL FOOD CULTURE IN THE AMERICAS FOR ITS SIZE. Around 600,000 people, and the food comes from: INDIGENOUS peoples; MAROONS whose ancestors won freedom by war; CREOLES descended from enslaved Africans; HINDUSTANI descended from Indian indenture; JAVANESE descended from Indonesian indenture — a community found nowhere else in the Americas at this scale; CHINESE; Lebanese; Portuguese-Jewish; and Dutch. The result on a Paramaribo street: ROTI shops next to warungs selling SAOTO soup and bami, next to Chinese restaurants, next to a Creole cook selling POM. ⚠ SRANAN TONGO is the lingua franca across all of them and Dutch is official. Ten districts; the coast holds nearly everyone.

Atlas — where and when

Where in the world

Communities and languages

  • Surinamese community documented

Languages: Dutch, Sranan Tongo, Caribbean Hindustani, Javanese

What is recorded

  • Surinamese foodways are recorded as a plural system with no majority culinary culture: Indigenous, Maroon, Creole, Hindustani, Javanese, Chinese, Lebanese, Portuguese-Jewish and Dutch traditions are each first-class. Sranan Tongo functions as the lingua franca across communities and Dutch is the official language. documented

Related foodways

This foodway relates to

  • related to Brazilian Cuisine documented

    The southern border, shared Trio and Wayana communities, and the gold mining that crosses it.

  • related to Caribbean documented
  • related to Dutch Foodways documented

    Dutch is the official language, the colonial power was the Netherlands, and the diaspora is overwhelmingly Dutch.

Recorded as relating to this foodway

  • related to Guyanese Foodways documented

    Neighbours, both plural indentured-and-enslaved societies, both with Indian and Chinese populations, both with the same Indigenous peoples across the border, and a shared Corentyne frontier.

Regional cuisines

Recipes

No recipes are filed under this cuisine yet.