Broodje Pom

Tjin's, the Amsterdam counter that dates its sandwich trade to 1977, lists the broodje pom three ways: plain, with chicken and salted meat, and with stewed maagjes, the chicken stomachs. The thing between the bread comes off a baking tray in a slab, and the slab has a skin on it. The top of a good pom goes amber and a little crackled at the edges, while underneath sits a damp, dense, nearly custardy block that holds its corners when a knife goes through. Steam off a fresh cut smells of onion, nutmeg, and sour citrus at once, a sharper smell than an oven bake of chicken usually gives. Packed into a roll, that slab turns a table dish for birthdays into something a person eats standing at a counter on a Tuesday.

Everything in the slab comes from one construction. Chicken pieces are sautéed in onion, tomato, and oil or margarine, then laid between two layers of raw grated pomtajer, the tayer root (Xanthosoma sagittifolium) mixed with citrus juice, and the whole pan goes into the oven until the top browns. The grated root loses its rawness in the heat and sets into a glossy, slightly gummy mass that the tongue reads as firm first and creamy second, with the chicken shredding through it in threads. Pull the pan early and the middle stays grainy and raw. Cut it hot and the slab slumps and runs. Leave out the acid and the starch tastes flat and heavy. The citrus is what lets a plain root register as food worth a celebration.

The roll is chosen for what it can hold up. A Surinamese puntje or a soft white bolletje has a crumb that takes moisture from the warm slab without going to paste, and a thin crust that gives way in one bite. A scoop of the filling rides in the middle, and the counter puts peper and zuur beside it: a hot pepper sauce for the fire and the pickled vegetables for a cool, vinegary snap against all that rich starch. Most shops hand the two over in separate cups, so each bite gets mixed to taste. Heat from a good pepper cuts straight through the starch, and the zuur makes the next bite taste new. The warm crumb finishes the job, turning the edge of the slab slightly steamy and soft.

Pom is sold by weight as well as by the roll. Tjin's prices a 200-gram portion beside the sandwiches, and the same slab turns up in a rotierol (a roti wrapper), in a bara, the fried split-pea fritter of the Surinamese counter, and in a vegan version built on tofu. The neighboring broodje pastei is a gravy filling that needs a spoon, while pom is sliced like a cake and carries itself between the bread. Salted meat or stewed maagjes ride in the slab for people who want more depth than chicken gives.

Pom is the most popular festive dish of Surinamese communities in Suriname and the Netherlands, which gives the roll an odd position on a lunch board. On Rotterdam's West-Kruiskade and around the Van Woustraat market in Amsterdam, where Tjin's opened its second shop, the broodje pom sits among the roti and pastei rolls of an ordinary Tuesday, and each bite tastes faintly of a birthday table. The party tray and the lunch roll are cut from the same bake.

Origin and history

Oral tradition traces pom to the Portuguese-Jewish planters of colonial Suriname, who are said to have baked a potato casserole in their ovens. Potatoes had to be shipped in, so cooks substituted the local tayer root, and the dish kept its name from the French pomme de terre. Karin Vaneker, the food researcher who curated an Amsterdam exhibition on pom, regards it as originally Jewish. Other voices credit the Creole cooks who knew the island's roots and did the laborious grating in plantation kitchens. Both accounts agree on the substitution of tayer for potato and on the citrus, and both rest on memory more than on documents.

The first printed description is dated. The Encyclopedie van Nederlandsch West-Indië, published between 1914 and 1917, says the large tayer is grated and treated with the juice of bitter oranges, then combined with chicken or fish into a pie called pom. Surinamese migration to the Netherlands in the 1970s brought the dish to Dutch cities, and Tjin's dates its sandwich counter to 1977, when rolls were sold from the back kitchen of a record shop on the Kinkerstraat until they outsold the records. No record names who first put pom in a roll.

On 21 May 2007 the Imagine IC center on the Bijlmerplein in Amsterdam opened Pom op het menu, an exhibition of recipes gathered from home cooks, with a guide to places serving pom and a cooking contest that June, where a jury and an audience vote picked the winners. A dish with a bitter-orange entry in a colonial encyclopedia from 1914 had its own gallery show in Amsterdam nearly a century later.