Epis

Epis is the everyday green seasoning base of Haitian cooking — a wet herb purée built from parsley, thyme, scallion, bell pepper, garlic, and lime — and its lineage is the island of Haiti itself. It belongs to the same African + Indigenous + colonial culinary braid that produced pikliz, sauce griot, and soup joumou, but where those are dish-specific, epis is the base that goes into the pan before any of them. Every Haitian cook has a version, and the version a household keeps is the one it learned from the cook who raised them.

The herbs themselves are not unique to Haiti — parsley, thyme, scallion, and bell pepper all grow across the Caribbean lowlands — but the ratio and the rhythm are. Epis is a green-seasoning paste that is pounded in a mortar or blended in a jar, packed into a glass, kept in the refrigerator, and used a spoonful at a time to start a pot. The homeland of the recipe is the specific Lakou kitchen that shaped it: the courtyard home with the cook out back, the auntie at the grinding stone, the neighbor who brings a bowl over when a new family moves into the block.

At Egbe we treat Haiti as the homeland of the cooking and the specific Lakou or vendor who dried and packaged the batch as the homeland of the batch. When we say our epis is sourced from Haiti, we mean the herbs were grown in Haitian soil, picked from a Haitian garden or market, and reduced to a form that survives the trip from a Caribbean kitchen to a diaspora one.

• A wet herb purée of parsley, thyme, scallion, bell pepper, garlic, and lime — the base that goes into the pan first.
• A household staple rather than a specialty ingredient — every Haitian cook keeps a jar of epis in the refrigerator.
• Equally at home in the Lakou kitchen of Arcahaie, the Artibonite Valley, and the diaspora apartments of Brooklyn, Montréal, and Santiago.

Epis is the base layer of Haitian cooking. A cook drops a spoon or two of epis into hot oil as the first step of almost any savory dish, lets the green herbs bloom into the fat for a minute, and then layers the rest of the meal on top of that herb base. It is what gives Haitian food the green, herby perfume that any Haitian household will recognize before the first bite — the smell of a kitchen that is starting dinner the way its grandmothers did.

Beyond being the everyday base, epis plays three named roles. It is the marinade for griyo (fried pork) and for the bouillon that goes into rice and beans; it is the flavor carry for pikliz, the pickled slaw that comes to the table with almost every plate; and it is the foundation of soup joumou, the New Year squash soup the diaspora eats on January 1st to mark Haitian independence. Every one of those dishes starts with epis.

The diaspora form is the wet purée that keeps in the refrigerator, or a dried herb blend that travels. The wet form is the gold standard; the dried form is the form that ships without leaking across an ocean, and on the Egbe shelf it is the dried form you are buying — dried herbs rehydrated on the stove the same way the Lakou cook rehydrates from the jar.

• Used as the marinade for griyo (fried pork) and for many bouillons.
• The flavor base for pikliz, the pickled cabbage-and-pepper slaw that comes to almost every plate.
• The foundation of soup joumou, served on January 1st to mark Haitian independence.
• Stored as a wet purée in the refrigerator — or as a dried herb blend in the diaspora version.
• Both forms (wet and dried) carry the same green-herb flavor; the dried form just ships to a diaspora kitchen without leaking.

Epis is not a ritual offering in the strict sense — it is a kitchen base — but it carries the gentility of Lakou domestic practice. A Haitian household keeps epis because the elders keep epis, and the dish that comes out of the jar is a continuation of a way of cooking that has been in the same courtyard kitchen for generations. The act of grinding the herbs by hand, in a mortar that has lived on the same shelf for years, is itself a continuity rite — a way of keeping Lakou cooking alive in a diaspora kitchen that may be a continent away from the courtyard the mortar came from.

It also carries the New Year meaning of soup joumou, which is itself UNESCO-recognized intangible cultural heritage — the soup is eaten on January 1st to mark Haitian independence, and epis is its foundation. The jar on the shelf is a quiet reminder that January 1st soup is coming, and the cook who keeps it knows the season. Diaspora cooks often name epis as one of the ingredients they restock first after a trip back, and a child who grows up smelling epis in the kitchen carries it into adulthood as a memory of the household they came from.

In Vodou-adjacent practice, epis also touches the everyday kitchen, which is itself a Lakou hearth — the herbs, the lime, the garlic, the pepper — and the same herbs that go into the pot are the same ones a Lakou cook would use to greet a guest or set a table for the household.

We source Haitian epis through our Haitian-lineage sourcing partners in Arcahaie, the Artibonite Valley, and the Lakou neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. The herbs are grown in Haitian kitchen gardens and small plots, picked young, washed, and either dried at our partner facilities or shipped as a wet purée for diaspora customers who want the refrigerator-jar form.

Because epis contains an ingestible botanical mix and crosses the U.S. border, we file the same compliance paperwork on it that we file on every other sacred food in the catalog. The compliance callout below names each clearance and gives you the same wording we use on the `/compliance` page and on `/catalog` — the agency voice is one voice across the storefront.

• Sourced directly from Haitian-lineage partners in Arcahaie, the Artibonite Valley, and the Lakou neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince — no middleman re-packaging.
• Dried at origin from fresh-cut herbs so the green color and herb flavor survive the trip.
• Shipped from our U.S. import warehouse after FDA / USDA / CBP clearance is on file.