festive Jamaican dinner brings together the Caribbean flavors of pineapple and pork.
Both country and town lunches consist of some of the favorite Jamaican dishes, such as stewed peas (which are what Jamaicans call beans); curried goat; oxtail; escoveitched fish (marinated in lime juice), brown stewed fish (pan-fried and then braised in a brown sauce seasoned with hot peppers and spices) or simply fried fish. These main dishes are usually served with rice, yams, green bananas or other starches. There might also be a satisfying soup of meats, vegetables, yams, cocos (taro, also called dasheen) and dumplings served as a one-pot meal. Dinner can include stewed beef, jerked meat, oxtail and beans, fish or fricasseed chicken.
The most important meal of every Jamaican household is the traditional Sunday dinner. This is usually eaten midafternoon after eating a bigger Sunday breakfast of ackee and saltfish or liver and onions with johnny cakes, green bananas and bammie (a flat cassava bread) and fruit.
Dinner (sometimes called late lunch as well) is the time when family and friends gather for a more relaxed meal. Rice and peas are de rigueur for Sundays, and often at least two meats—fricasseed chicken as well as a very spicy roast beef—will be served. Fried plantains, string beans, carrots and a salad might accompany the meats, followed by a pudding, cake or fruit salad. Beverages include soft drinks, lemonade, coconut water, beers and rum or rum punch.
Christmas is the most important holiday of the year for Jamaicans. This goes back to the days of slavery when there were four seasonal holidays— Christmas, Easter or Picanny Christmas, Crop over Harvest and the Yam Festival. The Yam Festival has since disappeared, but the other three holidays are still celebrated, and celebrated well.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Christmas consisted of three nonconsecutive days— Christmas, Boxing and New Year’s Days. During this time, a temporary metamorphosis occurred in the relationship between master and slaves: the slaves assumed names of prominent whites, richly dressed (most of their savings went into dressing), and addressed their masters as equals. Christmas celebrations began early in the morning when a chorus of slaves visited the great house, singing “good morning to your nightcap and health to the master and mistress.” After this, the slaves collected extra rations of salted meats for the three days of celebrations.
The great attraction on Boxing Day was the John Canoe Dance—which is slowly dying out—and on New Year’s Day, the great procession of the Blue and Red Set Girls. Each set gave a ball, and each was represented by a king and queen. The queen and her attendants wore lavish gowns that were kept secret until the day of their appearance.
For most Jamaicans today, the idea of Christmas conjures up cool days, shopping, social gatherings, and much eating and drinking. This is the time of year when the sorrel plant, used to make the traditional red Christmas drink, is in season along with the fresh gungo (pigeon) peas used to make Christmas rice and peas. A very rich plum pudding, made from dried fruits soaked for weeks in rum and port, is a must for Christmas dinner. It is usually served with a “hard” or brandy sauce.
Easter time reflects the passing of the cooler months and heralds the coming of summer. For strict Catholics, it means the abandoning of meats for fish. Even though the majority of the Jamaican population is not Catholic, more fish is eaten during Lent than at any other time of the year.
The eating of bun and cheese during Easter is a truly Jamaican innovation. Buns of every description are baked and eaten in large quantities—especially as a snack with a piece of cheese. Each bakery vies with the next to produce the best buns. But the buns of yesteryear, most of which were baked by small bakeries, were much tastier than today’s. Now the large bakeries make most of the buns, and at times the raisins and currants are hardly visible except as decorations.
Jamaican weddings today have become much like those in the United States. But of more interest were the old country weddings, celebrated grandly and often attended by the whole village. They were preceded by many nights of preparation, usually consisting of ring games. A feed was held the night before the wedding for the groom. This consisted of curried ram goat and sometimes “dip and fall back,” a dish of salted shad cooked in coconut milk and served with a lot of rum. It is said that the goat’s testicles were roasted and served to the groom. These days, mannish water, a stew made of a goat’s organs and head is served to grooms the night before the wedding to increase virility.
The day before the wedding a procession of young girls, all dressed in white, carried the wedding cakes on their heads to the bride’s house. The main cakes were in the form of pyramids, and each cake was covered with a white veil. The picturesque custom of young girls carrying the cakes on their heads has almost disappeared as transportation by cars is now used more often.
The wedding feast differed from village to village, but usually it consisted of a huge meal of roast pig, curried goat and traditional side dishes. The Sunday following the celebrations, the couple attended church with members of the wedding party.
While these traditions are slipping away, the flavors of the past are alive and well in Jamaica.
The Joys of Jerk
The island’s fiery food fetish has become a global addiction
Jerk—the fiery food that is now popular throughout the globe—is truly a part of Jamaica’s history. From M.G. Lewis in 1834 to Zora Neale Hurston in 1939, chroniclers of the West Indies tell us of their flavorful encounters with the Maroons—and even with the Maroons’ favorite food, a spice and pepper-encrusted slow-smoked pork called “jerk.” The Maroons, escaped slaves living in Jamaica’s jungle interior, developed many survival techniques—but none more impressive than the way they hunted wild pigs, cleaned them between run-ins with the law, covered them with a mysterious spice paste and cooked them over an aromatic wood fire.
Lewis gives us a vivid picture of a Maroon dinner of land tortoise and barbecued pig: “two of the best and richest dishes that I ever tasted, the latter in particular, which was dressed in the true Maroon fashion being placed on a barbecue, through whose interstices the steam can ascend, filled with peppers and spices of the highest flavor, wrapped in plantain leaves and then buried in a hole filled with hot stones by whose vapor it is baked, no particle of juice being thus suffered to evaporate.”
A cook serves up jerk at Faiths Pen—a lively collection of fastfood stalls along the highway that crosses the island between Ocho Rios and Kingston.
Even more exciting is Hurston’s description a century later of an actual hunting expedition with the Maroons. As an anthropologist, she was trained to discern cultural and ethnic truths. But in one extended passage, what she discovers is the unforgettable flavor of jerk pork.
“All of the bones were removed, seasoned and dried over the fire to cook. Towards morning we ate our fill of jerked pork. It is more delicious than our American barbecue. It is hard to imagine anything better than pork the way the Maroons jerk it. When we had eaten all that we could, the rest was packed up with the bones and we started the long trek back to Accompong.”
Thanks to Americans who have followed in Hurston’s footsteps, the jerk-scented “trek back to Accompong” has never ended. The Maroon method of cooking and preserving pork has become a Jamaican national treasure, inspiring commercial spice mixes, bottled marinades and the use of the word “jerk” around the world.
The word “jerk” itself, as with so many in Jamaica, is something of a mystery. Most Jamaicans offer the non-scholarly explanation that the word refers to the jerking motion either in turning the meat over the coals or in chopping off hunks for customers. Still, there is a more serious explanation.
