The British Cornish pastry which was a meat and potato filled pastry is the forerunner to the beef patty. These include Easter buns, tarts, sponge cakes, jams, pies, Christmas pudding, rice pudding, marmalade and pancakes.
They also introduced breadfruit, otaheiti apples, mangoes, rose apples tumeric, black pepper and coffee.Įvidence of the influence of the sweet-toothed English remains today in the rich pastries we so love to eat. These became staples in the slave diet and are still favourites today. They also exported rum and molasses that were traded for flour, pork and pickled fish. They built their kingdom on sugar cultivated by African labour.
In 1655 the British captured Jamaica from the Spaniards and controlled the land until 1962. Some of the peas and bean dishes that remain popular today also originated in Spain. They also brought cattle, goats, pigs and horses. The Spaniards also left us with hot country-style chocolate made from roasted ground/pounded, spiced cocoa beans gizzada the soaking of fruits in wine for wedding cakes and Christmas pudding. We also have the Spaniards to thank for stewed peas with cured meat, oxtail and cow foot, as well frying as a method of cooking. They also introduced the sugar cane, ginger, date palm, pomegranate, plantains and figs.Įscovietched fish and bammy is the result of combining the food of two cultures – escoveitched fish from the Spaniards and bammy from the Tainos. Sweet orange, sour orange (Seville and Valencia oranges), lime and lemon, tamarind, coconut, banana, and grapes are some of the plants and trees that the Spaniards brought to Jamaica. Not only did they introduce new crops and foods, but they also exported pimento, naseberry, coco and other favourites to Europe, In 1494, the Spaniards, the first Europeans to inhabit the island, arrived with Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to the New World. Roasted fish may well be a legacy of the Tainos. A combination of these two methods is used in jerking pork and chicken today. When the cooking was done, the mud was scraped off, taking with it the feathers and scales. This was the forerunner to the present day barbecue grill.Īnother method of cooking was coating freshly caught fish or bird with mud and baking it on charcoal placed in a pit dug in sand. One of their methods of food preparation was with the ‘barbcoa.’ This is a wooden grate standing on four forked sticks placed over a slow fire. Today, tenderisers are made from papain, extracted from papaya.ĭid you know that the Saturday beef soup and the pepperpot Jamaicans all love so much can be traced back to the Tainos? They are believed to have kept a stock pot in which meat, fish and vegetables were collected for soup. Another of their discoveries was that meat could be made tender if wrapped in papaya (pawpaw) leaves. The Tainos also made intoxicating drinks from cassava as well as from maize. The bammies became an important part of the diet of the Spaniards and the British soldiers as they would remain fresh for months.
The ‘thrash’ was moulded into cakes and baked in a griddle. The cassava was cut into small pieces, and the poisonous juice was then extracted. They also cultivated chilli pepper, cassava, sweet potato, pumpkin, yampi, corn arrowroot, coco, guava, starapple, pineapple, and cashew.īammy or cassava bread was the staple of the Tainos. They enjoyed the green part of the crab meat in the shell, which they mixed with lime juice making a sauce called tamaulin which they ate with cassava bread.īesides seafood, the Tainos’ protein diet consisted of small birds such as parrots and waterbirds, iguanas, yellow snakes and conies. The Tainos are said to have feasted on over forty varieties of fish including grouper, parrot fist, sturgeon, shark, lobster, oysters conch, whelk, and crab. With each group came the various types of food they ate, preparation methods, and the unique way they incorporated the foods they found here into their own recipe. Our fore-bearers who influenced what we eat today include the Tainos (more popularly known as the Arawaks), the Spaniards, British, Africans, Chinese, Indians and Germans. As each group of people came to Jamaica, they brought their own way of cooking, leaving their own delectable and indelible contribution to our culinary heritage.Īlthough in Jamaica we now enjoy modern methods of food preparation, no one can deny that the old-fashioned style of baking in a brick oven, or of cooking on an old time coal stove, produced results that were equally delicious and satisfying. What is now regarded as authentic Jamaican cuisine is an amalgam of foods from different cultures and people including Tainos, Africans, European, Chinese and Indians. Jamaican food is known and enjoyed across the world for its exotic flavour.
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