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Portrait of Jerk cooking

General knowledge · Food & drink

Jerk cooking

17th century onwards; Jamaica

Food and drink — the Maroon smoke-pit method of the Jamaican Blue Mountains

A Jamaican method of seasoning and slow-smoking meat, built on two ingredients that the island supplies and almost nowhere else does in the same way: the berries and wood of the pimento tree, known in English as allspice, and the Scotch bonnet chilli. The technique is credited to the Maroons, communities of escaped enslaved Africans who took to the mountainous interior after the English seized the island from Spain in 1655 and who cooked over smokeless underground pits so that their fires would not betray them. The name is generally traced to the Spanish charqui, itself from the Quechua ch'arki for dried strips of meat — the same root that gives English "jerky".

How to spot them

  • ▸Two non-negotiable ingredients: pimento (allspice) and the Scotch bonnet chilli
  • ▸Maroons, the Blue Mountains and the Cockpit Country of Jamaica
  • ▸Smoked over the wood of the same tree that supplies the spice
  • ▸A word that shares its root with 'jerky', by way of Quechua and Spanish
  • ▸Boston Bay in the parish of Portland is the pilgrimage site

Key facts

Escaped Africans in the Cockpit Country cooked over smokeless underground pits so their fires would not give them away (1655)

The Maroons, after the English took Jamaica from Spain; the method of survival became a national cuisine.

Pimenta dioica, whose berries the English named for tasting of cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon at once

Allspice — the berry seasons the meat and the wood smokes it. Jamaica is the dominant world source.

Capsicum chinense, the lantern-shaped chilli that gives the heat and is named for a tam o'shanter

The Scotch bonnet, one of the hottest widely eaten chillies at 100,000–350,000 Scoville units.

A steel oil drum sliced lengthwise, hinged and set on legs at the roadside

The 'pan' — the modern descendant of the buried pit, seen at every stall in Jamaica and in Brixton.

A fishing village on the north-east coast of Portland parish treated as the shrine of the style (1930s)

Boston Bay, where the roadside pits made the dish a tourist destination.

From Quechua ch'arki through Spanish charqui — the same root that gives English 'jerky'

Dried strips of meat; the Taíno word barbacoa took a parallel route into English as 'barbecue'.

The Spanish called them cimarrones, 'wild ones' or mountain-dwellers, and the English shortened it

Maroons — the communities who preserved the technique; the Leeward Maroons signed a treaty with Britain in 1739.

Key ideas

  • The defining claim is that the smoke and the spice come from the same tree: authentic practice requires the meat to be cooked over pimento wood, so the flavour cannot be fully reproduced off the island.

Quick-fire facts

  • •Pimento, or allspice, is Pimenta dioica; the English name records that one berry seems to combine cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon
  • •Jamaica is the dominant world producer of allspice, and the tree has resisted commercial cultivation elsewhere
  • •The Scotch bonnet is a cultivar of Capsicum chinense, a close relative of the habanero, rated at roughly 100,000–350,000 Scoville heat units
  • •The Maroons took to the interior after the English captured Jamaica from Spain in 1655; the Leeward Maroons under Cudjoe signed a treaty with Britain in 1739
  • •'Maroon' derives from Spanish cimarrón, used of runaway livestock and then of runaway people
  • •The word is usually derived from Spanish charqui, from Quechua ch'arki — the origin of English 'jerky'
  • •Boston Bay in the parish of Portland, on Jamaica's north-east coast, is conventionally named as the home of the modern roadside trade
  • •The classic accompaniment is festival, a sweet fried cornmeal dumpling, with hard dough bread and rice and peas
  • •The oil-drum grill, split lengthwise and hinged, is the standard modern apparatus and is simply called a pan
  • •The Taíno, Jamaica's indigenous people, gave the island its name Xaymaca and gave Spanish the word barbacoa

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