Three Jerks

Jerk Pork on the beach at the Ritz

Jerk Chicken getting the sauce at Scotchie's
Viv enjoying a Jerk Fish down by the beach

Ackee and saltfish is the national dish of Jamaica, but the Jamaicans I spoke to admitted, when pressed, that actually, when it really came down to it, they preferred Jerk.

A simple barbeque dish, Jerk refers both to a set of spices used to marinade chicken, pork, and fish alike, as well as to a sweet-and-spicy sauce that the resulting meat is drenched in. It's served in "jerk centers", mostly shacks with a few tables and a steel-drum barbeque and a few drunks.

Chickens are the most classic food to Jerk. The birds, whole, are splayed opened ("butterflied"), rubbed deep with spice mix, left to marinade in a cooler for a day or two, then cooked slow over a wood fire. The meat gets cooked to a juicy perfection, but the skin barely caramelizes and hardly gets a chance to render, leaving it fatty and delicious.

Upon an order, a chicken is pulled from the grilled, and hacked into bite sized pieces by a strong armed man with a cleaver. The meat is piled into a stryrofoam box or piece of tinfoil, in a manner not a little reminiscent of Chinatown.

The classic sides are "rice and peas" (what we would call "ice and beans"), although this being Passover I focused instead on the popular alternatives of (humongous) roast sweet potatoes and yams, breadfruit, and something called "festival", which as far as I could tell was a cornmeal dumpling. I hope it was cornmeal, because they were good and I ate a lot of them.

In the four days I was in Jamaica, I think I had 6 jerk meals. The best, by far, was a Scotchie's, a roadside joint whose charming ramshackle local character is somewhat diminished by the expensive looking flat screen TV under thatched bar, and, gasp, a white woman who looked like a proprietor darting around in the back. The food was good, and the many local patrons didn't seem to mind the lack of complete ramshackle authenticity. Those I spoke to agreed it was the best, and apparently it recently won some sort of award from a magazine.

I'm almost ashamed to mention it, but the "Jerk center" at the Ritz, right down the beach, actually did a pretty damn good jerk pork, which may have been better than Scotchie's. It also cost $17, about five times as much. BUT, when served directly to our immaculately turned out lounge chairs facing the beach, and eaten with the sea breeze at our backs in pina coladas in our spare hands, we were not counting pennies.

Ackee, rice, salftish is nice

Ackee and saltfish. The yellowish bits that look like fish, are actually the ackee.
Ackee on the vine
Mackerel Rundown, another Jamaican breakfast specialty

One of the themes of this blog is salt cod (bacalao). I'd heard of course about Jamaica's national dish, ackee and saltfish, but I just assumed it was dried local bream or river fish. So imagine my pleasure when we pulled into Dolly's Café in Montego Bay, and I was served a plate of unmistakable bacalao.

The fish, like all salt cod, comes from the North Sea, Scotland and Norway and thereabouts, and is dried by wealthy Europeans before being processed in EU-standard factories and shipped to the New World for consumption by the simple folk here. So understandably, the amount of saltfish in the dish was pretty low, maybe just an ounce or two.

That's where the Ackee comes in -- a handsome purplish fruit, when boiled it yields a firm yey flaky texture which closely resembles that of the saltfish. It's rather flavourless, and so easily adopts and the tastes of salt and the see when its sauteed with the cod. I actually thought it was fish until the second or third bite. A practical filler.

Dolly, a septuagenarian restaurateur, seems to operate mostly for the benefit of expatriate Jamaicans returning home from the US for a vacation. She was a bit surprised to see the two of us white folks, remarking, "you're escaped!" (form our hotel).

Good Hope, Jamaica

"How many people work here with the tourists?" I asked Isaac and Alfred, our two guides for a horse ride we were taking around the Good Hope Plantation yesterday. It was a bright day, and there must have been 5000 acres of property dazzling below me.

"Two," they replied, and looked a bit puzzled. I steered my horse, Cokehead, off the trail and up into one of the many citrus groves we were riding through, and plucked another Ugly Fruit of the tree. Like an orange, only uglier and more delicious. Juicy like you wouldn't believe, with the flavour of a mandarin and the size of a small grapefruit. The peel came off easily, and I gleefully let the juice run down my face and shirt as the horse walked itself back onto the trail.

It had taken a good hour to drive the 20km inland to get to the Plantation, which dominated most of the valley of the Martha Brae as it ran out of the Cockpit mountains out to the coast and the resorts below. Some signs posted about the plantation described that it had been around for some two hundred years, and owned by a succession of oddballs, starting with a succession of slave-owning sugar cane farmers, and eventually passing into the hands of a partnership which tried to create a high-end tourism destination in the 60's or 70's. They restored the old great house up at that top of the hill to its most charming, and for a brief while they managed to lure in some society types, even a prince, it so appears.

There was a civil war of sorts in the 70's in Jamaica, and the visitors ground to a halt. A brochure with the history of the plantation noted that when Jamaica emerged in the 80's, tourism there "had gone from exclusive to (all)-inclusive." The owners tried a few other pursuits, notably the citrus farm, as well as a race horse training operation. Both worked, sort of, to the degree that we were able to hire two retired race horses to ride through the magnificent orchards of trees dripping with ripe fruit.

We high-brow Americans, the kind who are pre-disposed to "responsible tourism" and look down our noses at package tours and would never willingly don a bracelet or surrender to having to eat at a buffet while on holiday have an ingrained aversion to Jamaica, land as it is of bargain all-inclusive. It's a shame, really, since the island is full of gems such as the Good Hope Plantation.

If any of the Internet people out there find this post and are considering a trip to Montego Bay, don't miss a horse ride up at Good Hope. I hear that you if you call ahead and ask for it, they can prepare you lunch at the great house. I just found the web site, which I'm glad they have, but don't worry, it is MUCH more slick than the plantation itself...

Jamaica me crazy

South coast of Jamaica, near Belmont

The flight to Montego Bay was packed. Usual set of white people vacation goers, families, fat people, the like. My stomach turned as I saw the queue to board the plane; I had visions of screaming children and fat people closing in me both for the entirety of the flight across the Caribbean, but also during my stay there. Ellen, who had never been to Jamaica described it as middle-class over-grown spring-break hell, with the bad taste of economic colonialism thrown in to boot. I didn't really do that much research in advance of this trip; I had a few free hotel nights to burn, so I looked for the combination of cheapest flights and most expensive eligible rooms, and clicked buy as fast as I could, before I could get a call from the office taking my long weekend away.

The plane ride was predictably awful. The vacation actually pretty damn nice.

The fat people from the plane disappeared promptly upon arrival. I didn't even really see them in the airport, at least once we cleared the surprisingly rigorous immigration screening. I picked up a rental car, turned on to the highway and whizzed up the coast, skirting by yards the perfect Caribbean beach vistas, complete with beach shacks, kids splashing in the waves and fishing boats bobbing gently off to the side. We passed a dozen or so all-inclusive resorts. I was pleased to reflect on how pleased I was to not be in there with the fat people.

Our hotel, The Ritz-Carlton Rose Hall, which I chose on the basis of it being A) not an all-inclusive resort, and B) being very expensive but still under the $400 limit for me to use my Hotels.com points, was actually great. A bit on the big side, with 400 rooms, but what it lost in character it more than made up for with comfortable rooms and terrific staff, who appeared only too happy to spread the towels over our lounge chairs and bring us plates of jerk chicken and pina coladas as we dozed and read on the beach. Every request was received with a friendly "ja man!"

We had two full days, and on both ventured out in the rental car up and across the mountains in the interior. The first day we ventured clear through to the south side of the island, the Kingston side, which provided all of the standard developing country trappings I required to make me feel content in having ventured out of the tourism bubble (goats in the road, shack-stores, police checkpoints, ubiquitous mobile phone ads, etc). We had a fine meal at a public beach packed with Jamaican weekenders, then drove back north the long way, wrapping along the western coast, stopping for sundowner in the resort town of Negril

Negril and Montego Bay together are the main resort towns of Jamaica. I was prepared for Cancun, but was quite pleased to find that the all-inclusive fortresses which dot the coast have actually done a decent job of leaving the towns themselves in relative peace. They appear to have only recently entered the " no more stray dogs" phase of development (beach towns start out with a few dogs, which then become a lot of dogs, which then go to no dogs as they are discovered and develop). It's all small hotels spread out along the beach. A few lousy foreigner restaurants, a few good foreigner restaurants, a few really good local shacks. Happy faces all around.

We returned back to our own island, tossed the keys to the valet, and retreated to our balcony to crack a Red Stripe and watch a movie on the laptop.