Jamaican Food: A Local’s Guide to What to Eat

Jamaican food is big flavor from a few things: scotch bonnet pepper, pimento (allspice), fresh thyme, scallion, garlic and ginger, plus coconut milk, salted fish and whatever is in season. It’s Taíno, West African, Spanish, British, Indian and Chinese cooking folded into one kitchen, which is why the national dish pairs a West African fruit with salted cod from the North Atlantic. This is a local’s guide to what to eat, when Jamaicans eat it, and where to try it.

The national dish: ackee and saltfish

Ackee and saltfish is the national dish, and ackee is the national fruit (Government of Jamaica). The ackee came to Jamaica from West Africa, probably on a slave ship, and its name comes from the Twi word ankye, from Ghana (Jamaica Information Service). Its botanical name, Blighia sapida, honors Captain William Bligh, who took ackee plants from Jamaica to England in 1793.

The soft yellow part of the fruit is boiled, then cooked down with flaked saltfish (salted cod), onion, tomato, scallion, thyme, sweet pepper and scotch bonnet. Cooked, it looks a little like scrambled egg and tastes mild and buttery against the salty fish. It’s a breakfast dish first, served with fried dumplings, boiled green bananas, roast breadfruit, fried plantain or bread, but you’ll see it at any time of day.

A safety note every Jamaican grows up with: ackee is poisonous if it’s eaten unripe. The JIS advice is to pick ackee only once the pods have opened naturally on the tree, clean off the red fiber and throw away the cooking water. In practice, that means eating it from a restaurant, a hotel kitchen or a Jamaican home, not picking it yourself. Abroad, it’s sold in cans.

Jamaican breakfasts

If you’re at an all-inclusive, the breakfast buffet usually has a Jamaican corner. Skip the bacon and eggs for a morning and try these:

• Ackee and saltfish with fried dumplings or boiled green bananas and yam.
• Callaloo and saltfish: a leafy green, a bit like spinach, steamed down with saltfish, tomato, onion and pepper. A Sunday morning favorite in many homes.
• Mackerel rundown: salted mackerel simmered in coconut milk until the fish “runs down” and falls apart, with boiled food.
• Porridge: cornmeal, hominy corn, peanut, green banana or plantain, cooked with milk and sweetened with condensed milk, nutmeg, cinnamon and vanilla. As a child in Jamaica, a bowl of cornmeal porridge before school was normal.
• Steamed fish with okra and water crackers, more often lunch but good any time.
• Something hot to drink. In Jamaica, “tea” can mean any hot drink: mint, ginger, cerasee, chocolate tea made from local cocoa balls, or a cup of Blue Mountain coffee. You can see where that coffee grows on a Blue Mountains coffee tour.

Everyday dishes

When a Jamaican says “food” with a plate of meat, they mean the starch: yam, green banana, dasheen, sweet potato, breadfruit and boiled dumplings, together called ground provisions. Rice and peas means rice cooked with kidney beans (Jamaicans call them red peas), coconut milk, thyme and scallion, and it’s the Sunday dinner standard.

• Jerk chicken and pork: meat seasoned with scotch bonnet, pimento and thyme and cooked slowly over pimento wood or in a drum pan. Boston in Portland is called its home, and the Maroons, Africans who escaped slavery into the mountains, are credited with the method. My list of the best places for jerk in Jamaica covers where to get it.
• Curry goat: goat curried with Jamaican curry powder, scotch bonnet and potato, cooked until it falls off the bone. Curry came with the Indian indentured workers whose first group landed at Old Harbour Bay in 1845 (JIS), and no Jamaican party is complete without it.
• Oxtail: browned and stewed with butter beans and allspice in a dark gravy. One of the pricier plates at a cook shop, and worth it.
• Brown stew chicken or fish: seasoned overnight, browned, then cooked down in a thick, dark gravy.
• Escoveitch fish: whole fried fish, often snapper or parrotfish, under a pickle of vinegar, onion, carrot, pimento and scotch bonnet. Good Friday and beach-day food.
• Stew peas: red peas stewed with salted pig’s tail or beef and small flour dumplings called spinners.
• Soups: in Jamaica, Saturday is soup day, heat or no heat. Beef soup, red peas soup, chicken foot soup, and pepperpot made with callaloo and okra. Fish tea is a thin, peppery fish broth.
• Mannish water: goat soup made with the head, feet and tripe, plus green banana, yam and dumplings. It’s the soup at a nine night, a wedding or a big dance, and it has a reputation, said with a smile, as a man’s tonic.

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Street food and quick bites

• Patties: a flaky, golden pastry filled with spiced beef, chicken, vegetables or shrimp. Jamaicans buy them from bakery chains and roadside shops, and order a patty “in coco bread,” a soft, slightly sweet bread folded around it. The Devon House Bakery in Kingston is known for its patties.
• Festival: a slightly sweet fried cornmeal dumpling, the standard side with jerk and fried fish.
• Bammy: a round cassava flatbread that comes from the Taíno, Jamaica’s first people, soaked in coconut milk or water and then fried or steamed. Classic with fried fish.
• Roast breadfruit: roasted whole on coals until the skin is black, then sliced. Captain Bligh brought the first breadfruit to Jamaica (JIS).
• Pepper shrimp: river shrimp boiled with scotch bonnet and spice, sold by the bag at Middle Quarters, St Elizabeth.
• Roast yam and saltfish, roast corn and corn soup: sold from roadside fires and carts, especially in the evening.
• Bulla and pear: a dense, spiced molasses cake eaten with avocado (Jamaicans call avocado “pear”).

Sweets, fruit and drinks

Jamaicans have a sweet tooth. The old-time sweets, as the Gleaner put it, were coconut-based: Bustamante Backbone, a hard coconut and sugar candy named after national hero and first prime minister Sir Alexander Bustamante, said to stand for his firm character; gizzada, a coconut tart with a pinched crust; grater cake, toto and coconut drops. Sweet potato pudding is the one with the rhyme: “hell a top, hell a bottom, and hallelujah in the middle,” because it was baked with coals above and below.

Fruit depends on the season. Mango season in the summer is the big one, and you’ll also see guinep, June plum, star apple, sweetsop, soursop, naseberry and jackfruit at roadside stands. Buy from the stand rather than the hotel shop, and ask the vendor which are ripe today.

To drink: fresh coconut water from the nut, Ting (grapefruit soda), sorrel (a hibiscus drink with ginger, made at Christmas), carrot juice with condensed milk, and Red Stripe beer. For rum, see my guide to Jamaican rum.

Eating vegetarian or vegan

Jamaica is easier than you’d think for vegetarians. Ital food, the plant-based cooking of the Rastafari, uses no meat and often no salt, built on ground provisions, peas, callaloo, coconut milk and vegetables. Ital shops and stalls are common. Ackee cooked without saltfish, callaloo, rice and peas, steamed cabbage, vegetable patties and festival are all easy finds. Ask whether a soup or stew has meat stock, because “vegetable” doesn’t always mean what you expect.

What to try where

For more places by area, checked for what’s open after Hurricane Melissa, see my list of the best restaurants for authentic Jamaican food.