Jamaican Snacks and Drinks

Every Jamaican has a snack that takes them straight back to school: a bag of banana chips from the tuck shop, a Big Foot shared at break time, bun and cheese on the bus home. These are the snacks and drinks Jamaicans actually grow up on, where to find them on the island, and how to make one of the oldest sweets of all, coconut drops, at home.

Chips and crunchy snacks

• Banana chips. Thin slices of green banana, fried and salted. You’ll also see plantain, cassava and breadfruit chips on the same supermarket shelf. Chippies and St Mary’s are the names most Jamaicans know.
• Big Foot. A big, puffy cheese snack shaped like a foot with three toes. Ask any Jamaican child to name a snack and this is usually the first one.
• Cheese snacks. Tigaz, Cheese Trix and the rest of the cheese-puff family. Every shop has a row of them by the counter.
• Roast peanuts. Listen for the whistle: the peanut man’s cart has a steam whistle you can hear down the road, and he sells hot roasted peanuts in paper bags.

Baked snacks

Patties

The Jamaican patty is flaky golden pastry around a spicy filling: beef is the classic, with chicken, vegetable, cheese and shrimp at most counters. Patty shops are everywhere, and Jamaicans have strong opinions about which chain is best. Tastee says it has been baking patties since 1966. Ask for it “with coco bread” and you get the patty folded into a soft, sweet bread roll, a full lunch for very little money.

Bun and cheese

Spice bun is a dark, sticky loaf made with molasses, spices and dried fruit, sliced thick and eaten with a slice of processed cheese. It’s sold all year, but Easter is bun season, and HTB calls its bun Jamaica’s number one Easter treat. Bun and cheese on Good Friday is as Jamaican as it gets.

Biscuits and cakes

• Shirley biscuits. A plain, slightly sweet biscuit (cookie) that every Jamaican grandmother keeps in the cupboard.
• Kiss Cakes. Small cream-filled snack cakes in a wrapper, in flavors like chocolate and orange.
• Gizzada. A tart with a crimped pastry shell and a sweet, spiced grated coconut filling.
• Grater cake and toto. Grater cake is grated coconut and sugar, often colored pink on top; toto is a dense coconut cake. Both are country baking at its best.
• Bulla. A flat, dark, spiced cake made with molasses, cheap and filling, and often eaten with butter or cheese.

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Roadside and beach snacks

• Peppered shrimp. Small river shrimp boiled with Scotch bonnet pepper until they’re red and fiery, sold in plastic bags by vendors at Middle Quarters in St Elizabeth. If you’re heading to YS Falls, you’ll pass them on the way.
• Roast corn and roast yam. Cooked over coals at roadside stands, especially on the country roads.
• Fried fish and festival. Not quite a snack, but it’s what you eat at the beach. The fish shacks at Hellshire Beach near Kingston are the most famous place for it. Festival is a sweet fried dumpling.

Drinks

Coconut water from a jelly coconut

You can get a fresh green coconut, a “jelly,” from a cart or a roadside stand almost anywhere on the island. The vendor chops the top off with a machete in a few quick strokes and hands it to you with a straw. When you’ve finished the water, hand it back: he’ll split it open and cut a little spoon from the shell so you can scoop out the soft jelly inside. Jamaicans drink coconut water because it’s cold, sweet and everywhere, and the jelly is the best part. Buy from a vendor who opens the coconut in front of you.

Sodas and juices

• Ting. A sparkling grapefruit soda, and the mixer for rum and Ting.
• Kola champagne and cream soda. Sweet, bright sodas Jamaicans grew up on; D&G is the old name to look for.
• Ginger beer. Strong and peppery, the way Jamaican ginger is.
• Sorrel. A deep red drink made from sorrel (hibiscus) flowers with ginger and spices, made at home for Christmas.
• Carrot juice. Blended carrots with condensed milk, nutmeg and sometimes a splash of rum or stout.
• Peanut punch. A thick, creamy peanut and milk drink; my Jamaican peanut punch recipe makes it in a blender in about 10 minutes.

Coconut drops: a recipe

Coconut drops are diced coconut cooked down with brown sugar and ginger until the syrup sets around it. Growing up, they were sold in little paper bags at the school gate and the market, and most country families had their own way of making them. This makes about 12 to 15 drops.

Ingredients

• 2 cups (about 200 g) diced fresh dry coconut, from one mature brown coconut, cut into small cubes
• 1 cup (240 ml) water
• 1 cup (about 200 g) packed brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon finely grated fresh ginger
• A pinch of salt
• Optional: a pinch of ground nutmeg or cinnamon

Method

1. Put the diced coconut, water and ginger in a heavy pot and bring to a boil. Cook for about 10 minutes, until the coconut softens a little.
2. Add the brown sugar, salt and any spice. Stir until the sugar dissolves.
3. Keep it at a steady boil, stirring often, until most of the liquid has gone and the syrup is thick, dark and sticky, about 15 to 20 minutes. Watch it closely at the end, because it burns quickly.
4. Drop tablespoons of the mixture onto a greased baking sheet or a piece of banana leaf.
5. Leave the drops to cool and set, about 30 minutes, before you lift them off.

Tips and swaps

• Use fresh mature coconut, not dried desiccated coconut from a bag. You can leave the thin brown skin on the pieces; it’s traditional.
• Dark brown sugar gives the deepest flavor. If you can’t get fresh ginger, use 1 teaspoon of ground ginger.
• If the drops don’t set, the syrup wasn’t cooked long enough. Scrape them back into the pot and boil a few minutes more.
• Keep them in an airtight tin for up to a week.

Buying Jamaican snacks abroad

Caribbean grocery stores in New York, Miami, Toronto and London stock most of the packaged snacks on this list, along with Ting and the sodas. If you’re carrying snacks home from Jamaica, declare them: US Customs and Border Protection requires travelers to declare all food, and says many meat products are prohibited, so a beef patty may be taken from you. Let the officer decide on the rest.

For the full meals behind these snacks, read my guide to Jamaican food, and for where to eat it, the best restaurants for authentic Jamaican food.