Excerpt from Caribbean Cuisine

Click To View Additional Samples   Click to View Sample Recipe

Jerk cooking does not mean an ill-tempered lout is behind the grill, barking orders from the kitchen line or galley. For our purposes jerk cooking means fish, fowl or meat cooked the Jamaican way.

The popularity of jerk cooking has increased dramatically over the last decade. Today, these island specialties are found on menus at restaurants across the country. Once you try jerk, it’s easy to understand its popularity.

Credit: Bob Willis

The jerk cooking technique dates back several hundred years. The slow cooking of highly seasoned perishables was a trick developed by the Amerindians to preserve meats and cover up the taste and smell of edibles that were past their prime. The term "jerk" follows the English transliteration "jirk" for the Spanish word charqui, the term they applied to the native technique of drying thin strips of meat in the sun or smoking them on a barbacoa. Other stories say the name derived from the motion of jerking the meat back and forth over the fi re while cooking it. Some jerkmen will tell you it’s about pulling, or jerking the cooked meat off the hot bones. Even the Dutch stake a claim, saying it comes from their word gherkin, which means to pickle or marinate.

Lore aside, anthropologists believe that the Quechua Indians, Peruvian cousins of the Arawaks, are the originators of jerk cooking. The Quechua and Arawaks traveled to Jamaica together nearly a thousand years ago. These early Caribbean tourists had developed the method of using chiles and spices as a means of preserving meats for their journeys. Today’s jerk is remarkably similar to its predecessor given that most recipes have been passed down from generation to generation, inevitably undergoing some embellishment and change.

Possibly the closest relative of the original jerk came from a band of West African hunters called the Cormantee (pr. KAR man TEE). The Cormantee passed on the The Cormantee passed on the TEE tradition to the Maroons, a fi erce and semi-lawless band of freed and escaped slaves living in the rugged southwestern terrain of Jamaica. Maroons hunted wild pigs and rubbed the meat with a spice mixture made from allspice and ultra-hot Scotch bonnet chiles. The paste could include such ingredients as chives, thyme, cinnamon, garlic, cloves, malt vinegar, and rum. Recipes varied from cook to cook, some utilizing as many as 20 ingredients ...