A trip to Portland (the parish where Port Antonio is located) wouldn't be complete without sampling jerk, the spicy and flavorful preparation of chicken, pork and other meats that hails from this parish. Although I've eaten jerk-seasoned foods in the states, they don't come close to the real deal. In Jamaica, the meats are seasoned with allspice (aka pimento) and Scotch bonnet peppers, then placed on pimento wood covering a fire and essentially grilled. We sampled jerk at this roadside stand in Boston Bay.
Our first breakfast on the island was a traditional Jamaican dish called ackee and saltfish. The "meat" of the ackee fruit grows inside a pink exterior that opens like a flower and yields three pieces of the fruit, each attached to a large, shiny brown seed that looks like a chocolate-covered cherry. Salt cod is the fish in this dish, which comes served with fried dumplings sometimes called Johnny cakes (second from left) and a fried cassava cake (right). Ours also came with fried plantains (left).
While rafting one afternoon, we stopped at a riverside spot where lunch is served daily. On my plate, you'll see (clockwise from top) rice and peas, another traditional Jamaican dish of red beans, rice and coconut milk; another Johnny cake; breadfruit, which I found delightfully soft, comfortingly bland, but still quite satisfying; cooked bok choy; curry goat (at center); and a salad of lettuce, cabbage, carrots and peppers.
For our dessert at the same spot, we were served sweet-potato pudding (left), which had the consistency of a very dense pumpkin pie filling, and chewy, uber-gingery cookies called coconut drops. In the cup? The best lemonade e-ver! Belinda, the cook, told us she had added lime juice to the mixture.
On the second night, we dined at a casual restaurant where the first food we were served was an otaheiti or Jamaican apple. It was quite petite (you see I photographed it next to my Red Stripe for a sense of scale), pear shaped, with flesh that reminded me of a cross between pears, plums and apples. The flavor was remarkably floral, almost like the scent of roses. Our escort from the tourist board told us this was eaten before the meal to aid in digestion.
One of my favorite food experiences on the trip happened not at a restaurant, but at a small roadside produce stand. After seeing countless signs advertising "ice cold jelly" during our two-hour drive from the airport in Kingston to our hotel in Port Antonio, we asked our escort what the signs were all about. Rather than tell us, he had the driver stop at the next sign for the stuff and told us to all get out so we could try it. The jelly turns out to be the inside of the cavity of a young, green coconut. (The hairy brown things we think of as coconuts are the mature version, smaller than their young counterparts.) In the picture below, the innermost, whitest layer is the jelly.
The owner of the roadside stand, who identified himself to us as Watches, hacked off the tops of a few green coconuts with his machete, then passed a handful of straws to us. After we sipped the delicious coconut water out of the center, Watches cut open the coconuts and demonstrated how to use one half to scoop out the jelly from the other half in ribbony sheets. Its flavor was mild, and the consistency reminded me of scallop sashimi.Our tour guide then borrowed Watches's machete and cut open a mature coconut to let us sample the flesh. It was quite firm and required extensive chewing, but I was surprised by how much I liked it. The flavor was much less concentrated or coconut-y than what we find here in the states, perhaps because by the time coconuts reach our shelves (or in the dried, shredded or flaked form) the water content is so much less and, therefore, the coconut flavor more intense.
Not pictured, but also consumed: okra, dolphin, wahoo, Ting (a lightly sweet grapefruit soda), and insanely fresh ginger beer. All in all, lots of new flavors and foods!
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