Saint Mary Food & Traditional Cuisine

Saint Mary eats the rural version of Jamaican food, close to where it grows.

Ground provisions — yam, dasheen, coco, breadfruit, green banana — are the base of most meals here, boiled and served with whatever protein there is. This is farming country and the produce is exceptional.

Jerk is cooked at the roadside over pimento wood, and the coast road has stands at intervals; the further from the resorts, the better and cheaper it gets.

The rivers give crayfish — called janga locally — and the sea gives snapper, parrotfish and lobster in season.

Fruit is the parish’s glory: banana and plantain everywhere, plus ackee, mango, soursop, naseberry, otaheite apple and jelly coconut sold from stalls.

Cook shops and bammy stands do the everyday eating, and villa cooks do the rest.

Pepper shrimp, the north-coast roadside speciality: small river crayfish cooked hard with scotch bonnet and salt until fiery red, sold by the bag at the roadside and eaten shell and all. Middle Quarters in the south is more famous for them but the eastern rivers produce them too.

Jerk pork from a drum grill, chopped and served with festival and a bag juice.

Ackee and saltfish at breakfast with fried breadfruit or boiled green banana.

Run down, mackerel or salt fish simmered in coconut milk until the milk splits and thickens, with onion, thyme and pepper — a proper country dish and not often found in resorts.

Steamed fish with okra and crackers, cooked whole in a broth.

Also: bammy, the cassava flatbread, fried and served with fish; soup on a Saturday; and roast breadfruit off a coal fire.

Port Maria market and the smaller markets at Highgate and Annotto Bay run on set days and are where the parish’s produce is traded — yam, dasheen, banana, pepper, thyme and whatever is in season.

The roadside is the real food culture. Jelly coconuts opened with a machete, bags of pepper shrimp, roast corn, jerk drums, and fruit sold from a board on a stand — all of it cheap and all of it better than it needs to be.

Saturday soup is an institution: a thick pot of ground provisions, pumpkin, spinners and meat, sold from kitchens and bars on Saturday afternoons.

Sunday is church and then a long family lunch; much else is closed.

Bars are small, painted, and social centres as much as drinking places.

No wine is made here, but Saint Mary grows two things the world drinks.

Cocoa has been cultivated in the parish since the eighteenth century, and Jamaican fine-flavour beans are prized by specialist chocolate makers. Smallholders still ferment and sun-dry on raised barbecues at the roadside, and the traditional chocolate tea — cocoa ground with spice, boiled with milk and drunk at breakfast — is a country tradition rather than a tourist one.

Coffee grows in the higher southern districts of the parish, on the fringe of the protected mountain zone; beans grown outside the certified boundary are sold as Jamaica High Mountain, which is good coffee at a fraction of the famous name’s price.

Rum is Jamaica’s spirit and the bars here run on white overproof, drunk with water or in a punch.

Sorrel at Christmas, and fresh jelly coconut water year round, which is what most people actually drink through a hot afternoon.