The Jerk Pits at Boston Bay

Boston Bay, Portland parish. Eight or so stands under zinc roofs with the sea right behind them, and the meat lying on green pimento wood laid straight across the fire. Sweetwood and wild-coffee branches go on beside the pimento. A plate comes with festival or bammy and something cold, and you eat it standing up. This bay is held to be where commercial jerk in Jamaica began.

The method is older than the island's name for it. In 1516 the Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo recorded the Taíno cooking meat and fish on a barbacoa, seasoned with hot peppers and pimento — and the Scotch bonnet was already growing here. The word came by a different road: jerk runs back through the Spanish charqui to Quechua, for dried meat, the same root that gave English jerky.

Spain claimed Jamaica in 1494. When the English attacked in 1655 the fleeing Spanish colonists freed the people they had enslaved, and those people went into the interior and became the Maroons. Living alongside the Taíno who remained, they took up the jerking, hunting wild hogs and cooking them slowly over pimento wood. The story the cooks at Boston Bay tell is that the pits were covered so the smoke would not show the militias where the camps were; that part is told as story. The National Library of Jamaica traces a second line, to Coromantee hunters from West Africa who roasted pork over coals under green pimento branches, and notes that Coromantees settled heavily in Portland. From about the 1960s cooks began splitting oil barrels lengthwise and hinging the lids to hold the smoke. In 2015 Jamaica registered Jamaica Jerk as a geographical indication, the first in the English-speaking Caribbean.

Jamaican Jerk is that rub — allspice, thyme, chile and paprika with garlic, onion, a little sugar and vinegar. Allspice, Whole is the pimento berry itself, clove and cinnamon and nutmeg in one seed, which is why the same tree flavours the meat and makes the fire it cooks on. Crack the berries into the rub and throw a handful on the coals. Thyme and Green Onion are the green floor under all of it — the dried escallion a Jamaican kitchen keeps beside the thyme — and Cayenne Pepper, Hot is the heat where the Scotch bonnet would be.

The island's other pot arrived on a ship. On 10 May 1845 the first vessel landed at Old Harbour Bay with 261 people from northern India, and more than 36,000 followed by 1921; Jamaican Curry Powder came with them and never left. And Hibiscus, Organic is sorrel — steeped deep red with ginger and cloves, drunk cold, the drink that turns up every Christmas.

Eight products. One fire, and a bay behind it.