Jamaican Food: History, Biology, CultureHistorical study of food and the anthropology of food are recent and growing fields of scholarly inquiry. Why people eat what they do and how they prepare it is an important means of studying a culture. It can reveal much about a culture's crop production, economy, eating rituals, preparation methods, festivals, foodways, history and environmental care, and degradation. This book sheds new light on food and cultural practices in Jamaica from the time of the earliest Taino inhabitants through the introduction of different foodways by enslaved cultures, to creole adaptations to the fast-food phenomena of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The author examines the shift in Jamaican food practices over time, from the Tainos' use of bitter cassava to the Maroons' introduction of jerk pork, and the population's love affair with the fruits of the island such as paw paw, guava, star apple, and avocado pear. In this well-written and accessible study, the author traces how endemic animals, delicacies such as the turtle, ringtail pigeon, black land crab and mountain mullet, barely retained their popular status into the early twentieth century and are now almost completely forgotten, their populations dramatically depleted, often endangered. The two main sections of the book deal separately with plants and animals. Plants are grouped together according to the parts of them used as food: roots, stalks and leaves, fruits and seeds. Generally, all aspects of a particular plant have been discussed together and the plant as a whole has been located in its dominant use. Animals are treated in the same way, putting all of their uses in a single place but grouped into biological families. |
Contents
WHY DO JAMAICANS EAT WHAT THEY EAT? | 1 |
What is Jamaican food? | 2 |
Jamaican cookery 13 Jamaican taste | 17 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
ackee Agriculture American animals apple baked banana beans beef Benghiat birds black pepper boiled bread breadfruit Browne butter cakes callaloo Caribbean cassava centimetres chicken Civil and Natural coco cocoa coconut coffee common consumed cookbooks cooking cornmeal crops cultivated Desnoes and Geddes dish Donaldson Dovaston dumplings eaten eggs eighteenth century enslaved Figure fish flavour flesh flour Food Supplement fresh fruit Geophagy Gleaner goat Gosse green Guinea corn Hortus Jamaicensis imported Indigenous island Jamaica Cookery Book Jamaica Journal Jamaican food January John Lindsay Journal juice Kingston London Long Lunan mango meat nineteenth century nutmeg Nutrition patty peas pepper pickled pimento plant plantain planters pork potato Real Taste recipe rice ripe roasted roots salt saltfish sauce scallion season seeds slavery Sloane soup species spice stew sugar Sullivan sweet Taino Titford tomato Traditional Jamaican Cookery tree Tropical tubers turtle twentieth century variety vegetables West Africa West Indies