Quintessential Jamaican: Jerk, Reggae, and Patois

Some people would tell you nothing says Jamaican better than jerk, reggae, and Patois. They’d be wrong, as Jamaican culture is rich, complex, and highly variegated, and just these three things cannot represent the entirety of Jamaican culture and ethnic identity.

That said, Ya! Jerk, reggae, and Patois are quintessentially Jamaican. If you’re lucky, you’ll find all three in your favorite Jamaican restaurant.

Craving some Jamaican food, music and vibes? To help you out, here are some of the top tings to add to your must-try Jamaican experience. Ya, yuwelkom!

1. Jerk

If Jamaicans were fairies, jerk spices would be their magic dust.

Pulled jerk chicken, jerk chicken shawarma, jerk eggplant risotto, jerk falafel, jerk hummus, jerk chicken pasta, jerk fried rice, and jerk BBQ glazed ribs – whatever jerk dish your favorite Jamaican restaurant serves, make sure to try it.

To be precise, the Jamaican jerk is a style of cooking, not a seasoning mix. However, over time, jerk has become so intertwined with the ingredients (particularly the spices) used in jerk cooking that the word gradually evolved to take on another meaning – i.e., jerk the spice or seasoning mix.

Therefore, when you see jerk pasta, it’s less likely to be pasta cooked in the traditional jerk way. It’s probably pasta with the signature Jamaican jerk seasoning.

Jerk the Cooking Style

Jerk cooking style was born from a marriage of two cultures. One is of a people traumatized by discovery – the Taíno, indigenous to the Caribbean. The other pertains to proud (dignified) people from various African tribes forcibly transported by the Spanish to Jamaica. They later disdained their enslavement to make a life in the mountains and were later dubbed the Maroons.

With the help of the Taínos, the Maroons learned how to cook in underground smokeless pits. They could not risk cooking over an open fire for fear of giving their location away. The Taínos also taught them which local ingredients they could use to preserve the game they caught.

Jerk, therefore, is a fusion of cultures. The jerk technique doesn’t only cook but also tenderizes meat through the clever use of seasoning and slow-grilling.

Seasoning involves rubbing the meat or vegetables with salt, bird peppers, and allspice (pimento). The seasoned meat or vegetable is then wrapped in pepper elder leaves before being roasted over embers in a smokeless, underground pit.

Jerk cooking has evolved through the years. Modern jerk now involves smoking, which can be accomplished by using pimento wood chips in smokers or incorporating them (say, putting glowing embers of the wood at the bottom rack of the oven) when roasting jerk-seasoned meat.

Jerk cooking is slow and unhurried. Smoking a 12-pound turkey can take more than six hours in a typical smoker.

Jerk the Seasoning

As you can see from the above section, traditional jerk seasoning includes pimento or allspice, bird peppers, and salt. These core ingredients have expanded to include Scotch bonnet peppers, scallions, garlic, ginger, thyme, and cinnamon.

Jerk seasoning can be dry or wet. To make a dry rub, put all your dry ingredients in a spice grinder until they’re uniform in size. To make a paste, add oil, vinegar and lime juice to the dry ingredients and pulse everything together in a food processor.

Jerk requires high-quality spices. If you want authentic Jamaican jerk, visit a restaurant that imports its ingredients and seasonings from Jamaica.

2. Reggae

Who hasn’t heard of Bob Marley? Even people who don’t know who he is have probably heard at least one or two pieces of his music. “Get Up, Stand Up,” “No Woman, No Cry,” “I Shot the Sheriff,” “Buffalo Soldier,” and “One Love” should readily come to mind.

Bob Marley, born Robert Nesta Marley in 1945, is one of the pioneers and icons of reggae, a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the 1960s. Its forerunners were ska, a distinctly Jamaican musical style characterized by a distinct guitar chop on the offbeat, and rocksteady, another musical style that featured a dramatically slowed ska tempo.

After it was introduced, reggae — with its bass-driven faster beats and significant political messages —rapidly became the leading music genre in Jamaica. Its fame spread beyond the island, and reggae (and its top stars, including Bob Marley) gained international fame in the 1970s, especially in Great Britain, the United States, and Africa.

Reggae, with its calls for change and justice for the oppressed and marginalized, remains a relevant music genre today. Since its genesis, however, it has given rise to Jamaica’s dancehall musical movement.

Dancehall features a deejay talking in a rhythmic monotone over a recorded instrumental track (i.e., toasting). It’s part song, part monologue, with the deejays reciting a spiel they have memorized beforehand or come up with at the spur of the moment. It’s dancehall that led to the emergence of hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s.

Indeed, you can’t talk about Jamaica without touching on Jamaican music and how it has such soul and meaning. Ska, rock steady, reggae, and dancehall are Jamaican music’s most notable representatives, and they ultimately inspired hip-hop.

3. Patois

To be clear, English is the official language of Jamaica. However, it has a distinctly colorful and dynamic language known as Jamaican patois or Jamaican creole.

Jamaican patois is primarily based on English, but to a casual listener, it sounds nothing like the language from which it borrows heavily. Distinctly present in Jamaican patois are elements of the African, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Arawakan (the language the Taíno people spoke) languages that have shaped and influenced the Jamaican people and culture through the years.

It will take you at least several years of intense study and conversations with Jamaicans to speak the language fluently, but here’s a list of the top Patois phrases you can use occasionally and their meaning.

Note: The meaning may not be the literal translation of the phrase. For instance, weh yuh ah seh translates to “What are you saying?” but it means “How are you doing?”