The Tradition of Meat Dishes in Jamaican Cuisine

Jamaican cuisine is all about the flavor of the sea. Any authentic Jamaican restaurant will be serving you an   experience, not just meat. Chicken makes a big part of the Jamaican cuisine, and the Caribbean people love  chicken in many ways. Also, they use mutton, fish, shrimp and lobster, and oxtail meat in their food. Let’s see what varieties of dishes Jamaicans love to cook and serve.

-Ackee and Starfish is the national dish as it stands for all things Jamaican! The dried and salted codfish is prepared with the local fruit of Jamaica, Ackee, and it is all served with fried dumplings, cassava bread called Bammy and roasted breadfruit. This is a hugely popular dish which has cod fish meat.

-Jerk chicken is an immensely popular jerk meat dish, which the Jamaicans take pride in! It has travelled far and wide, impressing everyone with its moisture and flavors. One can even get a good Jamaican Jerk Chicken in Maryland now. All the authentic flavors and cooking styles are preserved.

-Curry Chicken comes across as a more Indian style chicken curry, which can be enjoyed with an assortment of Jamaican bread. The chicken is stewed in tomato-onion based gravy and then cooked to tenderness.

-Oxtail is typically Jamaican meat which contains meat from tails of cattle (real), and this dish includes Oxtail with beans. The Jamaican cuisine is incomplete without this meat.

-Curry Goat is a mutton curry, again influenced by the Indian subcontinent style of cooking mutton. The curry is spicy and full of flavors, which can be enjoyed with a rather bland tasting bread assortment, mainly roti, which is again an Indian bread.  The influence of the Indian style of cooking came to Jamaica with all the Indians coming over in the British imperialism era to work in the sugarcane industry. They brought their cuisine with them, which amalgamated with the local styles.

-Jerk Salmon is a jerked fish dish, which is again a staple for Jamaican cuisine. It is a spicy, glazed salmon, which is moist and full of flavor!

-A few other seafood dishes like shrimp and other fish are also common in the Jamaican cuisine, as it is an island, and it is obvious it will have a variety of seafood staples dishes. 

The Jamaican cuisine is so varied because of the variety of people who have come to the island and made it their home. The slow overlap of each other’s cooking and eating styles gave rise to the modern-day cuisine where is it tough to find out which portion of the recipe came from where. But the one thing that binds everything together is the amazing use of locally grown food, and food, which is abundantly available with ease. This makes the culture richer and more relatable. You can get good Jamaican food around you as well. There is a Jamaican restaurant in Maryland, which sells authentic food with all the food culture as if straight from Jamaica!