ackee

West Africa, likely Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire; Blighia sapida, carried to Jamaica in the eighteenth century on the slave routes, its Jamaican name from the Akan and Twi ankye

West Africa to Jamaica by the transatlantic slave trade, becoming the national fruit; taken from Jamaica to Kew by Captain Bligh in 1793 and named Blighia after him; barred from the United States by an import alert from 1973 until 2000

Ackee and saltfish is Jamaica's national dish, an African fruit with European salt cod, the plantation economy on one plate. The naming tells the rest. The everyday word is African, ankye in Twi, carried across with the people who knew the tree. The botanical name is Blighia sapida, after Captain William Bligh, who shipped specimens to Kew in 1793: the fruit is scientifically named for the Englishman who took it away rather than for anyone who brought it. Then the United States shut it out for twenty-seven years, an import alert in 1973 over hypoglycin A, widened in 1993, lifted only in 2000. The toxin was never the problem. Hypoglycin is concentrated in the unripe fruit and collapses once the pod opens on the tree, which is precisely when Jamaican cooks have always picked it. The safety rule the FDA finally certified was the harvesting rule Jamaica already had. Twenty-seven years of exclusion for knowledge that was never missing, only unrecognised.