jerk seasoning

Jamaica, where pork has been jerked at least since the middle of the seventeenth century, the word itself, by Cassidy's account, an English form of a Spanish word from the Quechua of South America; a seasoning of ground Jamaican pimento, hot pepper, black pepper, scallion, thyme, nutmeg, cinnamon and salt, used as a rub or, with soy sauce, oil and vinegar, as a marinade

Pit cooking brought to the island by African hunters enslaved by the British, who quite possibly took up the seasoning of the native Arawak, above all their chile peppers; first recorded in the mid-eighteenth century during the Maroons' guerrilla wars with England; kept for a time to Maroon Town in the Blue Mountains of Portland, a former Maroon stronghold, then carried down the mountain to the jerk pits of Boston Bay near Port Antonio and on across the island

Jerk was kept by people who had freed themselves: Benghiat writes that the method, probably learned from the island's Indigenous people, was preserved by the Maroons, formerly enslaved by the Spanish and joined by people who escaped slavery under the English, and that they kept it secret until it reached the festive dinners of the nineteenth century. It began as preservation, the pork slathered with a seasoning heavy in salt and peppers, wrapped in leaves and buried in a pit of hot stones or grilled for twelve to fourteen hours over green wood, the way M. G. Lewis described a pig dressed in the true Maroon fashion in his journal of 1834. Part of it is still kept: the early Maroons used another wood and herbs whose whereabouts their descendants will only point towards in the hills, and when Zora Neale Hurston hunted wild boar with the Accompong Maroons, the meat went to the hunters' families and friends and was never sold. What travelled is the open half, jerked chicken and fish at roadside stalls across the island. This is not simply a seasoning: it is a method that freedom kept, and it has never been handed over whole.