Pigs, Portland Parish and the evolution of charqui

Tilting back his trilby as Tilbury dockyard came into view, the celebrated calypsonian Lord Kitchener sang sunnily that London Is The Place For Me. But as his fellow countrymen shivered down the gangplank of the Empire Windrush into a midsummer pea-souper; the rubble, rationing and rampant racism that awaited them in the ‘mother country’ must’ve seemed a world away from the crashing waves of Boston Bay and the perfumed wood smoke from it’s famous jerk pits. Kitchener’s calypso beats, a sound which would electrify London’s underground dance scene, may’ve found it’s first footing in the UK on that momentous June day, but the Caribbean culinary culture that accompanied the newcomers didn’t curry favour with Londoners’ and their war-torn tastebuds quite as fast.

Still, 75 years after that first flowering of post-war migration, few people in London have managed to successfully recreate the heat, history or chutzpah of the Caribbean kitchen. A food culture that stretches back two thousand years to the Arawaks who settled in Jamaica from Peru and introduced the joys of charqui, a dry-curing process that turned wild boar and their porcine pals into jerky or 'jerk’. Spooling through the centuries, the amalgamation of West African cooking techniques in the 1600s gave greater scope to what would become Jamaica’s national dish. The Maroons, escapees from barbaric enslavement in the sugar trade, took refuge in the Blue Mountains where they cooked their quarry buried in fire pits to avoid detection from the plantations owners below. After emancipation, the Maroons’ jerk pits came down from the mountains and established an epicurean epicentre in Jamaica’s Portland Parish on the north-east tip of the island.

Boston Bay is now a Graceland for jerk aficionados and Uton Burke, who set up Mickey Jr’s Jerk Center, is it’s Elvis. Uton’s grandfather was one of the first 'jerkmen’ to truly harness the culinary alchemy of the mountains and set up shop on Portland’s commercial coast. Mastering the balance of fire and smoke is key, as is the blending of pimento, wild coffee and sweetwood, whose branches double as latticed grilling racks and cooking fuel. The heady marinade or ‘rub’ traditionally consisted of bird pepper, pimento and thyme but has since been adapted to include cinnamon, nutmeg, garlic, ginger and Scoville scale superhero - the scotch bonnet pepper.