A Glossary of Jamaican Food Words

Jamaican food vocabulary is small and it repeats constantly. Learn roughly twenty words and a menu stops being guesswork. Below are the ones you will actually hear, grouped by what they describe, with definitions short enough to read in a queue.

What Jamaican food words should you know before ordering?

Start with the words that name a whole dish or a whole category. These do the most work.

• Jerk: a seasoning and a cooking method, built on scotch bonnet and allspice, cooked slowly over wood.
• Escovitch: fried fish topped with a vinegar pickle of onion, carrot and pepper.
• Brown stew: meat browned in caramelised sugar, then simmered in the resulting dark gravy.
• Curry: Jamaican curry powder, heavier on turmeric and allspice than most blends, cooked into a gravy.

Three more cover most of what is left.

• Rundown: fish simmered in coconut milk until the milk breaks and reduces to an oily sauce.
• Ital: Rastafarian cooking. No meat, usually no salt, nothing processed.
• Soup: in Jamaica this means a substantial one-pot meal with provisions and dumpling in it.

That is most of a menu already. Seven words covering the majority of what a Jamaican kitchen actually cooks.

What do the Jamaican cooking words mean?

These describe process rather than product, and they turn up in conversation more than in print.

• Season up: to marinate, usually overnight, usually heavily.
• Browning: burnt sugar used as a colouring and flavouring agent in stews.
• Draw soup: a soup steeped gently rather than boiled hard.
• Nyam: to eat. A verb, neither polite nor impolite, simply direct.

The next three are about feeding people rather than cooking.

• Belly full: satisfied. The compliment a cook actually wants.
• Run the boat: to cook one big pot for everybody.
• Cook shop: a small neighbourhood kitchen selling cooked food to take away.

That last one is the name over the door here, and it carries a specific meaning. What a Jamaican cook shop actually is unpacks it.

Which Jamaican words describe heat and seasoning?

The pepper vocabulary is short and worth knowing before you order anything.

• Scotch bonnet: the standard Jamaican chile, hot and fruity, often cooked whole so it flavours without burning.
• Pimento: allspice. Berry and wood both go into cooking, and neither one is a bell pepper.
• Pepper sauce: a bottled condiment, usually scotch bonnet and vinegar, added a drop at a time.

The green side of the seasoning has its own words.

• Escallion: what Jamaicans call scallion or spring onion.
• Thyme: used in whole sprigs and pulled out later rather than chopped in.
• Season: as a noun, the wet green paste of aromatics rubbed onto meat before it cooks.

Six words and you can read almost any Jamaican recipe. Most of the rest is technique described in plain English.

What are the starch and side words?

Jamaican plates carry a lot of starch, and the starch has more names than anything else on the menu.

• Hard food: the boiled starches on a plate. Yam, green banana, dumpling, sweet potato.
• Ground provisions: root vegetables and tubers, the farming term for most of the above.
• Irish: Irish potato, said that way to separate it from sweet potato.
• Dumpling: boiled, fried or roasted, depending which one is meant.

The fried and pressed ones get their own names.

• Festival: a sweet, slightly crisp fried dumpling made with cornmeal.
• Bammy: a flatbread pressed from grated cassava, often soaked in milk and fried.
• Peas: beans. Kidney beans or gungo peas, almost never garden peas.

Two vegetables round it out.

• Cho cho: chayote, a pale green squash, usually steamed or stewed.
• Callaloo: a leafy green in the amaranth family, steamed with onion, thyme and pepper.

The starch vocabulary is bigger than the protein vocabulary for a reason. Ground provisions were what grew reliably and what fed people, so the language around them is precise in a way English food words are not.

Two of those have their own explanations worth reading. The full picture on yam, green banana and hard food covers the provisions, and how the Jamaican dumplings differ from each other sorts boiled from fried.

The peas question catches everybody. Why Jamaicans call the beans peas has the answer, and it is a language story rather than a food one.

What do people call the drinks and the sweets?

The drinks vocabulary is smaller and mostly self-explanatory once you hear it.

• Sorrel: a deep red drink made from dried hibiscus, ginger and spice.
• Peanut punch: peanuts blended with milk and spice into a thick, filling drink.
• Sky juice: shaved ice with syrup, sold from a cart.

The sweets are baked rather than iced.

• Bulla: a dense, dark, molasses-sweetened cake.
• Gizzada: a small tart filled with sweetened spiced coconut.
• Toto: a coconut cake, firmer and less sweet than it looks.

Peanut punch is the one people ask about most. How peanut punch is made and drunk goes further into it.

How do you order at a Jamaican counter without asking twice?

Name the protein, then the base, then the side. That order matches the way the food is assembled, and it is the sequence anybody behind a counter expects.

If you do not recognise a word, ask what it is rather than guessing. Nobody minds. The vocabulary is regional, not secret, and most of it has a one-sentence answer. Explaining the food is part of the job behind a counter.

Repeat the order back before you hang up or step away. Counter conversations move fast and the vocabulary is unfamiliar, and thirty seconds of confirmation saves a wrong container.

And do not translate everything into an American equivalent in your head. Calling festival a hush puppy gets you into the right neighbourhood and then misleads you about texture and sweetness.

One last note on spelling. Jamaican Patois is spoken far more than it is written, so the same word appears several ways in print. Cho cho, chocho and chayote are the same squash. Rundown and run dun are the same pot.

Learn the twenty words. The rest of the menu explains itself, and the second visit is far easier than the first. The counter is at 8 Oak Street, East Orange. For anything this list does not cover, call 973-310-1065.