Good Morning Jamaica

Across the island, people wake up to big, delicious meals

By Betsy Andrews

Photo: Landon Nordeman

"It's a mon t'ing," Holland says; it belongs to a seemingly endless category of foods valued for aiding virility. Reddish-brown with peanut skins, it is nutty, earthy, and sweet.

After the frenetic rhythm of Kingston, I'm curious to know more about the slower-paced, agrarian Jamaica where the roots of the rib-sticking morning meal lie. So I travel westward to St. Elizabeth parish, to visit the family of my friend Melissa Stephenson, who lives in Mount Vernon, New York. "St. Elizabeth is the breadbasket of the nation," she has told me. "Growing up, our lawn was scallion and thyme."

When Melissa's father, Delano Stephenson, a prominent St. Elizabeth farmer and businessman, and her cousin, Keisha Green, pick me up at my hotel in the morning, our first stop is M & D Grocery, where proprietor Delvin Powell is standing in his parking lot, stirring the steaming contents of an enormous cauldron set over a roaring fire.

"Soup ready?" a woman shouts from a car rolling by.

"No, mon," says Powell. He's just finished assembling the ingredients for his conch soup, which won't be ready to sell for another hour. Nevertheless, he offers me a spoonful. Loaded with fresh conch and flavored with scallion, thyme, and Scotch bonnets picked from St. Elizabeth's fields, it already tastes terrific.

Conch is not the only fresh seafood I sample this morning. St. Elizabeth is also a fishing community; curried or brown stew lobster and fish soup are common breakfasts here, along with escovitch fish, fried whole and topped with a vinegary sauce. They're all eaten with a cassava flatbread called bammy, which is made from scratch by women like Imogene Falconer, whose home we visit next.

The bespectacled Falconer had grated her cassava and let it sit overnight in a wicker bag pressed down with stones to leech out its poisonous juices. This morning she beats the grated root in a huge wooden mortar, then sifts it to attain a fine flour. Oneil, 30, the eldest of her three sons, begins to fry small whole snappers and to prepare the escovitch sauce, slicing onions, ginger, and chiles into a reduction of coconut milk and vinegar. A tart aroma fills the kitchen, while outside, Falconer smooths a fistful of cassava flour into a round mold set on a cast-iron plate over a wood fire. The heat binds and toasts the starchy flour into a chewy, wafer-thin bammy. She hands it to me. It's smoky and has a creamy, wheatlike flavor. I've eaten escovitch fish and bammy before, bought from a hawker in downtown Kingston. But I'm grateful now to know just how much work goes into its preparation. Falconer makes six dozen bammies every morning to sell to farmers who snatch them up on their way to the fields.

We take a drive across Delano's scruffy land along an oceanside cliff, where he yanks a tentacled cassava from the ground and plucks some melons. We visit various Stephensons in their homes surrounded by banana plants and enormous rosemary bushes. As night falls, we wander down to Treasure Beach, where a fishing boat called the Avatar II has anchored. A crowd has formed with trucks and coolers. Driftwood fires dot the beach. The boat's crewmen, their muscles taut from hauling nets, row ashore and dump their catch: jackfish, grunts, parrot fish, yellowtail snappers, barracuda. Within an hour, all the fish is sold. By morning, much of it will be fried, doused in escovitch, and wrapped in paper along with fresh-made bammy, to be purchased and eaten for breakfast in an open-air market, on a street corner, or on a waterfront somewhere in Jamaica, as the sun rises again.

See our guide to Jamaican breakfast ingredients »
See all the Jamaican breakfast recipes in the gallery »
See our guide to where to eat and where to stay in Jamaica »

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This article was first published in Saveur in Issue #142

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Comments (2)

by TGIRLSTT on 2011-11-09

Sorrel is NOT made from hibiscus flowers. Sorrel is a fruit native to the Tropics and grown throughout the Caribbean. The outer coverings of the seed of this fruit are used to make the delicious drink enjoyed especially at Christmastime in the islands. The taste is similar to that of hibiscus and the plants are related. But sorrel is a fruit unto itself. It is mostly red but new varieties are being cultivated - striped red and white and all white.

by NYERUBY on 2011-11-11

This article filled me with nostalgic joy. I grew up in a Jamaican immigrant community in NYC and ate such foods for special occasions in the US and almost every morning during summer visits to my grandparents. I even learned about my heritage from this article -- I've never known how bammy was made, and I learned that my hominy porridge has never worked because I didn't cook it long enough!

One of the things I always noticed about Jamaica vs the US was how much of the food people produced themselves and bought in markets as opposed to 'supermarkets', even in the big cities. Behind my grandparents' house in Kingston were ackee, orange, mango, and breadfruit trees which we ate from daily, and friends of my grandparents raised goats, chickens, doves and even pigs.

At any rate, thank you very much for this lovely, warm, respectful and mouthwatering article.