Courtesy of the New York Public Library, Circa 1893
By one estimate, “80 percent of British imports of Gold Coast slaves went to Jamaica, the largest British sugar-producing region in the eighteenth century.” In Jamaica, planters supplied slaves with weekly rations of salted fish and set small parcels of land aside for their slaves to cultivate produce and raise animals on Sundays. Slaves in Jamaica managed to raise fowl, pigs, vegetables, and rice. What slaves did not use to supplement their rations, they sold on Sunday, the traditional market day and a free day for slaves. With their earnings they purchased salted beef or pork. They then combined the meat received as rations and purchased at market with produce from their gardens to prepare a spicy creolized stew they called oglios, or pepper-pot.
