Eating Healthy and Affordably During Quarantine Part 3
Cultivating beans with a four-row cultivator, Courtesy of the New York Public Library
During antebellum period, Jamaica represented what historians Franklin Knight calls an exploitation society colony—the British made no attempt to populate the island with a British settlers or recreate British culture on the island. Instead the imported large numbers of enslaved Africans as their labor force and producers of food for the few white who ran the islands sugar industry. The majority of the imported slaves came from West Africa’s rice coat. In Jamaica, planters supplied slaves with weekly rations of salted fish and slaves agitated for the right to have and maintain small parcels of land as subsistence farms. Enslaved Africans in Jamaica raised among other items fowl, pigs, they also sowed, coconuts, rice, kidney beans, and gungo beans also called pigeon peas. Note: some use red kidney beans the way cooks in New Orleans use kidney beans in their red beans and rice. Over the years rice and peas, historically made with freshly cracked opened coconuts and milk extracted from the meat of the coconut. The rice and peas are seasoned with thyme, allspice, garlic, salt, pepper, scallions, and they are simmered in coconut milk until done. Vegans beware, some cooks had meat to the pot as seasoning. Traditionally Jamaican cooked made it on Sundays serving it with a variety of milks. Today it’s eaten on any day at various meals and it’s one of Jamaica’s signature dishes.
