Jamaica Food Collection

Jamaican cooking announces itself with smoke. Jerk begins as a wet rub — scotch bonnet, pimento berry, thyme, scallion, ginger and a little brown sugar — worked into pork or chicken and left overnight. It is then cooked low over pimento wood, the branches doing as much work as the spice, until the outside chars and the inside stays wet.

The technique is older than the recipe. It travelled with the Maroons into the island's interior, where meat had to be preserved and cooked without announcing a fire, and it survives now in the drum-pan grills at the roadside, the smoke rising long before the sign comes into view.

Ackee and saltfish is the national dish and the island's clearest lesson in resourcefulness: a soft yellow fruit that must be picked exactly when it opens, sautéed with rehydrated salt cod, onion, tomato, thyme and pepper until it looks like scrambled eggs and tastes like nothing else.

Around it sits the Sunday table. Oxtail simmered with butter beans until the sauce turns glossy. Curried goat, dark and fragrant, made in a big pot because half of it is for other people. Brown stew chicken, browned in sugar first. Rice and peas cooked in coconut milk with a sprig of thyme and a whole scotch bonnet lifted out before it bursts.

Much of Jamaica's best eating happens standing up. The patty — flaky, turmeric-yellow, filled with spiced beef, chicken, shrimp or callaloo — is breakfast, lunch and the thing you buy for the bus. Festival, sweet fried dough shaped like a small baton, arrives beside fried fish and asks for nothing else.

Escovitch fish comes whole and crisp under pickled peppers, carrot and vinegar, a coastal classic in Port Royal and Hellshire. Fried breadfruit stands in for chips. Bammy, made from cassava, is soaked in coconut milk and fried soft. Pepper shrimp, red and blazing, are sold by the bag at Middle Quarters and eaten with a stack of napkins.

Saturday belongs to soup. Red peas soup thick with spinners, mannish water, chicken foot soup, and corn soup ladled from a pot on a Friday night as the sound system warms up. Callaloo is steamed down with onion and thyme, closer to the African greens it descends from than to spinach.

Run down reduces mackerel in coconut milk until the milk splits and turns rich — a rustic, patient dish from the days before refrigeration. Stew peas carries kidney beans, salted meat and dumplings in one bowl. Roast yam and saltfish, cooked over an open fire at the roadside, is the island's true yard food.

Jamaica drinks as well as it cooks. Blue Mountain coffee grows in the mist above 900 metres and is among the most sought-after beans on earth — smooth, mild, and famously expensive off the island. Ting is grapefruit soda, cold and sharp. Sorrel, steeped from hibiscus with ginger and pimento, belongs to Christmas.

Then rum, and rum punch: fruit juice, sugar, lime and enough overproof to make the room warmer. Rum cake soaks for weeks. Toto and gizzada finish the meal with coconut — one dense and dark, the other a pinched tart of spiced coconut that tastes exactly like the island's sweet side.

Our Jamaica collection gathers those dishes — jerk chicken, jerk pork, jerk sausage, ackee and saltfish, oxtail, curried goat, brown stew chicken, rice and peas, patties, festival, escovitch fish, fried breadfruit, bammy, pepper shrimp, callaloo, run down, stew peas, corn soup, roast yam and saltfish, coleslaw, toto, gizzada, banana fritters, rum cake, sorrel, Ting, Red Stripe, rum punch and Blue Mountain coffee — into one illustrated composition drawn with the colour and generosity of the Jamaican table.

Every Jamaica piece is printed and shipped through our Etsy shop: posters, aprons, blankets, T-shirts, sweatshirts and tote bags for anyone who keeps scotch bonnet in the freezer, argues about the right way to season oxtail, or knows which patty shop still has the good ones at four o'clock.