Jerk chicken is chicken prepared in the Jamaican jerk style, dry rubbed or wet marinated in a hot spice mixture built around allspice and Scotch bonnet peppers, both native to Jamaica, along with ingredients such as thyme, scallion, garlic, ginger and cinnamon. The technique traces back to the island's Taino and Arawak inhabitants and was developed further by Jamaican Maroons, communities of formerly enslaved Africans who fled into the island's mountains after Jamaica's 1655 invasion and adapted Taino methods of smoking and preserving meat over pimento wood fires. The style spread from home cooking and roadside jerk pans into a defining feature of Jamaican cuisine and, through Caribbean diaspora communities, into restaurants around the world; in 2015 Jamaica trademarked Jamaica Jerk as a geographical indication to protect the name, the first such registration by an English-speaking Caribbean country.
Facts
Disputed
Origin Period, From (Year)Century-level approximation only: the source traces the jerking technique to Jamaica's indigenous Arawak and Taino peoples with no fixed date, and to the 17th-century Jamaican Maroons who adopted and intermingled with them; 1600 marks that century, not the technique's considerably earlier indigenous origin, which the source leaves undated. Classification
Dietary SuitabilityContains Meat or Poultry 1 Origin Region Connections
Associated With
In Cuisine
Uses Ingredient
Sources
1. Jerk Chicken (Wikipedia)
WikipediaWikipedia lead paragraph, first sentence
Jerk is a style of cooking native to Jamaica, in which meat is dry-rubbed or wet-marinated with a hot spice mixture called Jamaican jerk spice.
Wikipedia lead paragraph, second sentence (Maroon adoption clause)
The technique of jerking (or cooking with jerk spice) originated from Jamaica's indigenous peoples, the Arawak and Taino tribes, and was adopted by the descendants of 17th-century Jamaican Maroons who intermingled with them.
entity record, Name (dietary-suitability)
Name: Jerk Chicken
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