Two things immediately spring to mind when you hear the word Jamaica: Bob Marley’s reggae and jerk.

Visit this Caribbean island and you’ll catch Marley’s tunes everywhere you go. Genuine jerked food, on the other hand, is something you’ll need to seek out.

Still, find it you must. “When you come here, you have to have jerk,” says Donovan Campbell, the Jamaica-born former executive chef at Sandals Grande Riviera in Ocho Rios, 112 km east of Montego Bay. Campbell left Jamaica in August 2011 and is currently the executive chef at the Culinary Academy of Las Vegas.

Campbell grew up in Hanover parish, which partly encompasses the resort town of Negril. He remembers the first time he tried jerk. He was about nine. His mother came home from a party with a foil package of zesty leftover barbecued jerk chicken and pork.

“My sister and I, we ate and cried, ate and cried, ate and cried,” says Campbell, smiling and shaking his head at the memory. “It was spicy—we’d run and get ice water. We ate so much jerk that night, it didn’t matter what amount of water we’d drink, the spiciness wasn’t going away. We actually opened up a can of condensed milk and licked it out of our hands, just to get [the] sweetness.”

Jerk’s precise origins are murky, just as the derivation of its name is debatable—it’s either a twist on charqui, the Spanish word for dried meat, or a reference to jerking, the motion of poking holes into the meat to fill with spices. The name is now used to refer to the cooking technique, the flavouring and the resulting dish.

The technique originated in the 1700s between the indigenous Taino people and the Maroons, runaway African slaves who hid in the hills to evade recapture by their British masters. Members of these groups intermarried and melded their methods for cooking the wild boars that roamed the region. A distinct combination of spices was used to preserve and flavour the pork, which was slowly smoked on a grate made with sticks of green pimento wood. Jamaica’s modern jerk shacks still use the island’s native pimento trees or sweet wood for kindling or commercially made lump charcoal.

Seasonings in jerk marinade usually include the locally grown, infernally hot Scotch bonnet pepper, vinegar, salt, thyme and jerk’s defining flavour, pimento, better known as allspice. Some cooks choose to add ginger, onion, nutmeg, cinnamon, rum, mint and even soy sauce, but the berry of the island’s native pimento tree remains the essential ingredient.

Campbell prefers a wet marinade to dry jerk seasoning because, “the vinegar cooks it, the salt cures it.”

Despite its long history, jerk wasn’t widely popular locally until about 40 years ago. That’s when it really caught on in Boston Bay, in the parish of Portland, 115 km east of Ocho Rios.

“There’s a ‘jerk’ dish on every menu in every single restaurant in Jamaica,” says Kasey Bourne, chairman of the Portland Jerk Festival, held in the city of Port Antonio. According to Virginia Burke, author of the cookbook Eat Caribbean, it was the Rastafarians’ refusal to eat pork that inspired cooks to branch out to chicken—now the most popular form of jerk. These days, you can find jerk fish, seafood, sausage, tofu and even breadfruit and plantain.

This island specialty didn’t hit the international radar until the 1980s. Bourne says there are three reasons why jerk seized the global imagination: Jamaica’s cultural impact on the Western world through its musicians and athletes, increased tourism that brought cruise ship passengers into jerk-rich Port Antonio and jerk’s monster kick. “People remember spicy food,” he says.

Commercially made jerk is not generally that tongue-searing. It’s not the heat units in the Scotch bonnet peppers but the dark, intoxicating blend of spices that sends aficionados into orbit. The spiciness of the jerk is cooled down by its mild side dishes, which, Campbell insists, should be festival bread, a deep-fried flour and cornmeal dumpling, along with “rice and peas” (rice and red kidney beans cooked in coconut milk).

Anna-Kay Tomlinson, owner of Miss T’s Kitchen, a popular eatery in Ocho Rios, says moistening your lips and eating brown sugar will take away any lingering sting.

These days, most Jamaican resorts make jerk available to their guests. At Montego Bay’s Secrets Wild Orchid Resort, you can buy it from a fellow who cooks it off the premises and strolls the grounds shouting, “Jerky! Jerky!” 

When Campbell made his delicious jerk-style chicken and pork at Sandals in Ocho Rios, he marinated the meat for several days, seared it on a grill, then roasted it in the oven for 15 minutes. He admits, however, the resort’s spicing was tempered to the tourist palate.

“Every now and then, we’d get that guest who came in and said, ‘Listen, man, I want me some real jerk, y’understand?’” says Campbell. “That’s when we added the extra pepper to it, giving it that real Jamaican kick.”

Authentic jerk used to be cooked on wood slats over charcoal, then covered and smoked into submission for hours. However, because this time-consuming procedure doesn’t suit every resort or restaurant, many use grills or ovens instead. But the key to perfect jerk is seasoning, marinade and that particular smoking process.

When Campbell is back home in Jamaica and jonesing for the real deal, he goes to Scotchies (found in both Ocho Rios and Montego Bay). It’s an open-air establishment where the meat is cooked in a traditional pit out back. Other equally informal eateries can be found all over Jamaica and private roadside vendors are a common sight. These casual cooks prepare chicken (and sometimes pork, sausage or shrimp) on a wire rack set on top of a steel oil drum that’s been cut in half and fuelled with pimento wood.

The cheap, spicy street food runs about US$4 for a quarter-chicken. While some jerk purists won’t call this real jerk, but “pan chicken” with jerk sauce on it, it’s still well worth a taste. Such ultra-casual eateries embody Jamaica in a nutshell. On this sun-soaked, cash-strapped island, unforgettable experiences pop up from humble roots.

Take Campbell, for instance. As a kid, he used to slather the jerk he bought with soothing ketchup and devour it with “hard dough” (soft white) bread. Now, he makes his own jerk products—Donovan’s Jerk Marinade and Donovan’s Jerk Marmalade—which will be in U.S. supermarkets later this summer.

Ask him what else goes well with Jamaica’s most famous dish and he’ll tell you, “a nice cold beer,” with an island lilt in his voice. “And that’s it. Jerk is very, very simple.”