One of our new Eat columnists, Bryan Washington, on a quintessentially Jamaican food that’s now found all over the world.
A Jamaican beef patty is an island’s history in the palm of your hand. All of its spices, triumphs, fluctuations and migrations. They’re minced. Lathered. Chewed between the flakiest of pastry crusts. The patty is a vehicle for deliciousness and a simulacrum of the nation’s rhythms, and your patty could be a late breakfast, or an early lunch, or a boozy midnight snack. You might eat yours in a paper bag. You could order four under the streetlights of a curbside pop-up. Or maybe, if you’re lucky, it’s simply pulled from your oven, tossed directly from your baking pan into the loaf of coco bread on your counter. For a moment, your only problem in the world is wishing you had three or four more.
For the uninitiated, a beef patty is a meat pie with a diced filling — oftentimes beef, but it can be an abode for any number of stuffings, including lobster, lamb, chicken, cheese or the Jamaican fruit ackee. This filling is layered in a suet-laden dough colored by turmeric. And while the dish has (mostly) avoided the Americanized “elevation” of so many immigrant cuisines, you’ll find beef patties in restaurants, across bar tops and behind convenience-shop counters wherever the Caribbean diaspora has made a home.
In Jamaica, you’ll find patties brandished across fast-food stands and convenience stores and walk-ups. They’re as reliably present as a burger with fries. And on trips to the island as a kid, I had patties in Kingston that were noshed on the go after crossing three lanes of rush-hour traffic on foot. But my first encounters with the patty were in Houston’s Alief neighborhood.
My family went to our usual Jamaican takeout spot only on Saturdays, but whether we ordered two dishes or 12, we always waited an hour for our food, queued behind a seemingly infinite backlog. The same soaps always droned from the television. The restaurant’s matron stood by the register, resting her elbow on the counter. After we made our order, she’d pat my head exactly once, less out of approval than to dismiss us as she disappeared into the kitchen indefinitely. These patties were obligatory: It mattered that I liked them as much as it mattered that I liked air or water. They just were. I sneaked bites from the bag on the way home, breaking off just enough crust to pretend that I hadn’t disturbed them at all.
The patty’s journey to fruition is as varied as Jamaica’s history.
Generally, though, there couldn’t be a faster food — you order a patty and poof, it’s in your hands. If you’re lucky, it’s crispy to the touch. If you’re luckier, you’ve taken a bite quickly enough for the steam to escape the pastry. And there’s a kick of spice present — enough Scotch bonnet for you to say, “Hunh,” but not enough to send you sprinting. But crucially, a beef patty is both deeply inconspicuous and entirely singular, a ritual taken for granted that you can’t help mourning once it’s gone.
The patty’s journey to fruition is as varied as Jamaica’s history; the island’s national motto is “Out of Many, One People,” adopted in 1962 after the island became independent of England. From the arrival of the Spanish (with their concurrent mayhem) and the British (with their concurrent mayhem) to the generations of Africans who were brought enslaved to the island, the mixing only furthered as the years passed. Indentured servitude and migration rhythms also brought Chinese, Indian, Jewish and other West Indian Caribbean dwellers to the island. And through the rhythms of migration and relocation, the island’s confluence of cultures and mores changed forms, taking what it was given and continually adapting.
The island’s foodways changed, too. As Enid Donaldson writes in “The Real Taste of Jamaica,” the predilections of those arriving cultures “have all helped to create the unique culinary blend which is Jamaican.” The world is so much smaller than we make it out to be. So maybe it’s hardly surprising that one of my life’s wonders has been finding beef patties all over the globe: I’ve ordered them, four beers in, from the bar stool of Patois, a Caribbean-Asian restaurant in Toronto; and I’ve dined on patties barefoot at seaside convenience stores in Playa del Carmen; and I even found patty variants on the menu of an entirely delightful Jamaica-themed queer bar (now defunct) in Osaka, where the microwaved dish I snarfed in fours as a child was served alongside umeshu.
But the biggest surprises arrive closest to home. Not long ago, my boyfriend and I passed through Cool Runnings in Houston, one of our first sit-down restaurant outings in the past few years. We were led into the dining room, a dance hall in repose, where streamers loomed above an empty stage. Our waitress inquired about our spice tolerances — insisting, with a smirk, that we be honest, for everyone’s sake — before she brought out a plate of brown stew chicken, another of ackee and salt fish and then two patties: one beef, one chicken.
Naturally, I had my “Ratatouille” flash of recognition: a momentary stunning into speechlessness. It had been a few years. But aren’t the dishes we hold dear so much more than whatever words we conjure for them? So when my boyfriend asked me about the first bite, I could only reply, blandly, but lovingly: It’s a patty.
Recipe: Jamaican Beef Patties
Bryan Washington is the author of “Lot” and “Memorial,” which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. He lives in Houston.
