HOW DO you eat a cow? One steak at a time.
Patrons to this year's Jamaica 4-H Nyammins & Jammins Food Festival are in for a special treat 'spit roasted cow, complemented with red wine', say organisers.
How do you spit roast a cow? It is done in the fashion that our foreparents used, explained a press release from the festival. They dug a hole in the ground to keep the fire going and refined the art of jerking and slow cooking the meat. In the same vein, organisers of the Heroes Day (Monday, October 18, Catherine Hall, Montego Bay) festival will inject a blend of herbs and spices -- escallion, thyme, onion, pimento, garlic, black pepper, country pepper, and more into the meat, leave it to marinate for a day and then place it on a spit, over a pimento wood fire or pimento wood charcoal.
They will slowly turn the meat as it roasts. The slicing and eating will begin as the turning continues.
Sylvia Porteous, 4-H Home Economics Officer, and Desmond Thompson, 4-H National Properties Manager, are scheduled to take their turn over the giant spit, which has been secured through the generosity of Tankweld Ltd.
BEYOND THE SPIT
If red meat is not your thing, then IGL Blue Drawers Fiesta will have the kind of old-fashioned nyammins that's rarely seen these days. Whether you call it tie a leaf, dukunnu, or blue drawers, this is rib-sticking Jamaican food.
The A to Z of Jamaican Heritage describes dukunno as "a pudding that is wrapped in banana or plantain leaf and tied in little packages before cooking, hence its other name of tie-leaf. Dukunno is made in small individual portions and has also earned the name blue drawers because the leaves turn a blue colour when heated. The main ingredient is grated corn or cornmeal, although grated green banana or cassava flour is sometimes used. This is mixed with coconut milk, sugar and spices. Dukunno can be boiled or thrown directly into a fire and baked in the oven.
"The name dukunno betrays its origins as a West African dish. In the Twi language it means boiled maize bread and is still found in Ghana. (Another Twi-derived term, Conkie, is used in some of the other West Indian islands.) Dukunno's popularity is celebrated in an Anansi story of a fabulous dukunno tree".
For Monday s festival IGL and the St James 4-H Advisory Council will be taking blue drawers to another level. How about chocolate or breadfruit dukunno, sweet potato blue draws or even yam and shrimp tie a leaf?
In addition to spit roasted cow and blue drawers there will be jerk from Portland; Westmoreland curry; Trelawny yams and an array of other
dishes -- soups, crayfish, conch, fish tea mannish water, run dung, fried fish and bammy, cornmeal and potato pone, drops, grater cake, juices and more.
