Jamaican patties are a golden, flaky pastry wrapped around a spicy filling, and they are the most popular convenience food in Jamaica. Ground beef is the classic, though patty shops also sell chicken, goat, pork, lobster, shrimp, vegetable, and even ackee, Jamaica’s national fruit.
They come out of the patty shop oven hot, into a paper bag, and get eaten straight from it on the way somewhere. For most Jamaicans that means lunch at school or at work, one or two, and it is filling enough to do the job. Cheap, everywhere, and substantial enough to work as breakfast or dinner just as easily.
The patty is a product of colonialism and migration, which is exactly why it tastes like nowhere else.
The British brought the Cornish pasty. Indian indentured labourers brought cumin and curry seasoning. The scotch bonnet was already there, indigenous to the island. Jamaicans took those three things and made something that belongs to them.
Almost every food culture has arrived at a version of the same idea. South Asians have the samosa, Puerto Ricans the pastelillos, Greeks the spanakopita, the English the Cornish pasty. All of them are filling, compact and easy to eat with one hand. Across the Caribbean, the patty is the street food everything else is measured against.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, Jamaicans moved to the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom to work as nurses, hospital orderlies and home health aides. The recipes went with them.
Patty shops followed the communities. They appeared across the New York metropolitan area, and in British cities with large Caribbean populations like London, Birmingham and Manchester. In the UK they have since spread well beyond those communities into mainstream shops.
You can now find a patty wherever there is a Caribbean community, which by this point is most places.
A regular patty is a full meal, roughly the size of a folded hand.
The same pastry and filling also gets made in bite-sized portions, called cocktail patties. Jamaicans serve those at parties, funerals, christenings and anything else where people are standing up with a drink. If you are catering, they are the easier format.
We stock patties with beef, chicken and vegetable fillings, frozen and ready to bake at home. They come out of the oven close enough to a Jamaican patty shop that people who grew up on them tell us so.
Because they are frozen, patties are part of our Take & Bake range, which is home delivery within Greater Sydney only. Order by midday Monday for Thursday delivery.
Shop Jamaican patties and frozen in our store!
Bake, do not microwave. The pastry is the point, and a microwave turns it soft.
Beyond that there are no rules. Jamaicans eat patties on their own, in a coco bread, or with a Ting. If you want the full effect, put some music on while they are in the oven.
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