The ackee, Blighia sapida, is a West African tree of the soapberry family, a relative of the lychee, the longan, and the rambutan, and like them it is eaten for its aril, the fleshy growth that surrounds the seed. The fruit is a leathery capsule of three lobes, yellow flushed with scarlet and about the size of a goose's egg. When it is fully ripe it splits along its three seams, and Jamaicans say it has 'yawned' or 'smiled'; inside, each of the three glossy black seeds sits on a cream-coloured aril with the consistency of firm fat, and that aril is the only part that is eaten. PROTA, the Plant Resources of Tropical Africa, gives the tree's natural range as Senegal to Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, and within that range it is commonly planted as a fruit tree and for shade.
The ackee is also poisonous, and the whole of its cookery is organised around that fact. The unripe aril, the seeds, and the pink membrane that joins the aril to the pod contain hypoglycin A, an unusual amino acid which, once the body has metabolised it, stops the liver making glucose when its reserves run out. The result is what Jamaica called the vomiting sickness: vomiting, then drowsiness, convulsions, coma, and too often death. C. H. Hassall and K. Reyle isolated hypoglycin A and B from the fruit in 1954. When the pod opens on the tree the toxin in the aril falls away rapidly, which is why an ackee is never picked closed, never forced open, and never cooked without its seeds and membranes removed and its cooking water thrown away. Julia Morton, whose Fruits of Warm Climates (1987) remains a standard account of the tree, notes that the danger was long misunderstood and blamed on the membrane alone or on overripe fruit. It is not only a Jamaican hazard: PROTA records that eating unripe arils has probably caused many cases of encephalopathy in children in Burkina Faso and neighbouring countries.
The tree has barely been domesticated. Morton found that it is grown from seed or by budding and shows very little variation, and PROTA lists orchards in Florida, Mexico, and Costa Rica, but in Africa it remains a wild or village tree. A survey of 240 farmers in Benin, published by Marius Ekué and his colleagues in 2010, found them sorting ackees by the size of the fruit, the taste of the aril, and the size of the seed, and judging large fruit to be commoner in planted and managed stands than in the wild; the authors read this as the beginning of a domestication. Jamaica tells its two kinds apart by the aril alone. 'Butter' ackee is soft and yellow and breaks down in the pot; 'cheese' ackee is firm and cream-coloured and holds its shape. Both are the same species, and they share one origin on this map.
The ackee crossed the Atlantic once, and the record of the crossing is unusually exact. The Hortus Eastensis, the catalogue of the botanic garden that Hinton East kept in the mountains of Liguanea above Kingston, lists 'The Akee', from Africa, introduced in 1778 by Dr Thomas Clarke, and adds in a footnote: 'This Plant was brought here in a Slave Ship from the Coast of Africa, and now grows very luxuriant, producing every Year large Quantities of Fruit; several Gentlemen are encouraging the Propagation of it.' Charles König, who described the tree for science in 1806, repeated that its seeds had come from the coasts of Guinea in 1778 on a ship engaged in the trade in enslaved Africans. Who carried them, the crew or the captives, the record does not say.
The story that William Bligh brought the ackee to Jamaica is widely repeated and has the journey the wrong way round. Bligh reached Port Royal with the breadfruit in February 1793, and the Jamaican government's own account records that in that year he took ackee plants from Jamaica to England. König named the genus Blighia in his honour in 1806, and the honour has been mistaken for an introduction ever since; Morton's Fruits of Warm Climates has Bligh bringing the tree in 1793 'to furnish food for the slaves'. By then it had been fruiting in Jamaica for fifteen years.
From Jamaica the tree went on to the other islands and to the mainland. Morton lists Trinidad, Haiti, and the Bahamas; the Atlantic coasts of Panama, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, where it was apparently carried by Jamaicans; southern Florida; Calcutta; and the Philippines, where it first fruited at Lamao in 1919. Nowhere did it become a food as it did in Jamaica. The Jamaican government states plainly that Jamaica is the only place where the fruit is widely eaten, and Trinidad outlawed the tree in 1900 after it had caused deaths. That is why this journey has two points and not more: everywhere else the ackee went, it stayed an ornament, a curiosity, or a hazard.
The modern traffic is in tins. Jamaica cans the arils in brine for Jamaicans abroad, and Belize and Haiti can them for export too. The United States banned the import in 1973, admitted the first shipments from Jamaican processors who could show that their fruit was ripe in 2000, detained them all again after a run of failed tests at the end of 2005, and has since readmitted them.
Ackee is the national fruit of Jamaica, and the Jamaican government names ackee and codfish as the national dish. The tree grows in yards and along roadsides across the island and fruits for most of the year, and a pot of boiled ackee folded through salt fish, salt pork, or callaloo is the island's defining breakfast. The canned arils, exported for Jamaicans in Britain, Canada, and the United States, are a substantial trade, and the American market is policed closely: the US Food and Drug Administration treats any ackee product containing more than 100 parts per million of hypoglycin A as adulterated, and admits only the firms on the 'Green List' of its Import Alert 21-11 without inspection.
In West Africa the ackee is a local food rather than a national one, and its importance is concentrated in the north of Benin and of Côte d'Ivoire. In the township of Toukountouna, in north-western Benin, Ekué and his colleagues found that 121 households produced more than nine tonnes of arils in 2003, dried and sold four-fifths of them, and earned nearly a fifth of their income from them, about as much as they earned from maize. Around Katiola, in northern Côte d'Ivoire, the arils are mostly eaten after drying in the sun. Elsewhere in its homeland the tree is valued as much for its soap, its timber, and its shade as for its fruit.
Historical Journey of Ackee
Dahomey & the Gold Coast — before 1778 CE
The ackee is a tree of West Africa, native from Senegal to Cameroon, and the record of people eating it begins only when it left. When its seeds reached Jamaica in 1778, the Hortus Eastensis noted that the inhabitants of Guinea served the aril at table either by itself or boiled in a broth or pottage, and that is still, in outline, how West Africa eats it.
It is not a food of the whole region. PROTA says plainly that the arils are not largely consumed in Africa, and on the Gold Coast, where the English name was most probably born, Morton found the fruit little eaten and the tree admired as an ornament and planted in villages for shade, whilst the Krobo use its green fruit, which lathers in water, as soap. The ackee matters most in the north of Benin and of Côte d'Ivoire. In a survey of five peoples of Benin published in 2010, food was the commonest reason that farmers gave for keeping the trees, and amongst the Otamari of the Atacora every one of them gave it. They eat the arils fresh; fry them in groundnut or palm oil; parboil them with salt; dry them in the sun for four days to keep and to sell; and put them into sauce in place of sesame or groundnuts, or grind the dried arils to a powder and stir it in for its oil. The Natemba name for the tree, foulama, means 'groundnut of trees'. In the township of Toukountouna, in the north-west, 121 households produced more than nine tonnes of arils in 2003 and earned nearly a fifth of their income from them.
None of this has given the ackee a named dish in its homeland, and the recipes on this point are ways of eating the aril rather than dishes with names of their own. Around Katiola, in northern Côte d'Ivoire, the arils are mostly eaten after drying in the sun, the same way that the sun-dried arils of northern Benin reach its markets.
The ackee reached Jamaica in 1778, and within fifteen years it was 'producing every Year large Quantities of Fruit'. The Hortus Eastensis, the catalogue of Hinton East's botanic garden in the mountains of Liguanea above Kingston, credits the introduction to Dr Thomas Clarke and records that the plant 'was brought here in a Slave Ship from the Coast of Africa'. By 1814 John Lunan's Hortus Jamaicensis could report that it 'succeeds in most parts of the island', and that the aril, fried or boiled, was eaten 'as marrow, or sweet-breads, or in soups'.
Its partner in the pot was salt cod. The plantations fed the people they enslaved on imported salt fish, and the fish they were sent was the worst there was. In the grading of the Newfoundland salt-fish trade, 'West-India fish' was, in the words of a writer of 1818, 'the refuse of the whole', and it was 'invariably sent for sale' to feed the enslaved people of the Caribbean. Boiled ackee folded through salt cod fried with onion, tomato, thyme, scallion, and Scotch bonnet became ackee and saltfish, which the Jamaican government names as the national dish. When the two were first cooked together is not recorded. Two foods of the slave trade, one carried from West Africa and one shipped down from Newfoundland, now make the island's defining breakfast.
The same boiled ackee goes with salt pork, as ackee and corned pork; into the curry that came to the island with the indentured labourers from India, the first of whom landed at Old Harbour Bay on 10 May 1845, as the curried ackee that Morton found eaten with rice; and into a pot of callaloo, the Jamaican amaranth, which is how the ital kitchen of Rastafari, which avoids meat, cooks it.
The danger is part of the cookery. The rules that every Jamaican cook follows, and that the Jamaican government repeats in its account of the national fruit, are the ones the chemistry now explains: gather only pods that have opened on the tree, clean each aril of its red fibre, and throw away the water in which the arils are boiled.
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