A whole breadfruit roasted on the coals or over the open flame of a gas ring until blackened, then peeled, sliced, and eaten hot with butter, or fried the next day
Origin: Port Royal & Jamaica
From the journey of Breadfruit.
Every Jamaican knows the smell of a breadfruit roasting: set straight on the coals of a wood fire, or turned over the open flame of a gas ring in a town kitchen, until the skin is charred all over and the stem end steams. The black skin is peeled away, the core cut out, and the pale, fluffy flesh sliced and eaten hot with butter, or alongside ackee and saltfish at breakfast. What is left is sliced and fried the next morning. Breadfruit came to Jamaica as an instrument of slavery. West Indian planters lobbied Joseph Banks for the tree from 1772 onwards, and Hinton East of Jamaica wrote to him in 1784 that it would feed the enslaved with 'infinitely less labour' than the plantain; the planters, Elizabeth DeLoughrey observes, had no intention of eating it themselves. On 5 February 1793 HMS Providence reached Port Royal from St Vincent, and the Tahitian plants were distributed to the botanic garden at Bath, in St Thomas, to Spring Garden, and to estates across the island. The people they were meant to feed would not eat them for years, preferring the plantain, yam, and cassava they grew themselves, and breadfruit became a Jamaican staple only slowly, over the nineteenth century. Bligh's may not have been the first. Douglas Hall's reading of the island's records puts a 'breadfruit' among plants arriving in January 1786, but seeded and seedless breadfruit and the jackfruit were all called by overlapping names, and what arrived that year is not certain.
A mature breadfruit is heavy for its size, with a skin that has begun to show brown patches between the segments; a fruit that is soft to the touch is ripe and sweet, and better baked into a pudding than roasted.
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