When people ask me what I think about when I think about Jamaica, they expect me to say the beach. And yes, the sea is in there. But I am going to tell you the truth: I think about breadfruit.
Other people plan their trips home around Christmas, around carnival, around somebody's wedding. I plan mine around breadfruit season. The main season runs through the summer months, with a smaller bearing around the start of the year, and if you think I have not checked the tree situation before booking a flight, you do not know me at all.
I have eaten low-carb for years. I gave up rice. I gave up bread. I gave up festival, and if you know what festival tastes like, you know that was not a small sacrifice. But breadfruit? No. Everybody has one thing they will not put on the altar, and this is mine. Roasted, boiled, fried, plain, with a little salt, with a little oil, in soup, next to ackee. All of it. If you stranded me on a little island with one breadfruit tree, I would eat breadfruit every day for the rest of my life and wave at the rescue boats as they pass.
The love started, like most of my food stories, in Hamilton Mountain in St. Mary. My grand-aunt would roast breadfruit right over the open fire in her outdoor kitchen, turning it in the flames until the skin was charred black and the inside was steaming and soft. The smell of a breadfruit roasting over wood fire is one of the smells I would bottle if I could. That smell is a whole childhood. You crack the black skin open, cut a slice while it is too hot to hold, and understand immediately why the tree was worth carrying across an ocean.
Because it was carried, you know. The breadfruit is not originally ours. It came from the Pacific in 1793, brought in to feed the island, and Jamaicans did what Jamaicans always do with whatever lands here: we made it family. Today a yard with a good breadfruit tree is a wealthy yard, whatever the bank says.
So here is my advice if you are visiting in season. Find roast breadfruit. A cookshop, a roadside vendor, anybody roasting over real fire. Eat a slice hot, with a piece of fried fish if you are lucky. Then check your flight home and see if you can stay a little longer. I always try to.