The Devil’s Gravy

In Jamaica, they make a sauce that’s pure evil.

And just to cap it off, they give this weapons-grade sauce the innocuous name of “gravy”. Essentially, it’s a device used for burning the taste buds out, or playing practical jokes on unsuspecting tourists.

The sauce was originally just used on oysters, but now it’s put on jerk, on grilled fish and meat, on curry, on steamed kallaloo or spinach, on rice dishes … the Jamaicans splash it on pretty much everything.

But here’s something that’s interesting.

We tend to forget that the Caribbean and the South of the USA are historically linked, via the old Atlantic triangular slave/cotton/sugar trade route. And in the Southern USA, there exists a condiment known as ’sport pepper’. Sport pepper is a similar sauce to Jamaican gravy, in that it consists of chillies in vinegar. But Jamaicans use Scotch Bonnet chillies, which are INSANELY hot, and they add pimento, thyme and garlic, as they do to many other dishes. Southern US sport pepper uses medium chillies in plain vinegar. And they don’t use rum bottles.

It should be noted that the term ’sport pepper’ is also used in Chicago, to describe mild pickled chillies, which are put on hot-dogs and sandwiches. But Chicagoans use the chillies themselves and discard the vinegar; in the South, they use the vinegar and just leave the chillies in the bottle.

So, here’s the recipe for …

Jamaican ‘Gravy’.

Ingredients.

* 2 spring onions, 6 garlic cloves, 2 cups Scotch bonnet chillies, 20 thyme sprigs, 1 tbsp whole pimento, white vinegar sugar, soy sauce.

Before you make the sauce, you’ll need an old rum bottle, with a little bit of rum left in it. (You know that almost empty bottle of rum that your grandmother has in the back of her liquor cabinet? Yeah, steal that).

To make the sauce, trim the shallots, chop them into very small pieces and put them aside in a bowl. Peel the garlic and cut each clove into about five pieces. Cut the chillies into quarters, top to bottom. Snip the thyme sprigs into 1cm lengths.

Next, stuff the chillies, shallot, garlic, thyme sprigs, and pimento into the rum bottle. Try to stuff them in evenly, so all of the ingredients are distributed nicely.

Next top up the bottle with boiling vinegar and a couple of dashes of soy sauce. Add a few spoons of sugar into the bottle and screw on the lid. Turn the bottle upside down and back a few times, then top up the bottle with a bit more boiling vinegar, so that the vinegar reaches the very top. Put the bottle in a dark place and leave it for a month or so.

This stuff is insane. It’s like Jamaican Tabasco … except hotter.