Belcour Preserves Ltd

23/06/2025

What does your bun say about you?

Send this post to that person who has a strange way of eating Jamaican bun... And remember that this is a fictional piece of work; any resemblance to a real person is purely coincidental 😉

*The last combo with bun and pepper sauce is a joke - try this combo at your own risk! 🥵

🇯🇲

11/05/2025

Like many, Mother’s Day has a special place in my heart. My family was in the Red Stripe business so food and hospitality were always an integral part of the family dynamic growing up, meals and memories of those times go hand in hand. My mother in particular was a very creative cook and did her best to provide delicious and varied meals from around the world. When she passed, I found boxes of her hand written recipes in the attic, which I then turned into the Belcour Cookbook. The book is a love letter to her memory and her love of cooking.
I could not have written the Belcour Cookbook without the help of a long line of women in my family; my grandmother Dorothy “Mimi”, my father’s godmother Gan Ma, and my aunt Linda, all of whom taught me the value of family and what it means to share love and tradition through food. Sunday lunches for our large and boisterous family were often spent at my grandparents’ home, filled with laughter and sharing stories. The tradition has been passed down from one generation to the next, and continues with each iteration of our family.
People often tell me that my Belcour Cookbook is a homage to my family. It is. It is also a celebration of the importance of sharing a meal with the people you love, and I want to share that love with everyone.
To all those who show love through food, Happy Mother’s Day!

08/05/2025

Choosing the name of our company the use of the word preserve was quite intentional. We wanted to preserve fruit and vegetables the old-fashioned way because we believe in eating food free of preservatives would help preserve our health. Using less pesticides preserves our soil and allows our bees to thrive.

22/04/2025

Every day should be Earth Day.

18/04/2025

Beginner-friendly, step by step guide on how to make ham. Boasting traditional Jamaican flavours, the Belcour Ham Glaze is our go-to for ham, but did you know it tastes great on roast chicken too?

Wishing you all a lovely and rejuvenating Easter from us at Belcour.

30/03/2025

“Manna from heaven” is not a gift you got that you didn’t know where it came from, its sugar from a tree.

Or maybe a tree that could represent one of those “pots of gold” you find you’re sitting on, another famous fable.

Plants and trees, like the breadfruit and others like Manna, are right here on earth and maybe a part of that “gold” of food sustainability.

Manna is a sugar substitute, that comes from the sap of a tree, with health giving properties and needs little processing. Only some people who live in “Manna Land” in Sicily, know the traditional way of how to grow and process to extract the sugar from it and they are dying out carrying with them this knowledge.

The benefits of the Manna tree and trees like breadfruit are many. In additional to feeding us, trees provide us with oxygen and nutrients essential for our survival. Food sustainability is even more important faced with more fires and drought, due to the ever increasing effects of the climate crisis.

Waiting for Manna to fall from heaven is probably not a good strategy and Manna is not a panacea, but it can potentially reduce a country’s dependency on food and fuel.

Manna is also a good example of the need to preserve ancestral knowledge, which is of vital importance to food sustainability, both globally and locally.

Human beings just might need to rely on the traditional knowledge and plants to feed us and keep us healthy.

It's mentioned 17 times in the Bible and was harvested in the Mediterranean for more than a millennium. Now, a farmer is reviving this ancient "superfood".

28/03/2025

I never expected to find a treasure trove of medicinal herbs right in my garden. Thanks to Donna and Coli, Belcour 'herbologists', I had a day full of learning about common herbs that Jamaicans have used traditionally for different health purposes.

We were only able to show some of plants we found in this video. It was quite eye-opening to see that plants that can potentially heal us from so many diseases and maladies are growing all around us. The concerning fact is however, that while we are becoming increasingly dependent on pills and Western Medicine to treat and cure us, tradional remedies exist, but the knowledge of them is being lost.

Do you recognize any of the herbs in this video? Do you know of other medicinal herbs like these, or any other uses for them that aren't mentioned here? Let us know in the comments below 👇

⚠️ PLEASE NOTE ⚠️ that we are not healthcare professionals, and are not suggesting that these herbs be consumed in place of treatment recommended by a healthcare professional. This video is purely for educational purposes, to preserve and share Jamaican herbal lore. Please DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH and consult your doctor before incorporating these plants into your healthcare regime.

21/03/2025

In 2010, I bought a big pot for J$5,000. I was making some tomato chutney and marmalade at the time and needed to do more than the dozen bottles that I could make in a soup pan. The larger pot allowed me to make five dozen cases at a time, which I sold at fairs or gave away at Christmas. I didn’t know then that this would be a stepping stone to developing a business. Indeed that wonderful big pot helped us grow the business from stove-top to supermarket shelves.

Other important acquisitions were a super blender known as the “Big Mama,” and a 10-frame honey spinner.

The “Big Mama” was primarily used for blending roasted scotch bonnet. The grinding of peppers was difficult to do in batches in our small blender, as the less you handle the pepper the better. Grinding up a large quantity of anything is not a problem for the Big Mama however, which simplified one of the arduous steps in the making of the pepper sauce. We no longer use the Big Mama in manufacturing, but it still comes in handy to make juice, coconut milk and bisques at home.

I think what makes our sauces and condiments delicious is the addition of honey to ”round up” the flavor. In the beginning, to harvest honey, we would gather in the evening when the bees were asleep and drain the honey through a muslin cloth. This process took so long that we would become drunk from all the honey we ate. One day, a kind woman asked me if I would like her two-frame spinner as her husband was allergic to bees. Naturally I said yes, and this started us on the journey to becoming real bee farmers. Not long after, I applied for a beekeeping grant, and was able to purchase a 10-frame electric honey spinner. With this, we could reap buckets of honey at a time.

These three pieces of machinery helped to move our cottage industry to the next level. Throughout history, advances in machinery, science, and technology have changed the world. My big pot did not change the world but these tiny improvements in machinery changed our business. Can you imagine then what giving each child a computer could do for their education?

08/03/2025

On International Women’s Day, we celebrate two women who have made significant contributions to food sustainability.

Jamaican born Mary L McLaughlin who started the Trees that Feed Foundation that is planting 1000s of breadfruit trees in tropical countries around the world.

https://youtu.be/ZqJ8DN4e6ek?si=ngxDh02hXxGwoXe_

Dr Wangari Maathai Nobel Laureate who started tree planting by women as a vehicle to social and economic empowerment and environmental sustainably.

https://youtu.be/koMunNH1J3Y?si=1WKp-lL3R6PjSm98

To commemorate and honor the life and work of Professor Wangari Maathai, the Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF) opened Forest Day 5, one of the most ...

14/02/2025

Wishing you a lovely Valentine's from us at Belcour Preserves. 🍯🌶️

30/01/2025

TBT. Wow most of us are still part of our team working with Belcour and helping to build our brand 15 years later! So grateful to everyone and their love support and hard work. We are so blessed to have you still here, still creating, keeping the quality consistent and the dream alive.

29/01/2025

Chinese New Year means jiaozi season at Belcour, but however you celebrate, we wish you a joyful and prosperous Year of the Snake. May your seeds bear fruit, your prayers come true, and your cooking become ever more delicious 😉🧧🙏

🐍 #春节快乐 #新年快乐

27/01/2025

Love to get these messages from people. Yes that’s a really good recipe in the Belcour Cookbook and there are a lot of good ones, if I say so myself. I use my own cookbook regularly.

22/01/2025

Brown lentils, a recipe from the Belcour Cookbook on page 245. A delicious vegetarian meal served with white rice, a fresh green salad and some Belcour Pepper Jam.
NB you can use regular onions if you don’t have red onions.

22/01/2025

In December of 2005, twenty years ago, I collected some recipes from the boxes of recipes my mother had left. I bound them and printed 25 copies and gave them to all the women in my family and a few girl friends as Christmas presents.
I asked that if they used the recipes and give me some feedback. The book was replete with spelling mistakes, important omissions like eggs in cakes, non-specific quantities like a pack of chicken. That book had no pretty photos except the one of us having one of our “girls lunches” at Linda’s house.
This tradition and the memories of my mother, and our family lunches at our grandparent’s house, Bamboo Pen, was actually the inspiration for the book. Getting together for these lunches is still a family tradition and I believe part of the “glue” that keeps our family together.
I had no idea that this spiral bound 2005 book would spawn the Belcour cookbook which I eventually published in 2015.
It’s gratifying and somewhat annoying that after all the effort of making the hard copy Belcour Cookbook, that many of my relatives still use the old spiral bound book! They tell me it’s because over the years they have made their edits on it! And they don’t want to mess up the “pretty” hardcover book.
So another ten years have passed and I’ve decided to publish my second book, which I am currently working on because they are some good recipes I left out, like Claire’s Cake, and Ga Ma’s recipe for “Lion’s Head” a Chinese classic that I use quite often now. I’m am in the process of testing and collecting the ones I think are worth publishing. With some of my originals and more anecdotes.
My working title is Belcour cookbook, “Second Course” as our son Daniel suggested, after hearing my less appealing “what left. I will of course go back to my cousins, aunts, sisters and friends for their edits of the 2025 spiral bound prototype I shall give them. I’m hoping it won’t take me another 10 years to publish my second “real” book.
I often ask myself why in God’s name would I do another cookbook, knowing the effort the first one took? The answer is, I can’t help it, a cook cooks, a painter paints. And why would I tell you in advance ? The answer again is simple, I am speaking it into being.
My husband Michael said about the first one that “I had birthed a baby”, because it took nine months to make. The thing is you forget about the pain of childbirth and go ahead and have another, if you can.
Michael also said I had “jumped out the plane of self-publishing without a parachute”, but if I had looked at it that way, I would never have gotten on the plane. So I want to encourage anyone who is trying to create a body of work, be it writing a book, a play, or creating some music, to go ahead get on the plane. Life would be very dull if we didn’t take the risk of giving voice to our creative expressions. I guess I should caution, remember the parachute, but I prefer as Churchill famously said, “damn the torpedos full steam ahead”.
I am grateful that of the 2000 books I published I have 264 left. I am grateful that people like it and use it. I believe that in spite of AI, and the Internet, books and all expressions of creativity are still important. Just for god sake replace those spiral bound books with the newer 2015 hard copy please, but you can scribble all over the 2025 prototype of “Second Course” if you want.

20/01/2025

Doing the rounds in Montego Bay checking Belcour’s distribution. Progressive Supermarket in Fairview

16/01/2025

16/01/2025

I think Jamaica’s mirepoix is : thyme, scallion and scotch bonnet. What do you think Jamaica’s mirepoix is?

They're called "humble beginnings" for a reason. The foundation of so many of the world's greatest dishes—from chicken fricasse to jambalaya—is merely a group of un-fancy vegetables that disappear, practically or literally, once they have performed their part.

15/01/2025

Love to get these messages endorsing our Belcour Honey Mustard Hot Pepper Sauce. I’ve given samples to it from the Specialty Food Show in NY to Supermarkets and I can always tell a chef or someone who knows food because they always love it. I call it our “Chef’s Sauce” because I’ve never met a chef who didn’t love it. Why? Because it has that roasted peppers and garlic so it enhances everything you cook or eat. I know that’s boasting, but try it and let me know.