Belcour Preserves Ltd

31/10/2024

A lunch staple at Belcour, perfect for when you want a healthy dose of leafy greens that's scrumptious. Serve with Jamaican sides like breadfruit, green banana, dumplings or rice. The full recipe can be found in the Belcour Cookbook, and on our website: https://belcourpreserves.com/recipes/salt-fish-and-mixed-vegetables-with-belcour-pepper-sauce/

22/10/2024

Beauties of Belcour 🌸
Now who can guess the name of the first flower?

18/10/2024

Jamaica, yes, we’re more than a beach.

The Frankfurter Buchmesse (Frankfurt Book Fair) opened 2 days ago. Having taken a booth at the Buchmesse in 2017, displaying my Belcour Cookbook, I noticed a widespread interest in Jamaica while there. I think it would be a great idea for Jamaica to take a booth and participate in the Buchmesse next year, and position Jamaica as a cultural destination for visitors looking for more than sea and sun.

There are direct flights from Montego Bay to Frankfurt and the Buchmesse is held in Frankfurt every Fall. It is the largest book fair in the world attracting visitors from all over the world, and therefore is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate to tourists that they will find a vibrant and sophisticated cultural scene here in Jamaica, a culture so unique that it has influenced the world.

I can envision the Jamaica booth at Buchmesse exhibiting our diverse literary offerings, from Marlon James to poetry, from Miss Pat: My Reggae Music Journey to travel guides, from books on cookery to art and history. Hopefully some of our award-winning authors and other figures in the literary world could be sponsored to enable them to make presentations and read from their books.

I am contributing this idea because I am a proud Jamaican and want to help take our culture to the world. I hope the Jamaica Tourist Board will consider taking it on board because I think it will encourage more people to visit our beautiful island with our rich and diverse cultural heritage.

09/10/2024

Part 3 of Belcour Preserves’ interview with food curious, self-taught chef Marianna Farag. In this segment, Marianna shares her favourite foods that grow in Jamaica that we may not know we can eat (or how to eat), and elaborates on why she’s passionate about learning about such foods. If you haven’t already, check out Parts 1 & 2 to learn more about Marianna, her food philosophy and favourite all-time Jamaican foods 🇯🇲

05/10/2024

Dad used to say that in communist China, “they could take everything away from you, except what’s in your head”. My father’s life can be traced by following his memories of food, by knowing where and when he was by the food he ate.

Dad was born in 1927 and grew up in Beijing. His Dad was a professor of physiology at the Peking Union Medical College which was built and financed by the Rockeffer Foundation. With a generous professor’s salary his family entertained regularly, up till the outbreak of World War II. Dad’s favorite dishes were Ja Ja Mian and Peking duck, the quintessential dishes in Beijing. He told us that wheat grew in the north of China and hot noodles were eaten in winter. He said Ja Ja Mian was considered food for poor people, and posited that Marco Polo stole the idea of spaghetti and meat sauce from the Chinese.

After the Japanese invaded Beijing in World War II, Dad and his sister Effie were sent to Singapore to stay with their grandfather. Although they didn’t stay long there, he developed a liking for sate and dim sum. Going to dim dum on a Sunday remains one of our family’s traditions.

Gan Ma, his godmother, looked after Daddy and his sister while their father was off fighting the war. Having lost his Scottish mother shortly before the war, Dad remembers Gan Ma making a hundred jiaozi just for him, as her way of showing her love. She came to visit us regularly in Jamaica and taught Mummy recipes that Dad loved as a young boy. He and Gan Ma and her family remained close until she died.

In 1942, when Dad was fifteen, his father sent his children and Gan Ma and her children into the mountains in Burma away from the ongoing war. There they attended a missionary school, and Dad talked about getting eggs and milk that helped him to grow. At seventeen years old, he left the East for good to attend school in Connecticut, where he mentioned being happy just having enough to eat. He developed a liking for Boston cream pies, and clam chowder in Nantucket where he waited on tables during the summer holidays while in university.

Dad moved to Jamaica in 1958, the year I was born. My sisters and I were all taught very early how to use chopsticks. His favorite Jamaican dish was oxtail and spinners and he also enjoyed other extremities like cow foot. He preferred to eat rice with every meal rather than yams. In our house it was sacrilege to burn the rice. Our boyfriends had to like Ja Ja Mian to be accepted into the Lim family. It is still a staple dish for us and our families.

When Dad returned to China after sixty years with my sister and I, he retraced his steps through the cities he lived in while fleeing from the Japanese invasion. We ate jiaozi in Xi’an, had Hotpot in Chongqing and Peking Duck in Beijing. Dad was seventy-five, and this would be the last time he would return to China before he passed. As one of our uncles said, he was completing the circle of his life.

Happy 97th Birthday Dad, you are dearly remembered ❤️

27/09/2024

Belcour is honored to be included in a recent JTB article as one of the six books a person visiting Jamaica should get. The Belcour Cookbook reflects my family’s Chinese, French and Jamaican heritage. The homage from JTB comes at a serendipitous time as we’ve also just restocked on Amazon - you can purchase a copy from the link in our profile description.

On World Tourism Day, we celebrate not only Jamaica’s stunning beauty and the importance of tourism to Jamaica’s economy, but our rich and diverse heritage and culture and tourism as way of engendering a better understanding of peoples with the hope of engendering a more peaceful world.

24/09/2024

Goodbye Summer! The flavour of fragrant passion fruit is amazing and this pie is so good. Recipe on the Belcour Preserves website.

24/09/2024

The recipe for our Belcour passion fruit pie in case you missed it! 😉🥧💛

Artisanal hot pepper sauces, fruit preserves, and savory condiments made in Jamaica with locally grown, fresh produce, herbs and Blue Mountain honey.

16/09/2024

Vegan Mooncakes for Mid Autumn Festival. I was asked to bring a vegan recipe to my aunt’s ninetieth birthday on the day Mid Autumn festival this year so I’ve decided to make these. The mooncake is round to symbolize the full moon and family unity togetherness, family reunion and wishing family wellbeing. So I think this is perfect and appropriate dessert for a family reunion and celebration.

If you want to support the channel please visit my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/eastmeetskitchenBuy My Book! -- Vegan Dim Sum Cookbook: http://www.eastme...

12/09/2024

The Breadfruit was brought to Jamaica to help feed slaves. This overlooked ubiquitous transplant which was initially intended to be only “slave food” ironically perhaps, has the potential to help feed people all over the world because it grows in perfusion in hot climates and it is nutritious. Moreover the tree has a long life span of producing fruit. It is truly a miraculous tree as it can help to stave off starvation as temperatures rise due to climate change.

This calorie-rich, nutrient-dense, and climate-resilient crop has the power to step in for more common staples that can’t handle global warming.Warming temperatures are making farming much more difficult in the tropics. Food systems across island nations in the Caribbean and Pacific are …

10/09/2024

31/08/2024

Pimento Hill Borough Market London. Hanging out with foodie soul sister Dawn Smith talking food, hot sauces and our long journey into making great Jamaican condiments. And yes you guessed it, what can gwaan with getting Belcour into the UK market.

12/08/2024

They are sooo good. The yellow New Zealand Kiwi is protected by trademark the New Zealand Government.

Jamaica has so many things that aren’t protected by trademark, like Jerk seasoning and Scotch Bonnets, ginger etc. Blue Mountain coffee is trademarked but Jamaica has not protected any of our agricultural and other assets.

06/08/2024

“Out of many one food”
Representing Jamaica 2017 Frankfurt Book Show

02/08/2024

It's pine season and time to restock with a fresh batch of Belcour Pineapple Preserve. Do you have an unusual or special way of using our pine jam?🍍We'd love to hear in the comments below 😊👇

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28/07/2024

Mango and roasted vegetables salad. Looks like a rainbow tastes like summer earthy sweet warm yet refreshing

28/07/2024

The last of the season

27/07/2024

Anyone who has been watching with alarm the world hitting historically high temperatures over the last week should also be concerned about food security. There are fancy terms banned about by politicians and academics like food security, food sustainability and food self sufficiency, but they all boil down being able to feed ourselves.
In my view the first obligation of any government is making sure there is enough food and water for its population.
There is a lot of talk about becoming a “cashless society” but not much talk about becoming a “food less” society. Starvation is around the world is on the rise as our food supply is literally drying up. This is due to drought and conflict and supply chain disruption. Ukraine a case in point as it being one of the world’s largest grower of wheat therefore affecting the production and supply of flour.
As a tiny island close to the equator Jamaica is extremely vulnerable. Not only will the cost of food and the availability of food being adversely affected, but agriculture will be severely impacted by more extreme weather conditions, rising water levels caused by rising temperatures.
Although countries like ours are not big producers of greenhouse gases we will be disproportionately affected by the effects of climate change. Fighting for environmental justice and assistance to cope with the effects of climate change is very important, but is the subject for another discussion.
What can we do to provide enough food to feed ourselves faced with the ever growing possibility of a climate catastrophe. We expect therefore global food supply to decrease and there will be a shortage of food- this is fact not hypothetical and not in the future either. People are already experiencing the rise in food prices and the limited distribution of certain agricultural products
There are number of things Jamaica can and must do to have and produce enough food to become food self-sufficient and feed ourselves.
Some of these things include: increasing the amount of food we grow, through scientific innovations, the use of more efficient irrigation systems.
Protecting food sources like our marine life and perhaps more aquatic farming of other things like abalone.
Supporting farmers financially and an increasing our emphasis on the importance of agriculture and support for the Ministry of agriculture.
Cutting food waste is another partly by increasing the efficiency of the distribution of food. Looking around now during mango season there must be thousands of pounds of mangoes rotting on the roads
We can develop, cultivate other nutritious plants, and sources of nutrition than do not mean eating insects, although we may have to look at that. Perhaps the cultivation of rabbits and Morenga and palm nuts maybe more palatable to consider.
Encouraging people to plant their own food in kitchen gardens and school gardens and the setting up of more nurseries.
Reexamining food sources traditionally eaten food that grew profusely that we have ignored or have gone out of style like susumber.
Breadfruit and the increased cultivation of the breadfruit trees is a prime example which is being promoted and already put into action by the brilliant nonprofit organization Trees That Feed Foundation
At Belcour we be began looking at the traditional food sources and things that grow in Jamaica like the Dragon Fruit and Bamboo shoots out of curiosity and fodder for our social media. Our company has always believed in naturals preserving food using sun, salt, sugar, fermentation or vinegar.
Food was traditional preserved to reduce food waste and to have food during the Winter and in times scarcity, these methods have been around for centuries.
What begun as a fascination with preserving food naturally lead to making our jams and hot sauces.
We then developed a curiosity has grown into a passion because of the threat of food insecurity. We believe we need to identify nutritious food sources how to cook, eat them and preserve them to help stem food insecurity.
Follow along with us on IG if you’re interested. We posted about cooking Morenga and ackee and people seem to be on a similar wave length because fortunately Jamaica grows an abundance of different fruits plants and produce and we probably only eat a percentage of what we could consume. We’re posting on making susumber rice next. Our only disclaimer being we can identify traditional food sources but individuals will have to research their safety, because some may have side effects. That said, fast food has been found to have numerous side effects such as obesity and little nutritional value. That also leads us into the politics of food, which is the topic of another discussion

10/07/2024

Most of the seafood consumed in the US is farm raised and imported from India, Indonesia, Vietnam and China.

I know we have tried shrimp farming in Jamaica and still raise Talapia, but this seems to me to me aquaculture is a great opportunity. The size of the market and the demand for seafood is predicted to continue to grow significantly particularly as people eat less read meat.

On a flight back from China a lady who was head of the Chinese Association in Chicago, was sitting next to me. We talked about commerce and she asked me, why didn’t Jamaica farm more Abalone?

Apparently we do farm abalone. I would be interested to know more. I doubt abalone farms suffer from as much praedial larceny as abalone is not well known here in Jamaica.

The point is perhaps we should look at aquaculture again with an open mind and see what makes sense for us to farm and how to do it both sustainably and on a large commercial scale, like chickens.

From another angle Jamaicans are going to need other sauces of protein too / food in general for us to have greater food security therefore the more things we can farm and supply ourselves and the less we import from across the globe the better.

“Aquaculture is the fastest growing food production sector in the world. Of the total $281.5 billion global aquaculture market, the U.S. is valued at $1.5 billion or 0.5 percent and imports up to 80 percent of the seafood we consume.”

https://images.app.goo.gl/RFmXmPhAasuqLwxp6

Source

America’s seafood industry has long been a vital contributor to our economy, with the seafood supply chain supporting more than 1.8 million jobs nationwide, but you may be surprised to learn that the U.S. currently imports far more seafood than it produces.

05/07/2024

A big thank you to our nurses, doctors, fire fighters , JPS personnel, water commission workers, and all public servants who have been looking after people at the hospitals and clearing debris and getting our services back even during the storm.
Jamaica is doing an excellent job, however places on the island that have been devastated are going to need financial support from our government for the loss of their crops. Areas of the South Coast that were badly affected are also going to need help rebuilding.
There are many people who are less fortunate and who have lost their homes, so while we are happy that we didn’t get a direct hit from hurricane Beryl and we sustained minimal damage, there are people who lost their homes who are suffering, and the hurricane season is just beginning. Food shelters and charities are calling for donations of food and clothes. Anyone who has information as to where we can donate please post.