Strips of jerky, presumably beef
5 March 2021
A favorite of college students and those who are suffering late-night munchies, jerky is cured meat, especially beef, usually served in long, thin strips. The word, but not the method of preparation, shares an origin with the Jamaican dish of jerked meat. It is etymologically unrelated to the verb and epithet jerk (Cf. jerk).
Jerky comes into English from the Spanish charqui, which in turn took it from the Quechua, a native language of the Andean region of South America. In that language ch’arki means dried meat. Charqui makes its English appearance in a 1604 translation of José de Acosta’s The Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies. Acosta writes of the natives of the Andes, as translated by Edward Grimeston:
Of the flesh of these sheepe they make Cuschargui, or dried flesh, the which will last very long, whereof they make great accompt.
The form charqui continues in English use to the present day but mainly in reference to dried meat from the Andean region. For example, it appears in Charles Darwin’s journal for August 1834 when he was in Chile during his voyage as a naturalist on HMS Beagle:
They scarcely ever taste meat; as, with the twelve pounds per annum, they have to clothe themselves, and support their families. The miners who work in the min itself, have twenty-five shillings per month, and are allowed a little charqui.
The Spanish spread the word charqui throughout the Americas, and it made its way to the Caribbean and beyond. John Smith, writing of Virginia in 1612 uses the form jerkin for the cured meat:
Their fish and flesh they boyle either very tenderly, or broyle it so long on hurdles over the fire, or else after the Spanish fashion, putting it on a spit, they turne first the one side, then the other, til it be as drie as their ierkin beefe in the west Indies, that they may keepe it a month or more without putrifying.
And the form jerked, spelled girked, appears later in seventeenth century. Here is William Hughes writing about potatoes in his 1672 The American Physitian, which, despite what one may expect from the title, is a book about botany:
They are easie of digestion, agreeing well with all bodies, especially with our hot stomacks when we come there, who may at first eat of them moderately, four or five times a day, without hurt, (as also of some kinde of meat or flesh:) they breed very good nourishment; they corroborate or strengthen exceedingly; they chear the heart, and are provocative of bodily lust. They are used several ways, as I have often eaten them; either roasted under the ashes, and then peeled, pulp't and buttred, or boiled and buttred, or eaten alone, or with Girk't Beef and Pork instead of bread.
Finally, we get the familiar form of jerky by the mid nineteenth century. From Walter Colton’s 1850 Three Years in California:
My companions returned, and seating ourselves on the ground, each with a tin cup of coffee, a junk [sic] of bread, and a piece of the stewed jerky, our dinner was soon dispatched, and with a relish which the epicure never yet felt or fancied.
In nineteenth-century Jamaica the word was applied to a different kind of culinary preparation. There jerked meat refers to meat that has been marinated in a mixture of seasonings and then smoked or barbequed. The method originated among communities of escaped slaves in the interior of the island. It’s mentioned in Cyrus Williams’s 1826 A Tour Through the Island of Jamaica:
After this, the negroes came in a body and took away as much fish as they pleased, not less than a bushel a-piece, and yet left many on the shore. Some were hung up to dry and others were salted. The negroes carry them into the interior, and exchange them for jerked hog, on their own account.
There you have it, the history of colonial exploitation of and slavery in the Americas encapsulated in a single word.
Sources:
Acosta, José de. The Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies. Edward Grimeston, trans. London: Val Sims for Edward Blount and William Aspley, 1604, 320. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Colton, Walter. Three Years in California. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1850, 298. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Darwin, Charles, P. Parker King, and Robert Fitz-Roy. Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle, vol. 3 of 3. London: Henry Colburn, 1839, 317–18. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Hughes, William. The American Physitian, or a Treatise of the Roots, Plants, Trees, Shrubs, Fruit, Herbs, &c Growing in the English Plantations in America. London: J.C. for William Crook, 1672, 14–15. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2019, s.v. charqui, n., jerked, adj.2, jerk, v.2, jerky, n.2, jerkin, adj. and n.2.
Smith, John. A Map of Virginia, With a Description of the Countrey. Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1612, 17. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Williams, Cyrus R. A Tour Through the Island of Jamaica. London: Hunt and Clarke, 1826, 80. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: Larry Jacobsen, 2011, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.