HELEN
WILLINSKY
Helen Willinsky's name has been on the jar since 1986. Before there was a jar, there was a hotel in Port Antonio, a coffee grinder in an Atlanta kitchen, and a 500-pound order. This is that story.
A JAMAICAN KITCHEN
AND A SWISS SCHOOL
Helen Grace Skinner grew up in Jamaica surrounded by tropical fruit, fresh peppers and pimento trees. The British-style cooking she was taught seemed dull next to what was growing outside the door, and she knew early that food would be her work.
A Jamaica Tourist Board scholarship took her to the Ecole Hôtelière in Switzerland, where she learned the discipline of European hospitality. She came home with both: the flavors she had grown up with and the training to carry them beyond the island. Translating Jamaican flavor for the wider world would become her life's work.LEARNING JERK AT GOBLIN HILL
By 1972 Helen and her husband, Hartmut Willinsky, were co-managing the Goblin Hill hotel in Port Antonio. The waiters came from Moore Town, the Maroon community in the mountains above the coast, and they knew jerk the way it had been made there for generations. When the Tourist Board brought travel agents to the island, Goblin Hill threw the parties, and the Moore Town staff cooked: pork and chicken rubbed with pimento, Scotch bonnet and thyme, slow-smoked over pimento wood. Helen watched what that food did to a room full of people who had never tasted it."I never forgot that smell of that jerk smoke wafting through the air for miles and miles - a pure sensory experience. I knew it would be big. I just didn't know that I'd be the one to put it in a jar."
Jerk’s story is bigger than one person’s story.
Helen’s experience at Goblin Hill is one part of a much older Jamaican tradition. Our living history brings together documented sources, Helen’s memories, and stories from people whose families and communities have carried jerk forward. If you have a memory, photograph, correction, or source to add, we want to hear from you.
JERK WAS A PASTE. HELEN MADE IT DRY.
In 1978 Helen and Hartmut emigrated to Atlanta. The next year they founded Gourmet Concepts, and by 1980 they were supplying frozen desserts to restaurant chefs across the city. Hartmut was on the road most weeks, calling on the chains and their chefs.
Jamaica was opening up to tourism, and the Atlanta chefs were flying down on vacation, eating jerk, and coming home wanting it on their menus. By then they were all friends, and they kept saying the same thing to Hartmut: "Willinsky, your wife is Jamaican. Can she develop some jerk for us to put on the menu?"
The problem was the paste. Traditional jerk was a wet marinade that spoiled and didn't ship, which is why commercial jerk was all but absent from American kitchens.
Helen took it on like a chemist. She broke the paste down to its parts, worked out which ones carried the flavor and which only carried water, and rebuilt it dry — batch after batch, changing one thing at a time, tasting each against the jerk she remembered from Goblin Hill. Six weeks and ten coffee grinders later, she had it: a dry seasoning with the same spice, aromatics and heat, in a form a kitchen could measure, store and repeat, plus milder versions for American palates. Dry meant it kept without refrigeration, went on by the spoonful, and tasted the same every time.
"Nobody was making a dry jerk seasoning then. I made the first one in my kitchen — six weeks and ten coffee grinders. The big spice companies came in years later, once the restaurants had built the demand."
THEN CAME A 500-POUND ORDER
Hartmut took the new seasoning to Houlihan's for their summer menu and demonstrated it on shrimp. They bought 500 pounds on the spot.
Helen's Tropical Exotics was founded in 1986 to turn that order into a company. The business was food service from the start: restaurants, distributors and the chefs who cooked with it. The following year the Atlanta Minority Business Development Center named Helen Atlanta's Minority Manufacturer of the Year.
Bahama Breeze, Applebee's and Red Lobster became customers — some for the jerk, some for sauces Helen developed for their menus, like a tamarind apricot sauce for Applebee's and a tamarind raspberry sauce for Red Lobster. In the mid-1990s the company moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where it is today.
In 1990 Helen published Jerk: Barbecue from Jamaica, one of the first cookbooks to bring Jamaican cooking to an American audience. She revised and expanded it in 2007 as Jerk from Jamaica: Barbecue Caribbean Style, with more than 100 recipes covering meats, seafood, vegetables, sides, drinks and desserts.
The books did in print what the business was already doing in kitchens: they made jerk understandable to people who hadn't grown up with it.
STILL HELEN’S
Forty years on, the company is still family-run, and Helen's name is still on every jar. The recipe inside is the original dry jerk she ground in her Atlanta kitchen. Nothing about it has changed. What has changed is who can buy it. For forty years that jar went mostly to restaurant kitchens, and home cooks got the book. Now it comes straight from Helen's to yours.SHOP HELEN’S ONLINE PRODUCTS"The recipe in the jar is the one I made in that kitchen. I haven't changed it, and I'm not going to."