Carol Patricia Whyte, better known as Miss Pat or simply Mama, serves up a little Jamaican pride with every dish at her downtown Miami restaurant, Caribbean Delight -- pride in the food and history of the island first called Xaymaca, ''land of wood and water,'' by the native Arawak Indians.

The menus, printed in the gold, black and green colors of the Jamaican flag, pictures seven national heroes, from Warrior Queen ''Granny Nanny,'' who helped lead a rebellion against the British by the Maroons (runaway slaves, named for the Spanish word cimarrón or ''wild'') to Marcus Garvey, who championed black unification.

Ask a server and you get a history lesson with your rice and peas. Like the national motto -- ''Out of many, one people,'' referring to the mix of African, East Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern and European people -- the food is a potage of influences.

Miss Pat is from Montego Bay. She moved to Miami in 1986 with her husband, who was in the cruise industry, and sold home-baked goodies to Jamaican cruise-ship workers. She opened Caribbean Delight in 1993 on a stretch of Northeast First Avenue between Gesu Church and Miami-Dade College.

The casual, peachy-pink and aqua space has 15 tables and a small counter where folks sip red sorrel (hibiscus juice) with a beef patty or coconut drop. Jamaican patois floats in the air as students, office workers and ship crewmen gather for a taste of home.

Breakfast brings hefty plates of pickled salt mackerel cooked with onion, tomato and sweet peppers; ackee and salt fish; sautéed bits of liver laced with thyme or callaloo simmered with salt fish served with a choice of boiled green banana, yellow yam or dumplings (steamed dough).

Miss Pat grows her own ackee, a small fruit in the litchi family with scarlet pods that burst open when ripe to reveal shiny black seeds surrounded by a soft, pale yellow aril (seed covering). It looks and tastes something like scrambled eggs. She buys callaloo -- large, spinach-like leaves of the taro tuber with a delicate chard flavor -- from a Rasta man in Overtown who grows them.

At lunch, try the popular jerk pork or chicken, succulent oxtails, stew peas (red kidney beans cooked with pigs tail) or tender curry goat, marinated and slow cooked with curry seasonings. Also good is steam fish, a whole snapper steamed in broth, and escovitch, fried fish in vinegar brine with onions and hot peppers based on Spanish escabeche.

Meals come with rice and peas, salad and fried sweet plantain. For vegetarians, there's curry tofu with carrot and chayote squash; vegetable lasagne with soya cheese and hearty lentil soup.

Drinks include bottled imports such as Ting grapefruit soda and Mistic carrot-mango juice and homemade ginger beer and carrot juice blended with condensed milk, nutmeg and vanilla. Sweets include ''pinch-me-rounds''; gizzadas (coconut tartlets); and busta, hard coconut and melted sugar confections named for Jamaica's first prime minister, Sir Alexander Bustamante, who was known for his firm character.

Linda Bladholm's latest book is Latin and Caribbean Grocery Stores Demystified.