The ‘real deal’ Jamaican turnover biz celebrates five years of peerless patties By: David Sanderson Posted: 3:20 PM CDT Friday, Mar. 28, 2025

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/03/2025 (545 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Food fight!

A Jamaican patty is a turnover-shaped pastry containing a variety of fillings, most commonly spiced beef.

In February 1985, the Canadian government sought to prohibit sellers of the savoury treat from calling their victuals a “beef patty,” as they had been doing. Officials argued the term was reserved for hamburger patties, as per the federally regulated Meat Inspection Act.

Vendors stood their ground. A compromise — that the patties be billed as “Jamaican” patties to differentiate between the two — was eventually reached after Canada’s Jamaican community pressured government officials ahead of an official trip to the island nation by then prime minister Brian Mulroney.

Kevin Burgin’s mother Yvonne is the matriarch of Mama B’s Jamaican Patties, a family business currently toasting its fifth anniversary. Burgin has limited knowledge of the so-called “patty wars” — he was 15 years old when the beef occurred — but he does have stories of his own about customers who’ve been puzzled by Mama B’s patty parlance.

“A few years ago, one of the fathers from my son’s hockey team overheard people ordering patties from me at practice and said to put him down for a dozen,” says the father of three, seated on a couch next to his mom in his spacious Charleswood split-level.

Except when Burgin, the host of Winnipeg Weekends on 680 CJOB, dropped off the man’s allotment a few days later, the first thing the fellow said when he opened the bag was “what the heck are these?” Burgin explained they were Jamaican patties, but owing to the obvious confusion, he offered to take them back, no problem whatsoever.

“He said no, and that he and his kids would give them a try,” Burgin continues. “Three days later he sent me a text saying they were all gone and that he needed more patties… ‘Jamaican or whatever it is you call ’em.’”

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Yvonne Burgin, now in her 80s, was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. The youngest child in her family, she guesses she was three years old when she began standing on a chair in the kitchen to watch her mother as she prepared beef patties from scratch for her and her siblings.

“My mother passed away when I was 11 and even though she never gave me her recipe, not even for the crust, I discovered I was able to continue making patties for my sisters, from all the times I’d observed her adding a pinch of this and a dash of that,” she says, smiling warmly.

Wanting to expand her horizons, Yvonne moved to Great Britain in the early 1960s at age 19. There she met her late husband Allan, who was originally from St. Vincent. In 1974, the couple discussed relocating to Canada in order to, in Yvonne’s words, see yet another part of the world.

Kevin, who was born in London, pipes in when his mother begins to talk about how easy it was for his father to find work in this country, owing to a shortage of heavy-equipment mechanics, his chosen career.

“The truth is, she applied for all these jobs posing as my dad without ever telling him. It was only after a Winnipeg company agreed to hire him that she let him know what she’d been up to,” he says, playfully poking his mother in the ribs.

The Burgins arrived in the city, where Kevin’s two siblings were born, in September 1975. By the time Kevin was in Grade 7, the Burgins’ Crestview residence had become a social hub for Kevin’s school pals, who would regularly show up at lunch and after class, hoping to feast on Yvonne’s “famous” patties.

Yvonne remained at home with her kids after Allan died in 1983. She returned to the workforce in the mid-1990s, accepting a greeter’s position at a nearby Wal-Mart. One afternoon she was heating up her dinner in the staff-room microwave when two of her co-workers asked in unison “hey, what smells so good?”

Those are Jamaican patties, she told them. Where did she buy them, they wondered?

“I explained that I made them myself and after I gave them a taste, they said they’d happily pay me to make some for them, too,” Yvonne says.

“Pretty soon, I was getting orders from other people at work, as well as from their friends and friends of friends… so much so that it quickly became like a second job.”

Kevin chuckles, saying almost every time he popped by his mom’s place to say hi, there seemed to be a new appliance or piece of furniture. “Patty money,” his mom would say with a wink, when he inquired about her newfound wealth.

Aside from occasionally turning out patties for family members, Yvonne halted what had become a thriving catering enterprise following a move to Vancouver in the early 2000s, to be with one of her daughters. She returned to Winnipeg in late 2019 and when COVID-19 struck a few months later, she told Kevin, with whose family she was living, that she was considering getting back into the patty game, what with the sudden demand for food-delivery services.

In addition to his weekend-morning duties at CJOB, Kevin is also host of the station’s The Main Ingredient, an hour-long show that shines a light on the local food scene. In July 2020 he broached the subject of his mother’s Jamaican patties on-air, polling listeners to see if they thought that was something consumers might be interested in.

In closing, he listed a phone number and website address for Mama B’s Jamaican Patties, a tag they’d settled on after an acquaintance of his instructed him their original name, Yvonne’s Jamaican Patties, didn’t sound tropical enough.

“A couple of hours after my show, I was sitting in my living room when my mom came up to me, to say she was pretty sure my phone was broken, because it was dinging constantly,” he says.

“I picked it up, took a look and announced that was because there were orders for over 200 dozen patties. ‘OK, I guess it’s time to get to work,’ my mom said.”

Mama B’s Jamaican Patties are currently produced in a commercial kitchen in Oakbank. Family members, including Kevin’s three children and his sister Debbie, turn out five varieties, which are available at a number of grocers, including Red River Co-op locations in Winnipeg, Stonewall and Gimli.

Kevin no longer hand-delivers patties to people’s doors, like he did at the height of the pandemic, but he does do his fair share of in-store sampling, which affords him the opportunity to introduce interested parties to his mom’s fare.

“People who’ve gone to Jamaica or the West Indies for a holiday tend to know what they are but lots of people are like, ‘are those empanadas?’” he says, noting beef patties — mild or spicy — are the top sellers, with curry-chicken patties not far behind. (While the Burgins recommend hot sauce or mango chutney as accompaniments, they have heard of people dousing their patties in ketchup, Kevin grimaces.)

Yvonne, who is currently nursing a dislocated shoulder thanks to a slip on an icy sidewalk, states she was always confident her patties were the “real deal.” That belief was reinforced two summers ago when another ex-pat Jamaican stopped by Mama B’s booth at the St. Norbert Farmers’ Market.

Initially the woman scoffed at the advertised price, stating to Yvonne’s daughter and granddaughter, who were tending the booth, that she’d always made her own patties, and could do so for at least half of what they were charging.

“She tried a sample anyways and a few minutes later, she came back, almost like she was doing it in secret, my daughter said, to grab our business card,” Yvonne says, kicking back in laughter.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca