Delicious History

Are you a chef, food writer, restaurant owner, or food lover in Tampa Bay?  We must confess, we’re obsessed with food, cooking, and restaurants.  We know there’s a lot of us out there, tucked away in the nooks and crannies of the sprawling Tampa Bay area.  We already devote the better part of our waking lives to food, eating, cooking, drinking, documenting the best and creating new delicacies of our own.  So why not do it as a group once in awhile?

We were inspired by a group called the Southern Foodways Alliance that mixes great food and drink with a respect for tradition.  They combine their love of food with a willingness to learn about food culture and appreciate the art it inspires.  Their annual symposium is a lively party that only stops long enough for speakers to enlighten the audience with their knowledge and humor.

It gives us great pleasure to announce the formation of Tampa Bay Foodways, a group dedicated to finding the best Florida has to offer the food world.  We’re just getting started, the organization is coming together, the website is under construction, and we have a discussion board,    At the moment, our mission statement is still up for debate, but goes something like this:

The Tampa Bay Foodways Alliance seeks to celebrate, document, and contribute to the best of Florida’s food culture.

How could we best fulfill that statement as a group?  I suspect we’ll be eating, drinking, cooking, discussing, and debating food a lot.  Hopefully we can help recognize people and businesses along the way that feel the way we do, have parties, and make some memories.   So let’s talk food at the Ybor Crab Feast with the legendary Seabreeze Restaurant on May 22, 2010.  For more details, look down.

To join our mailing list, write to foodwah@gmail.com

To rsvp for the crab event, see below.

Until then,

the “Taste Buds”

Tampa Bay Foodways presents: The Cuban Crab Fest, a celebration of Tampa’s culinary heritage

An evening of exploration into Tampa’s deep ethnic roots and a fundraiser for the Marti-Maceo Club, one of Tampa’s oldest immigrant societies

With the legendary Seabreeze Restaurant rolling fresh deviled crabs and cooking up crab enchilado, or chilau: fresh Gulf blue crabs simmered in tomato sauce and served over pasta

With a pot luck of Afro-Cuban side dishes, full cash Bar, and Latin jazz and salsa music provided by “Luna Jazz”

In between sets, listen to traditional Gulf crabbers share their wisdom and cooking tips

Enjoy a great meal and help restore the club’s building      $20 for scheduled guests (who rsvp by May 20) $30 night of the event

Saturday, May 22      at the historic Marti-Maceo Club in Ybor City 6pm until?

1226 E. 7th Ave.  Tampa, FL   in historic Ybor City

Proceeds will go towards the Marti-Maceo Club’s restoration fund and the Tampa Bay Foodways annual symposium (to be held in November)

Please rsvp to attend.

To rsvp or donate food, write to Andy Huse at soulrecreation@yahoo.com

check out the new page dedicated to my speaking efforts.  it is available to the right.  i’ve spoken all over the state in the last few years, and i’m available to deliver fun, engaging, and educational lectures on Florida’s rich food culture.

In June, I recorded a new album with legendary Shane “Sanchez” Smith.  we had a great time as usual, and it is by far the best music we’ve yet produced together.

one of the songs I wrote is called “Big Sugar,” after someone suggested it as a stage name for me.  so i wrote some lyrics with an outsized personality in mind.  The album is being mixed.

and no, we don’t use or condone cocaine or “China white.”  (I thought Shane would appreciate that disclaimer.  He was a little nervous about naming the album after a song that mentions these things.  But the name was inescapable.  Thanks, Theresa!)

Dedicated to Florida’s sugar industry and the American appetite.  I’d like to write a song about high-fructose corn syrup.  This song is kind of bluesy honky tonk, and the chorus is fun to sing and say.

Chorus:

Big sugar, so sweet

Where the swamp meets the street

White powder, wet heat

Just ask all the girls who tasted me

x

If you like molasses on your corn bread

Rum with cola and all of your meds

Then sweeten your children and count the dead

Beneath your feet

x

We grow and cut the sugar cane

The cauldron boils out all the stains

Who knew that concentrated pain

Could taste so sweet?

x

Chorus

x

The cake is sweet and attracts the flies

With icing an inch or two high

You might not want to share your slice

But the devil has his piece

x

We tend plantations over unmarked graves

And we swing machete blades

Our grief flows out so deep in the glade

The gators get no peace

x

Chorus

x

We got mountains of the white stuff

It’s a feeding frenzy, can’t get enough

Just look at what its done to us

From our heads to our feet

x

It doesn’t stop with guilty bites

For our insatiable appetites

Coffee, cocaine and China white

We live and play to cheat

x

Chorus

x

Big sugar, so sweet

Where the swamp meets the street

White powder, wet heat

Just ask all the girls who tasted me

I hadf a blast at Wazoo, Lowry Park Zoo’s annual beer-fuled fundraiser.  some friends, stef and I had quite the time.  i made dinner before: the burritos were good, but it was the fresh scraped corn, chopped asparaus, and diced onion sautee that blew us away, with chili, cumin, and a little fresh salsa to perk it up.  it was naturally quite sweet.   after the fest, we badly needed a swim in the pool, and a cigar.  Then Stef made some great whole grain pancakes with blueberries, banana, and nuts.  I made some cheesy eggs to go with mine, but no one else would wait for the eggs.  They all tore apart the pancakes as they were made.  Pete spread peanut butter and Stef’s excellent Swedish jam between his pancakes, and we all followed suit.  The vividness of the memory of those pancakes borders on the sexual.

as for Wazoo, I wrote a piece for Metro Mix about it (i’m working on the typos if they’re still there) to give people valuable pointers.

oh yes, it was that good.  Had an excellent meal there last night: pasta, fresh gnocci, lotsa seafood, reasonable prices, great service. I will have a review up online in the coming days. i wanted to get this message up because one of the only online reviews seems totally off the mark to me.  it seemed… romantic.  and not in a cheesy way.  It was warm and homey, and we felt like we could be us.  more later on metro mix.

I’ve been cooking a lot lately, and it is only out of laziness i have not documented my efforts.  Pho turned out great on my first try.  The same with banh mi.  I’ve experimented with jerk recently, making some fiery hot meatballs and a sweeter chicken version.  Some friends complained about the heat of the meatballs— I made them punitive in nature, which is how i sometimes like it.  I like them to burn on the way out, if you know what i mean.  I made the chicken for a dear friend’s birthday party, shredded into chunks, and people loved it.  That sauce was more runny, with a fruity hint of OJ, and plenty of allspice, nutmeg, and cinnamon, all ground fresh.

On this website:

I’ve come to a grim decision: to take down all of the photos on this site and start over, at least as far as photos are concerned.  I’m really not that happy with Flickr as a showcase for this site’s photos.  It is too difficult to use of the purposes I envisioned.  So the photos will come down, and hopefully reappear over time in a more realistic and sustainable resolution.  Perhaps then i will be more interested in posting regularly again.  Besides, it will soon be time to make limoncello, and i wouldn’t want anyone to miss that one.

I looked over the final proofs thoroughly, and it looks good indeed.  University Press of Florida pulled it all together.  I only found 6 or 7 things for fixing—- which is rather miraculous considering the amounts of change to the text and layout.

I was looking forward to seeing the book go into the Florida History and Culture Series at the press.  It had special signifigance for me, as the series is edited by Gary R. Mormino and Raymond O. Arsenault, two professors who taught me so much in and out of the classroom.  Sadly, through some fluke at the press (but we won’t talk about that), it will not be able to be added to the series.  At this point, I’m grateful enough to have a book that does justice to its subject.

My speaking schedule is already beginning to fill ouyt for the fall, and I am abut to augment my now-classic (and still in demand!) lecture “Florida’s Delicious History” with new talks.

“Florida’s Delicious History” is a meditation on the “connective tissue” between food and Florida’s unusually rich history.  It is like my plate at the end of an excellent buffet: there’s a little bit of everything.  Most of all, I set out to show that food offers an opportunity to delve into (and relate to) serious history in a fun, engaging way.

I just created “In Search of Florida Cuisine” to reflect specifically on Florida’s food.  I attempt to answer the question “What is Florida food”, and look at immigrant cuisine, old time Southern food, and Floribbean flights of fancy.  It is testament to Florida’s multidimensional culture that it takes a full lecture to answer that question with any measure of effort.

For an interesing food and drink based talk on Pohibition, I will soon offer “Florida’s Noble Disaster: Prohibition and Repeal”, a look at righteous, God-fearing prohibitionists, shamless smugglers, the fall of fine dining, the rise of the criminal underworld, the land (and booze) boom, flappers and feminism, hard liquor at soft drink stands, a sudden enthusiasm for billiards, moonshining and NASCAR, all in the crazy place we call Florida.

I also look forward to offering “The Columbia Restaurant: A century of history, culture, and cuisine.”  That lecture tells the story of the Columbia Restaurant’s remarkable history, food, and family.  I tell the story in broad strokes while making time for stories from the book along the way.  If walls could talk, the Columbia’s would tell the most incredible stories.  This lecture (and the book!) is the next best thing.

It has been a grueling week on a number of levels.  But it has passed.

I submitted my manuscript for the Columbia Restaurant: Celebrating a Century of History, Culture and Cuisine, yesterday.  I met with Richard Gonzmart, the 4th generation president of the Columbia group, and Meredith Morris-Babb, director of the University Press of Florida, to discuss some particulars.  When we started talking about release dates and marketing, it finally dawned on me that after five years working with the company, and close to three years associated with the book project, it is finally going to print.

The publication process has taxed my time and patience in ways i never expected, but the work will soon pay off.  It is unbelieveable that publishing books is still so slow and archaic, when all i have to do is click once to publish this piece.

Nonetheless, the book represents a great launching point for the rest of my writing career.   I have long been irritated by how much food studies has been dissected into all all of these smaller disciplines: nutrition, recipes and technique, pop culture, and so on.  Food as a whole dominates so much of humanity’s waking hours that this shabby treatment, especially by historians, is incomprehensible.  But the genie is out of the bottle.  The Food Network is part of the mainstream, and is here to stay.  And academia is now beginning to catch up.

It still amuses me to think of how one of my history professors was so incredulous that I would pursue food as a subject of scholarship.  I look forward to outselling his books, most of which are pretty lame.  I must give credit to Gary Mormino and Ray Arsenault for their encouragement beginning way back in 1997-98 when i began graduate school.  They are both extraordinary.  Their Florida Studies Program at USF St. Pete is a great asset.  Teaching there was a great honor.

Anyhow, the Columbia book is due out in September and marketing will begin in October if all goes well.  I look forward to hitting the road again to promote the book.  It is very special to me and the Gonzmart family.  The recipes kick ass, too.  See the mojito chicken that I posted here months ago.  More about the book later.

Keep an eye out for teasers!