Food of Miami. Caroline Stuart
Читать онлайн книгу.
all over the world. But through it all, it has remained a mecca for visitors. Miami is second only to Disney World among Florida's many tourist attractions.
Miami is well-known for its cultural diversity and gustatory pleasures. In a photo from the Miami News, a Rabbi enjoys donuts, alongside the creator of those delicious confections, in a bakery on Miami Beach.
Today's sunseekers tend to be younger and more adventurous than in years past, more apt to order yellowtail snapper rather than sole, mango nectar instead of orange juice. Their worldly appreciation of fine cuisines has encouraged chefs in Miami and the Keys to make full use of the native abundance of tropical fruits, tubers, and seafood, transforming them into some of the most exciting fusion foods cooked in the United States today.
The melting pot that is Miami and the Keys continues to create a rich stew of cultures simmering in the tropical heat, a bold feast of international flavors constantly stirred by the hand of change.
The Florida Keys
Free spirit, good fishing great food
by Nancy Klinginer
The great opportunity for deep-sea fishing and snorkeling off the only live coral reef in the United States is just one reason visitors flock to the Florida Keys, a chain of islands that stretches for one hundred miles off the southern tip of Florida.
Key West, the last link in the chain, is the most famous of the dozens of islands that make up the archipelago. In the Old Town section, wooden houses built by sailors and fishermen still stand defiantly after more than a century of hurricanes, termites, and neglect. These days, most of the houses are sparkling again, painted pale yellow or peach or blue, showing off their unique mix of New England ancestry and Bahamian openness.
Many Key Westers take their cue from the laid-back style of the local architecture—shirts and shorts are the town dress code, lawyers and doctors commute on old bicycles and your bartender is likely to have a Ph.D. as well as a ponytail. The old island's free spirit, good fishing, and warm winter weather attract throngs of tourists each winter. The numbers have grown in recent years, but pilgrims to Key West are nothing new. Writer Ernest Hemingway wintered here all through the 1930s, and Key West is the setting for his novel To Have and Have Not. His Whitehead Street home is a museum today and one of the island's most popular attractions.
Tourism is just the latest in a varied line of livelihoods the Keys have drawn from the sea. Mostly, the waters have been generous, yielding fortunes in trade, fish and goods salvaged from ships that ran aground on the coral reef that parallels the islands.
The sea, however, also has punished the Keys. Hurricanes periodically roar across the Atlantic, blowing homes, businesses, and sometimes people out to sea. Even without storms, the subtropical climate, so soothing in winter, can be downright torturous during the still, simmering six-month summers. And isolation has at times brought poverty; the Great Depression was so dire in Key West that the federal government recommended closing the town and moving islanders. But the stubborn locals hung on; subsisting on a diet of grits and grunts," corn porridge and a lowly local fish.
Custom House and harbor, Key West. The term "keys" comes from the Spanish word for 'island," cayo.
Settlement of the Keys began in earnest in the 1820s; when John Simonton bought Key West from Spaniard Juan Salas. It was a strategic location for the U.S. Navy, then chasing pirates from the region, just as their successors in the Navy, Coast Guard, and Customs Service chase drug smugglers today. It was also a natural trading outpost for ships carrying goods to and from the Eastern Seaboard, Gulf Coast, Caribbean, and South America.
Early settlers came from the Bahamas and New England. Made of coral rock, most of the islands have only a thin skin of soil for planting, so, like their fortunes, the settlers' food was provided by the sea. The catch includes conch, of course, plus turtle, crab, kingfish, lobster, and crawfish. Early Conchs (pronounced "konks"), as descendants of the first settlers proudly call themselves, supplemented scarce fresh produce with avocados, bananas, pineapples, coconuts, figs, dates, oranges, tamarinds, guavas, and mangoes from trees they planted on Key West.
As Cubans rebelled against Spanish colonial rule in the late 1800s, Key West experienced a large migration from its neighbor island across the Florida Straits. Entire cigar-factory operations were transplanted, igniting a cigar-making boom that briefly made Key West the nation's wealthiest city per capita.
Almost a century before the Cuban diaspora transformed Miami, Key West became a truly Cuban-American city, electing Cuban immigrants to the state legislature and the judiciary. With Cuban culture came Cuban food. Thick, sweet Cuban coffee in small cups is still a staple for many Key Westers, who call it buche (from buchito, "to swallow"). Ice cream is another island favorite. Decades before the current gourmet ice cream craze swept the United States, Keys aficionados used local fruit to churn out papaya, guava, mango, and coconut varieties.
The most famous food of the islands is Key lime pie. Also called Mexican lime, the small, thin-skinned Key lime is yellowish (if you're served a piece of green Key lime pie, you know it's a fake) and has a unique tartness and aroma. Its juice also is the primary component of a salty Key West marinade called Old Sour.
Today, the Keys boast a host of upscale restaurants, from which the chefs are maintaining tradition by taking their inspiration from the sea and from the Bahamian, Cuban, Anglo, and Caribbean cultures that have touched these small islands, which barely rise above the warm waters of the sub-tropical sea.
This landmark diner on the corner of Fleming arid Duvall serves up sparkling seafood and a laissez-faire atmosphere.
Dining on salmon and crispy parmesan, littleneck steamers, shrimp rolls, and tuna carpaccio at Louie's Backyard in Key West.
Miami Beach Heyday
Society and glamour give way to tourist trade-then return once again-
to Miami's ever-changing shore
by Howard Kleinberg
Miami Beach has had plenty of ups and downs over the years, but the 1950s and 1960s stand out as a magical time of glamour, excitement, and rapid expansion. Each year during those two decades, a spectacular new hotel would go up: the Algiers, the DiLido, the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc, the Casablanca, the Americana, the Deauville, the Doral Beach. Miami Beach was in its heyday.
In its fancy hotels and nearby clubs, big-name entertainers drew throngs: Frank Sinatra crooned, Mitzi Gaynor danced, Alan King knocked them dead— even Sophie Tucker found a few bars to belt. Muhammed Ali liked to visit, as did Hollywood stars. The place was bursting at the seams as more and more visitors joined the fun.
It hadn't always been that way. Slow to evolve from its roots as a mangrove-laced sandbar, Miami Beach did not exist as a town until 1915. Put on the map by an early 1920s real estate boom, it was, until mid-century, a place to simply bask in the sun, initially for the nouveau riche of the Midwest, later for the Northeast's middle class.
An enduring facet of the city's character was forged in the 1930s, when a large Jewish population began emigrating to Miami Beach, chiefly from New York. Originally limited by restrictive developers and landlords to the southern end of the city, the new community ultimately moved north, bringing with them their corned beef and pastrami sandwiches, their sour pickles and Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray tonic. From Wolfie's down on 21st Street to the Rascal House up in Sunny Isles, residents and tourists alike seemed to take delight in being abused by Brooklyn-accented waitresses demanding, "Yeah, watcha want?" as they slammed pickle and sauerkraut bowls on the table.
During