Kia Damon’s Audacious Florida Cooking

Her archetypal instinct was to clam up astir the spot she inactive considered home. Over time, she began to spot the imaginable successful doing precisely the opposite. As a descendant of Africans who were enslaved connected Florida plantations, she felt that the authorities was underappreciated arsenic portion of the American South’s Black history, including its Black culinary history. Like galore Southerners, Damon grew up eating barbecue, gumbo, and hush puppies; she besides adored foods much circumstantial to Florida, specified arsenic chromatic crab and datil peppers—a fruity, spicy assortment cultivated successful St. Augustine, wherever a escaped colony for escaped slaves was established successful the eighteenth century, and wherever Damon’s parent and grandma were born. In 2022, she organized the Florida Water Tour, a bid of dinners astatine restaurants successful New York and different cities, featuring dishes that evoked classical Southern cooking and Florida’s sticky, tropical climate: root-beer-braised turkey necks, greenish beans cooked successful coconut milk, roast chickenhearted bronzed with earthy, bright-orange achiote, besides known arsenic annatto.

Online, Damon has cheekily adopted the statement of Florida Woman—an epithet much apt to evoke antics of the “Tiger King” assortment than those of an earnest Black millennial—and sells nineties-style “Floridacore” T-shirts successful homage to specified institutions arsenic Publix and Waffle House. The recipes that she develops for her social-media accounts and for the Times and Southern Living mag deftly harvester her worldly palate and her reverence for tradition. In the caption for an Instagram station astir fermenting boiled peanuts into miso, she joked, “I’m surviving George Washington Carver’s wildest dreams.”

The marsh circuit and the Pub Subs were portion of a meticulously planned itinerary that Damon had deemed a Big Florida Weekend—a primer for the uninitiated, and besides a probe travel for her forthcoming début cookbook, “Cooking with Florida Water: Recipes, Stories, & History of the Unsung South.” Currently, she lives successful Savannah, Georgia, wherever she works arsenic the culinary-operations manager for Grey Spaces, the edifice radical co-founded by the cook Mashama Bailey. On her days off, Damon steeps herself successful Floridiana, studying vintage cookbooks similar “Florida Fixin’s,” from 1992, and “The Gasparilla Cookbook,” a pirate-themed volume, published successful 1961 by the Junior League of Tampa, that includes recipes for Cuban shrimp creole and grapefruit-aspic salad.

As an aspiring “stewardess of Floridian history,” Damon is arsenic enthusiastic astir the state’s astir polarizing dishes arsenic she is astir its evident crowd-pleasers, aiming to conjure an representation of Florida beyond the large luxury of Miami and the kitsch of the Keys. Her publication volition see an adaptation of the Orange Crunch Cake served astatine the Bubble Room, a campy edifice connected Captiva Island, and a look for crab chilau, the unofficial crockery of Tampa, a spicy Sicilian-Afro-Cuban seafood stew. But determination volition besides beryllium a fried-gator po’boy and backwoods heavy cuts similar raccoon with saccharine potatoes. “I had to marque a decision. I was, like, Either it’s possum, it’s raccoon, oregon it’s squirrel,” Damon told me. “I don’t deliberation I could acceptable each 3 successful there.”

From Publix, we drove to Crystal River, successful Citrus County, where, aft an appropriately chaotic central-Florida afternoon—I concisely mislaid my rental-car keys successful a wildlife refuge, stranding america until Damon persuaded an indifferent parkland ranger to assistance rescue them—we ended our time connected the patio of a waterfront edifice called the Crab Plant. As the prima set, and no-see-ums and mosquitoes began to feast connected our bare skin, we divided fractional a lb of steamed stone-crab claws, forking the slippery, tender nutrient from their shells; a heap of plump, cornmeal-crusted fried frog legs, which tasted similar chickenhearted with the texture of a firm-fleshed achromatic fish; and a slick, snappy sausage made from gator chopped with pork. Damon was particularly funny successful a creamy smoked-mullet dip, which was served successful a tiny deli instrumentality with a broadside of crackers. Despite its estimation arsenic a bait oregon “trash” food (in the sixties, Florida’s conservation committee tried to rebrand it arsenic “Lisa”), the oily, strong-tasting mullet is truthful cardinal to the state’s cuisine that Damon is considering having 1 tattooed astir her near kneecap.