Key lime pie. This creamy pie dates back to pre-refrigeration days in the 1850s, when canned condensed milk was introduced to the Keys. Florida was still mostly a wilderness when Northern Standard Oil magnate Henry Flagler extended his Florida East Coast Railroad to Miami in 1896. His trains carried carpetbaggers and speculators, the infirm seeking warm-weather cures and homesteaders. Flagler built lavish resort hotels to cater to wealthy Northerners.
This whimsical print from the late nineteenth century depicts a very real environmental hazard in the Everglades.
The pace of development accelerated in the 1920s, when a land boom made the area irresistible to Northerners lusting for fast money and seaside living. The boom inevitably went bust, but the lavish Mediterranean-style buildings it fostered left an enduring mark.
Miami kept its character as a resort town through the post-World War II era. Transplanted New Yorkers brought with them a taste for Jewish delicatessen items, such as corned beef sandwiches and lox and bagels, as well as an appreciation for the fine Florida seafood.
The arrival of Cuban exiles that began in 1959 sparked the transformation of Miami into a city of global flavors, and immigrants from all over Latin America joined Miami's great melting pot of flavors. Little Havana on Cade Ocho is the center of Cuban culture, but throughout the Greater Miami area, the population is nearly sixty percent Hispanic. You'll hear Spanish spoken as much as English on the streets, and it is easy to find and enjoy Cuban sandwiches (bread stuffed with pork, ham, salami, cheese and pickles that is usually pressed), moros y cristianos (black beans and rice), picadillo (ground meat, olives and capers), to-stones (fried plantains), and empanadas (fried turnovers filled with meat, fish, poultry or fruit). Little Haiti is where to find "Caribbean-style" chicken and plantains.
Here and there, especially in the laid-back Keys, word-of-mouth keeps track of the best barbecue joints and fish fry shacks, and old-timers may still be heard to say, "We live on fish in the summer and Yankees in the winter."
Time and again over the decades, Miami has been remade by waves of newcomers arriving from 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
