The Florida Roundup - Statewide year in review, from Barabicu to BBQ, only-in-Florida food stories

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

This week on The Florida Roundup, we bring you some of the biggest stories from around the state with reporters from Florida Public Radio member stations (00:22). Plus, we learn about how Spanish settlers in Florida influenced America’s barbecue craze (20:15). And later, we bring you a collection of Florida-only food stories (37:32).

Covering Florida Navigator Program provides confidential assistance for Floridians looking to explore health care coverage within the federal health insurance marketplace. Open enrollment ends January 15th. 877-813-9115 or coveringflorida.org. This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. Thanks for being here this week. Today we start with a rundown of some of the biggest stories throughout the state this year, beginning with the election. Reporter Stephanie Colombini with our partner station WUSF in Tampa extensively covered the effort to pass a constitutional amendment to protect abortion. 60% of voters needed to approve it. It received 57% of the vote and failed. Stephanie, how did opponents defeat this abortion proposal?

Well, it was an aggressive campaign to encourage voters not to vote for this amendment. And the governor, Governor Ron DeSantis, was really spearheading a lot of it and using state resources to combat this amendment. The state health agency had launched a website earlier ahead of the election, encouraging people to vote against the amendment, saying that it threatened women's safety, that the current six week abortion ban protected women's health. He had press conferences with doctors who opposed the amendment. There was one lawsuit after the next tackling different issues, accusing the amendment supporters of petition fraud. And so there was a lot of efforts to paint this amendment as extreme and discourage voters from voting yes on it. There is a supermajority Republican control in the statehouse in Tallahassee,

two new legislative leaders for the next two lawmaking sessions. What's next for this abortion issue? In reality, I think status quo, I don't see there being a strong political desire in the legislature to change this six-week ban at all. You know, what might benefit the state, you know, considering this was a big issue with the amendment is maybe clarifying some of the current exceptions to this amendment. Those include to protect the life of the mother, if there's fetal abnormalities, rape and incest survivors, maybe we could see the state, you know, provide some additional clarity on that front. You know, there were some conservative lawmakers wanting to even further restrict abortion access. We'll see if those

measures get brought forward. What this ban, as it currently stands, is doing to women and other people who can get pregnant in Florida, how is it affecting their lives? Are we going to see drastic changes in the number of abortions being performed this year? We've seen a decline so far, definitely not as big of a decline as was maybe expected. So what is the six week ban doing for Floridians right now? And yeah, can there be any more efforts to change the policy in the future? Stephanie Columbini with our partner station WUSF in Tampa. Thanks.

Thank you. The failure of the abortion amendment was just one of the results of Florida voters swinging more conservative, especially in Florida this election. Wilkin Brutus is with our partner station WLRN. So Wilkin, how far did South Florida swing to the GOP this election cycle? The significant rightward shift in Dade County can't be understated, Tom. I mean, it had been losing Democratic support throughout several years, but this was a decidedly Republican victory. Donald Trump lost Miami-Dade County

by seven points in 2020, as a contrast, and he won it by around 11 points. A years-long drip, essentially, in this political shift turned into a full-on support. What about erosion in other Democratic strongholds, particularly in South Florida, like Palm Beach County? After this particular election, it remained slightly blue with Harris beating Trump by less than 1 percent, which is a strong indication of a rightward shift in Palm Beach County. Here's another example. indication of a rightward shift in Palm Beach County. Here's another example. Trump improved in Palm Beach County each time he ran, 41% against Hillary Clinton, 43% against President Joe Biden. And so it's just an indication that the county is shifting right. On that rightward shift, especially at the top of the ticket this year, the presidential race, who helped President-elect Trump turn South Florida more

Republican? The Hispanic voter shift, Trump's approach seemed to resonate with more Latino voters. He gained an increased number of black support. The margin of support for Kamala Harris decreased, even though there were still more support for Kamala Harris among the multi-ethnic black community, but they were still Trump gained more support in that regard. And there are also simply more Republicans who are registering to vote in Palm Beach County. And quite frankly, some Republicans are outspending Democrats. If you're part of the Democratic Party and you are a Democratic representative and you aren't seeing national support from the national Democrats, what do you expect locally? Failure. Wilkin Brutus, a reporter with our partner station WLRN. Thank you, sir.

Thank you. Now, at the beginning of the year, Governor Ron DeSantis had hoped to be on the ballot in November running for president, but his presidential campaign stalled out in Iowa back in January. Tristan Wood is a reporter with WFSU, our partner station in Tallahassee. Tristan, how has Governor DeSantis' presidential ambitions early this year changed his relationship with Republican lawmakers in Tallahassee? But he's still the governor. He's still very influential. And the ability to do line item vetoes and stuff like that in the budget definitely gives him a lot of influence, but definitely some lawmakers behind the scenes have some sour grapes there.

President-elect Trump has tapped a number of Floridians for his administration. What do you think does Florida's brand of Republicanism mean for the federal government beginning next year? You know, that's funny. And talking to a lot of state Republican leaders, they're thumping their chest saying, you know, we're going to make America Florida. Florida is the center of the conservative universe in America. Several of those key people, which are going to make issues that are pivotal to Florida, issues related to, you know, emergency responses for hurricanes, with Senator Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, his relationship with several South American countries, as well as his staunch

opposition to China, and other forms of communist governments is definitely going to reign through. And that type of message definitely appeals to a lot of the South Florida voters that Trump has won over, you know, over the last two election cycles. The governor's political future has dimmed and then brightened throughout 2024. What's the setup, Tristan, ahead of the spring legislative law writing session. The incoming Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez has pushed wanting to be a lot more fiscally constrained and fiscally responsible. A lot of the focus of this legislative session is going to be, at least from the House side, at reeling that spending in and seeing what ways that there can be cuts. As far as culture war issues, Randy Fine in the Florida Senate, he's running for Congress,

but he's already filed three bills, one of them lowering the gun purchasing age from 21 to 18. There are definitely lawmakers willing to push this type of culture war issues again, but whether that's going to be a legislative priority by the leaders in the legislature is yet to be seen. Tristan Wood with our partner station WFSU in Tallahassee. Thank you. No problem. Florida saw three hurricanes this season, Debbie, Helene, and Milton, all three hitting areas of the Gulf Coast. Helene and Milton were major storms bringing high storm surge. All three brought some significant flooding. John Davis is with our partner station WGCU in Fort Myers. John, how bad first was the

storm surge and the damage left by some of these storms? Well, the highest storm surge we saw from Helene was around the Cedar Key area. It got to around 9.3 feet. It was a little over eight feet in Sarasota with Hurricane Milton, where it was highest there. Now, there were times, you may remember, Tom, they were projecting storm surge as high as like 15 feet, kind of similar to what we did experience here with Hurricane Ian in 2022. So in some ways, it felt a little bit like we dodged a bullet just because it wasn't that bad. But obviously, eight to nine feet is pretty significant. Yeah, still more than a story worth of water being pushed ashore by these winds. What about the impact of the rains that Debbie and Helene and Milton all brought?

Well, that's where I would like to go back to Debbie, because the rainfall was really what the issue was. I mean, we had areas in Sarasota County, like communities that are pretty far inland. They're east of Interstate 75. So they were not in a floodplain. The people who lived there thought they were covered. The storm didn't make landfall until it was well north of that area. But they had so much rain. Their homes were inundated. Streets were flooded. A lot of emergency rescues just to get people out of those neighborhoods had to commence almost immediately. Each of these storms brings its own lessons. Your area in Fort Myers, we're still seeing the repercussions of Hurricane Ian from two years ago. What about some of the initial response after these three storms this hurricane season? season. One thing I will say is that Hurricane Ian, I really do think, did a lot in terms of just raising public awareness about the dangers that these storms pose. People didn't stay like

they did during Hurricane Ian. People evacuated. And I think the storm response has been somewhat rapid. I mean, we've already surpassed the point where Lee County's debris haulers, they're no longer collecting debris from Hurricane Milton. They've finished that effort in unincorporated Lee County. A big issue though for Fort Myers Beach is that they recently lost their class five rating with the community rating system. And that is what has historically entitled them to 25% discounts for property owners who have flood insurance policies through the National Flood Insurance Program. So now as folks are working to rebuild, dealing with all the flood damage on top of that, their flood insurance premiums are just about to jump 25%.

John Davis, a reporter with our partner station WGCU in Fort Myers. Thanks, John. In Jacksonville, Duval County voters elected three members to the school board endorsed by the Conservative Moms for Liberty group, giving it a majority. Megan Malakote covers education for our partner Jax Today. Megan, how has this more conservative school board impacted policy since the election? You know, right out the gate, they already have started to discuss things that it seems like will turn the school board a little bit more conservative. For instance, we've got policies coming up for a vote in January on sex ed. The new members are kind of pushing to make

it more of an opt-in policy rather than an opt-out policy than it currently is. Duvall, like a lot of large school districts, have seen a drop in student enrollment. How has the school board and the school district been dealing with that this year, and what decisions might it face next year? So I think there's some pretty good agreement in that regard, in that charter schools and the private school vouchers are pulling from students who might otherwise have been enrolled in traditional public schools. Where you'll see the members kind of diverge is in how they should fix that problem. And so some of the more conservative members are unabashedly a fan of charter schools, and they would like to see charter schools receive more funding.

However, others would like to see the traditional public school enrollment go back up. They would like to fill back marketing efforts and things like that to try to regain some of the students that have otherwise gone to charter schools. I want to visit neighboring Clay County next, Megan, because Clay County removed the most books of any school district in Florida in the last school year, 287. Tell us about that effort. Yeah, so Florida statewide, of course, has lots of, you know, is famous for its book ban efforts, and North Florida is no different. Clay County has removed a ton of books, like you said, 287.

Most of those were driven by one man who has complained about these books. And we should note that state lawmakers and state rulemakers have made some changes around the process of making a complaint about a book in response to so many complaints coming from singular sources and some sources that don't even have children going to a school district. Right, right. Yeah. Clay County is certainly not the only county that has had kind of one book ban evangelist

stand up and become the primary person. St. John's has had that happen as well. Megan Malacote covers education with our partner Jax today in Jacksonville. Thanks, Megan. Thanks, Tom. The big story out of higher education this year was in Gainesville and the arrest of University of Florida students protesting Israel's military action in Gaza. Anya Piniello is with partner station WUFT.

Anya, what's been the impact after so many months now of the university's response to those protests it saw in the spring? I caught up with one of the students who was arrested. Her name is Tess Siegel. I spoke to her in October. She was applying to school in Texas at the time, but she says a lot of the other students can't afford to go to private school. They don't have the means to study or live outside the state, and they are not eager to apply to another public university in Florida. On a campus-wide level, at the beginning of the school year, UF's interim president Kent Fox posted on social media telling the students that they do have a right to express themselves, but they also need to follow state and university laws. And there really have not been a lot of protests since then. Things have really died down.

Ben Sasse was the president of the university during the crackdown on these protests. He was hired back in 2023. He resigned 17 months later. He said it was because of his wife's health. She was diagnosed with epilepsy. What's the legacy of his very short tenure? So I think Ben Sasse will be remembered for two things. One, when he was hired, UF was ranked the fifth best public university in the country by U.S. News and World Report. And Sasse was hired to bring that ranking up even further. Instead, UF dropped down to number six and then down to number seven. Now, there are a lot of things that go into those rankings, but Sass was known for not putting a lot of stock into them, and that seems to have built up a lot of tension with UF's board of trustees.

The second thing I think Sass would be remembered for is his presidential office spending. In his first year in office, he spent a little over $17 million. That is more than three times what his predecessors spent in his final year. And a lot of the money that Sasse spent was spent on consulting contracts and hiring his former GOP allies and giving them high paying remote jobs. There's also been a lot of reporting on what's being called his lavish catering expenses. He reportedly spent $1.3 million on private catering, including a sushi bar that costs $38,000. And just last Friday during the Board of Trustees meeting, committee members passed new policies to make sure spending like this doesn't happen again without approval. That certainly is a legacy then. Meantime,

the timeline for his successor, what does that look like? Yeah, so there is a 15-member search committee that is in charge of choosing UF's next president. Their timeline to complete that search is not known, but back in August, UF's interim president, Kent Fox, said he expected a new president to be selected by the middle of next year. Anya Piniello is with our member station in Gainesville, WUFT. Thanks so much. Thank you. In October, a new state law took effect banning sleeping on most public property in an effort to prohibit encampments of people who are homeless. The law comes as many communities across the state are dealing with the housing affordability crisis.

Lillian Hernandez-Carabajo covers housing and homelessness for our partner Central Florida Public Media in Orlando as a Report for America Corps member. our partner Central Florida Public Media in Orlando as a Report for America Corps member. Lillian, how have communities responded to the new law banning encampments? They are responding with conversations, but it's hard. I don't want to take away anything they've done in the past, but finding land to build a shelter is hard, and finding communities or people willing to do these things is hard. When you do find a building that's empty and perfect for shelter, then communities start and neighborhoods start complaining that they don't want it there. Nobody wants these places in their neighborhoods. Some places have had to resort to criminalization because they don't have these shelters. So those are the responses that we've seen from the

community so far is either really trying to ramp up shelters, expand them, align with one another, trying to really build new programs, or in a lot of cases, they're having to criminalize the homelessness because they just need to comply with the new law. What does it mean if communities have turned to criminalizing being without a home? The issue of criminalizing homelessness is a little nuanced and multi-pronged. So, for example, in the city of Orlando, when they have an arrest of a transient person, a lot of times the charge is public urination, public defecation, or whatnot. Or maybe you're washing up in public.

Maybe you're just trying to sleep. So what we're seeing is not like criminalization of homelessness per se, but people are trying to survive out there, and in order to do so, sometimes they have to break the law. The criminalization means it's not what counties and cities are trying to do. But at the end of the day, as of January 1st,

residents and business owners will be able to sue counties and cities that are not enforcing this law. So they're against a rock and a hard place in a way. This challenge really does shine a light on the housing affordability crisis that almost all of Florida is experiencing. How are Central Florida communities responding and dealing with the housing affordability crisis? We are seeing the revamp and the adaptive reuse of a lot of hotels and motels in the Kissimmee and Orlando area. Tiny

homes are starting to make the conversation as are manufactured homes, actually 3D printing homes. And here in Brevard County, they just started 3D printing homes, which is, it cuts the cost of labor when there's a labor shortage, apparently, in that industry. It cuts on time. It cuts on a lot of things. So we're seeing a lot of innovation and a lot of different approaches to this because, yeah, people know that it's necessary. So it's getting imaginative. Lillian Hernandez Carabaggio covers housing and homelessness for our partner Central Florida Public Media in Orlando. Thank you, Tom.

Just some of the big stories across the state this year. Still to come, how your holiday menu may date back centuries and have an origin here in Florida. I'm Tom Hudson. You're listening to the Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio station. Covering Florida Navigator Program provides confidential assistance for Floridians looking to explore health care coverage within the federal health insurance marketplace. Open enrollment ends January 15th. 877-813-9115. We're coveringflorida.org.

This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. Thanks for being with us. Next week on our program, Climate Change on the Sea and Land here in Florida, we bring you reports from the podcast Sea Change. One explores how hotter ocean temperatures are affecting apprised and celebrated fish here in Florida, the mahi. We have to be really careful to not ignore that there could be a lot of negative consequences. This is a shift away from an equilibrium that's been established over the millennia. And a second report is on the storm in the state's home insurance market. How would you describe the state of Florida's property insurance right now?

I think it's a mess. Reporting from the podcast Sea Change is next week here on the Florida Roundup. Today, holidays often mean food, all kinds of food. What's on our family menu is a reflection of our culture, our personal history, and geography. And here in Florida, most of us are from somewhere else. About one out of every three people living here was born here. That's the second lowest proportion of people who are born and live in the same state. Only Nevada has a lower percentage of its population born in-state. So most Floridians come from somewhere else, and we bring with us our culinary tastes and traditions. This goes back centuries to the first Spanish settlers who were the first to bring pigs to the Sunshine State and help start America's barbecue craze. These things that you think of as

quintessentially Florida, or at the very least, you don't consider them Spanish at all. You can see a trajectory of them through time. And if you go backwards, they have their origins in the Spanish period of exploration, colonization, conquest. Kevin Kokomor is from Inglewood. That's along the Gulf Coast near Port Charlotte. I originally am from Florida and I actually am a USF alumni. I went to USF. I got my degree and my master's in history there. And then I went to Florida State University and got a PhD in early American history there. Today, he teaches history at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina.

He's also the author of La Florida, Catholics, Conquistadors, and Other American Origin Stories. I'm trained as a Native Americanist and early Americanist. I've always had a love for Florida and early Americanist. I've always had a love for Florida since I am a Floridian at heart. And the book essentially is about these early American Spanish threads to American history. He spoke about the lasting Spanish influence and its fusion with Native American cooking techniques with Dahlia Colon. She hosts the podcast Zest with our partner station WUSF in Tampa. In the book, you're arguing that barbecue is perhaps America's first food. Explain that.

Yeah, well, I also, a little tongue-in-cheek at the beginning of the section, is that this is contentious stuff, right? This goes down to, in a popular culture way, right? It goes down to like the very identity of what barbecue is best and where it comes from and who can lay claim. I picked up probably a dozen books while writing my chapter.

And one was from South Carolina and one was from North Carolina and one was from Virginia and all strenuously argued that their barbecue was the first barbecue. So these are fighting words to say that this stuff is. I sort of avoid all of that by saying all of the southeast is Florida and Florida is Spanish. And these traditions begin here in the southeast.

And they begin with the confluence of a Spanish tradition of pigs and a native tradition of smoking things. tradition of pigs and a native tradition of smoking things. And the first time that those two meet is either in Florida or somewhere in Georgia. We don't have perfect accounts of where exactly that is, but where we see that is in the primary source record about the DeSoto Entrada. And he's somewhere around the Georgia-South Carolina line where just in passing, you have this one sentence, and he cooked pigs for the natives. And you're sitting there going, well, that's not much, but you have this moment. That's got to be it. That is the Spanish side of things because there were no pigs here before the Spanish, right? And we know that that's just Colombian exchange objective historical truth is that Europeans, colonizers,

brought over pigs. And we have the evidence for that. Pigs first go to the Caribbean. They take over the Caribbean. In fact, the whole barbecue tradition in the Caribbean, the whole idea of a buccaneer is a French basically pit master in the Caribbean islands, because that's the one thing that they could rely on when there are these more or less uninhabitable Caribbean islands are just thousands of pigs everywhere. And so they would shoot pigs, smoke them, and then sell them to like passing by pirates. And that's where the term buccaneer comes from, because that's a way to roast. And so wherever these Spaniards go, they bring pigs. And that's because the Spanish have a long history pre-conquest, pre-Columbian exchange, of ranching pigs. And pigs are just one of these beautiful machines of ecological conquest.

They have a tremendous amount of their body fat is in energy. They grow hugely fast. I mean, they are the perfect food to bring with you because they can survive on anything. You don't necessarily need to feed them. And we know the reality of this in the 21st century is that there are pigs everywhere and they are an incredible, destructive ecological force. So we know that pigs are survivors. And that's why Spaniards got so good at ranching them.

They come to the Caribbean and wherever they go, I mean, they do it on purpose because they know that pigs will reproduce so rapidly that they will, within a decade, will produce a stable food source. And we know that DeSoto brings pigs with him from Cuba to Florida. And there are several entries where these chroniclers basically say it's taking like dozens of cavalrymen to just corral the pigs because we came here with 20 pigs and now we have 300 pigs. And they say multiple times the pigs ran away or we gave the pigs away or the pigs washed away. And they list 10 different times where the pigs have escaped. What we know about pigs, they probably survived. And there you go, right? There's why we have basically feral pigs in the Southeast. So the tradition of

pigs is Spanish. They bring them to colonize a place and provide food. They can depend on it. Natives have no idea what this is. This is incredibly destructive to the native world, by the way. You have natives who derive the vast majority of their calories from corn. And we know that they have to plant corn and the corn has to grow and everything that they consume is kept in dried corn, beans, and squash. So you can imagine what would happen when natives that are already depleted their populations, facing demographic collapse from disease. So we know the situation is already basically apocalyptic. And then you add pigs into it and you say, what happens when pigs run through a Mississippian community and eat all of the corn? They just destroy it. And they rip the corn out of

the ground and rip the corn up. Well, whoever survived the disease is now going to die of starvation. And so we know that pigs are not a triumphant story. And La Florida, the book, is not a story of triumphalism. This is violent in a lot of ways, and it's transformative. But pigs are another example of that, because pigs, we know now in the 21st century, I mean, it's impossible to get rid of them. So you can think what kind of ecological damage they would have done 500 years ago. Wow. Yeah, we've got them in my neighborhood. Actually, a friend of a friend just got into a car accident a couple days ago trying to avoid a pig in the road or a hog, I guess. They're big and they're scary and they can be violent.

They're extremely smart. And you think, well, one answer would be, well, if you're native, why don't you just eat pigs? Well, they don't know how to hunt pigs. And it's really hard to hunt pigs. We know that because it's hard in the 21st century to hunt pigs. So they are wily and they destroy everything. And so that thread of the barbecue story starts with pigs. And while that is fascinating, it's important to think about the implications of that. I mean, that is a very destructive force that comes in and totally upends the lives of the Native people.

I'm Tom Hudson. You're listening to the Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio station. Today, we're listening to an excerpt from the podcast Zest from our partner station WUSF in Tampa. Host Delia Colon is speaking with Kevin Kokomor, author of the book La Florida. So then how do we get to the barbecued pork? Because you have the Spanish who bring the pigs, and I don't know how they were cooking the meat before.

And then you have the indigenous people who have these barbecue techniques, but for various reasons don't want to eat the pigs. So how did the two converge? You think that this idea of curing meat with smoke is just universal, and it's actually an American phenomenon because there are other traditions of curing and preserving. In the Spanish tradition, it would be a matanza. It would be a gigantic pig roast. It would be like in these communities, you would slaughter a pig, but it would be part of the community, and the whole community would feast on the pig until there was no pig left. Think just like a big potluck. That's the way that went. So pigs would be slaughtered and eaten in one day. And every community would have people who over

time would donate the pigs to the community. So once a month, it would be your pig. And that's the way that the pig roast tradition is Spanish. But the way that they would, they're used to using salt. They're used to using different techniques. Now, wherever Spaniards go, and Oviedo Valdez says this in like the early 16th century, wherever you go in the Caribbean, wherever you go in Florida, in the Carolinas, in Texas, the first thing that Spaniards see are natives curing animals over smoke. They cook them on wooden grates called barbacoas. And that's where the term barbecue comes from, is from this scaffolding that they use. The term doesn't even come from the act of cooking.

It comes from the instrument upon which you cook, right? So we have the term barbacoa used all the time in the Southeast. They use it to store things off the ground. They use it to store corn. They use it to sleep on. A barbacoa is a raised wooden scaffolding. But if you're roasting slowly, so you can't use that as a grill. So we're not talking about just grilling fish or grilling alligator or whatever you would be doing in the Southeast. You can't use that over a wood grate for obvious reasons because it would burn up the grate. But what you're doing is you are preserving it using smoke and you're setting it high up to where the wood grate is not burning,

if that makes sense. And everywhere Spaniards go, and I really mean basically everywhere, in the Circum-Caribbean, the first thing they see is Spaniards smoking fish and smoking animals over fires on barbacoas. That is a uniquely circum-Caribbean, Taino, Arawak, Colusa, Tumuqua. I mean, it's definitely regional. I mean, even in the 21st century, right, we're Floridians. We know what smoked mullet is. It's processed the same way now that it was processed a thousand years ago, right? You smoke the mullet over heat, but not high heat, because you're looking to dry out the fish. You're looking to cure the fish. And that's how you keep something stable without refrigeration. That's their technique. So you mentioned fish and alligator. What else would the natives have been

eating before pork came on the scene? I don't know why alligator popped in my mind, except that we were thinking about coastal Florida. And we know that does happen, but we know fish is going to be huge. If you're in a coastal community, that's probably going to be the number one food stuff that you can rely on. There's a time when the mullet run. And when the mullet run, you would net as many as you possibly could. You would salt, you would air cure, you would smoke. And that would air cure, you would smoke, and that would be something that you would rely on throughout the year. And then there would be a time for you to cook and for you to grow corn, beans, and squash. And so the fishing and the

smoking fits into this model of a woodland way of living. And that is living, knowing every little nook and cranny of the environment, knowing the seasons, knowing how the place that you live works and exploiting that throughout the seasons. Did the Native Americans eventually adopt the idea of eating pork or was it just the Spanish adopting the native technique for cooking pork? So what would become those native peoples previous to Cherokees Choctaws Chickataws but also those people in the those groups in the 18th and 19th century they don't believe in land ownership they don't fence land in and so that really is a system that if they were lucky enough to kill a pig I'm sure that they would but they don't ranch in the same way that you would have to ranch pigs. Because if you're not pinning pigs in, and if they start to develop this feral attitude, I mean, they are hard

to kill. And natives still live in a very seasonal way of living all the way up until the 19th century, the early 19th century. And their lives still revolve heavily around agriculture, white-tailed deer, bear, stuff like that. You don't see a huge reliance on pigs until Europeans, Americans come in and tell them, I'm using air quotes, civilized Southerners farm pigs, and they use private property. Before that, there just wasn't the cultural, they just didn't do that. That's just not the way they saw their place on the land. What's your favorite way to enjoy barbecue or can you still enjoy it after writing this book? Well, so an intro to a chapter is about smoked mullet and man,

I do love smoked mullet and it's fantastic here. We do it here. But if I was to say my wife enjoys pulled pork and so she would be a Carolinian or North Carolina barbecuer. I enjoy ribs. And so I would probably be a Kansas City or St North Carolina barbecuer. I enjoy ribs. And so I would probably be a Kansas City or St. Louis barbecuer. But I've named a whole bunch of barbecues that are still pork based. And so that's all the Florida barbecue, as I would argue it. But she loves a good pulled pork sandwich. I love ribs. And we can't even see eye to eye on that. So. House divided. Exactly. Well, if that's your biggest marriage problem, then you're doing pretty great. So thank you so much for your time.

I appreciate it. Thank you very much. It's been a lot of fun. That was D'Lea Colon speaking with the author of the book La Florida, Kevin Kokomor. They spoke for the podcast Zest. Just before the holidays back in 2019, D'Lea visited Cindy Horton at Cracker Country. That's the Living History Museum on the Florida State Fairgrounds. They looked back at what the holidays were

like when Florida was still the frontier. The kinds of meats that we associate with our holidays today like turkey and ham and goose, those kinds of things would have been available back then and would have shown up on the holiday table as well. There are some traditions that were kind of unique to the time. A couple that I can think of from the fall that would involve food would have been sugarcane syrup grinding and boiling and also hog killing. Those were both two community events that happened in the fall of the year.

That would have been a social gathering. When it was time to kill hogs you want to do that in the cooler time of the year as if we have a cooler time of year here in Florida, That would have been a social gathering. When it was time to kill hogs, you want to do that in the cooler time of the year, as if we have a cooler time of year here in Florida, but it helps to keep the meat from spoiling quickly. And, you know, hogs, this is a very large animal and you might have shared that with several other of your neighbors. So they would have slaughtered the hogs this time of year and then processed the animal for all of its many, many, many parts. There's something that I've seen in several books that say, you know, they used every

part except the squeal. Most any house in a rural community would have had kitchen garden and you would have had staple things growing in there this time of year. We have some sorts of greens, we have brussel sprouts, we have broccoli, we have cabbages, of course citrus would be ripening around this time of the year. And all of those things would have shown up in some that's displayed on our kitchen table in the Carlton House for both Christmas in the country and for the Florida State Fair is called a Jam Cake, which is basically just either a yellow or a white kind of very rich butter cake, which

has some sort of fruit jelly or jam between the layers and all over the top, which was a very sweet dessert for the time period. That's Director of Museum Operations at the Florida State Fair, Cindy Horton, in 2019. I'm Tom Hudson. You're listening to the Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio Station. Covering Florida Navigator Program provides confidential assistance for Floridians looking to explore health care coverage within the federal health insurance marketplace. Open enrollment ends January 15th, 877-813-9115 or coveringflorida.org. This is the Florida Roundup.

I'm Tom Hudson. Great to have you along this week. So what's on your Florida holiday menu? How about something from the Caribbean with a Florida flair? Here's Tim Padgett from our partner station WLRN in South Florida. You call it Pao Angang, it's tradition. It's parang season at Sweet Hand Kathy, a Trinidadian bakery and restaurant in Miami Gardens, which means it's Christmas season.

Kathy Ann Paul, she's Sweet Hand Kathy's owner, was raised in the Caribbean island country of Trinidad and Tobago, and when December rolls around, she fills the place with Trinidadian parang songs. Very important. Christmas Eve night, we have a big event here. We have DJs playing outside in the park. But right now, Paul is inside her bakery kitchen making something else that's very important to a Trinidadian Christmas. Actually, more important. The heavenly rum-soaked fruit confection called black cake. It is arguably the most important food fixture of any Caribbean Christmas celebration.

January, everybody starts soaking the fruits. You heard her. It's so important that folks start preparing the black cake a year before Christmas. There's so many different fruits, like tutti frutti, which is made out of orange peels and citrus fruits. We have the cherry, the walnuts, the currants, raisins, and then you have the prunes. You have to soak it with wine and you have to soak it with rum. Especially rum. Did I mention for a whole year? But black cake is more than just rum cake, and it's more than the fruitcake Americans know. In fact, Paul's disappointment after

tasting American fruitcake here helped convince her to start a bakery and to make a lot of black cakes at Christmas. My grandmother inspired me to do black cake, right? And my grandmother would bake, and then everybody in the village always get a cake. So that's the reason why I am so used to cooking in large amounts. And in her own style. To turn that marinated fruit mixture into the dark, caramelized delight known as black cake, she uses her grandmother's ingredients. Cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, rose water, cola essence. But also her own secret ingredients

including granulated bay leaf. When I use it, it was a hit. I give it my own twist. I wish my grandmother was alive today to really taste my cake and she would have been really, really, really proud. Not just Trinidadians, but the entire Caribbean take pride in black cake, or at least the English-speaking islands. And that's the point. The islanders consider their Christmas black cake an exquisite refinement of the Christmas plum pudding their former British colonial overlords introduced to the West Indies. And every island's recipe, from Barbados to the Bahamas, Grenada to Guyana, is a little different. And that's created some fun intra-Caribbean rivalry.

But I know everybody who makes it from any country, they will say that their cake is the best. When Maurice Chang lost his job in Miami during the last recession, he decided to reconnect with his home island, Jamaica. Chang and his Jamaican wife Marcia opened Jamrock, a popular Jamaican eatery in Kendall. Each December, he bakes his family's black cake recipe created in Colleyville, Jamaica. It does have a lot of meaning to me. We try to be perfect with it.

Perfect, Chang says, because he feels it's a key part of preserving Jamaican and Caribbean culture here in South Florida, a culture he fears may be waning. We are getting a little bit more Americanized, and although we are not losing our identity, our culture, we are sort of in a survival mode. That renewed urgency to promote black cake has another interesting benefit. Bakers in South Florida's various Caribbean communities are borrowing from each other's recipes. Don't tell the Trinidadian Rum Makers Association, but the Trinidadian Kathy Ann Paul now uses Jamaican overproof rum to soak her black cake. I like it for my black cake. Most citrus smell. So I brought Paul's Trinidadian

black cake and Chang's Jamaican black cake back to the WLRN studios for our staff to try. Oh, wow. It's just a happy medley of goodness. Oh, that's so good. And the winner is? Well, you don't think we're really that foolish, do you? They were both superb. Thank you. I'm Tim Padgett in Miami. Holiday cooking can be about creating new traditions, but often it's about making recipes that have been handed down and mixing dishes from different families as we join together all at the same table. Reporters Danny Rivero and Natu Tway swapped holiday family favorites a few holidays ago. rice cooked together. And you usually take little bits of meat like bacon or just a pork chunk or a little bits of chorizo and you put it all into the pot and you cook it all together with the rice and the beans. And, you know, a lot of families have their versions of it. My family has our version of it. My mom's side of the family came from Eastern Cuba, where this is from. And I actually

recently really asked my grandma, my Abuela Nena we call her, and I asked her to give me her recipe for it. She's been making this for decades. I've been eating it for decades. And I really wanted that recipe, even if I could go around the corner, almost anywhere in South Florida, and get a pretty good pot of it, right? Same with my grandmother now. It's been, I think this is my first Christmas without her in a while because she moved back to Liberia. And I would always make something with her or I'd watch her make something.

We'd do it together, whether it's like Jollofrice or any other Liberian dish, palm butter, cassava leaf, or if we were just doing something simple. And being able to share my recipe with someone else really kind of made me feel like I was still doing that with her, even if she wasn't here, in a different capacity, you know. Jollofrice is a versatile, versatile practically one pot dish that comes from west africa it originates from senegal from the wolof people the drelif empire way back in the day it made its way throughout west africa nigerians ghanians liberians all have their take

on drelif rice and the essence of it is essentially rice in this tomato sauce this tomato coloring and you can generally add what you want Liberians add a lot of meats to jollof rice it'll be rice with mixed vegetables my mom likes add mushrooms you know onions bell pepper and then like chicken beef pork shrimp all those added together create Jollibee fries. So we seasoned it with some maggi and salt, pepper, oil, onion and garlic powder. We're going to make the sauce. You ready?

We're going to make the sauce. One, two, three. One thing I did is I played Celia Cruz while I was cooking because it seems very appropriate you know because she celebrates her West African heritage and I'm Cuban I celebrate her heritage and there's a pretty straight line. Okay now this is looking like a meal that I want to eat. I got the chicken and the veggies and the red rice. Mmm.

Now to this is fire. Even though I had followed every step possible in the recipe, I made the rookie mistake of taking my black beans off the water too early. I may have messed up on cooking the beans, but I'm not a bean rookie. It's not my first time making a dish with beans. And it may be my first time making congri, but I'm not a stranger to the dish either. I've had it many times here in South Florida. I know what it's supposed to taste like.

That's probably the best congri I've had in a very, very long time. It was so good. You just can't go wrong with a simple dish that is still so delicious, even when you mess it up. Natu Tway, making the favorite recipe from the grandmother of Danny Rivero and reporter Danny Rivero, making Natu Tway's grandmother's recipe. I'm Tom Hudson. You're listening to the Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio station. Finally on the Roundup, this one is for the chefs in the house. You know there's a lot riding on getting those potatoes just right, making sure the main dish is out on time, having enough dessert. Now imagine cooking for folks not headed home for the holidays after the meal, but headed to outer space.

That's what Bill Farina and Joe Alfano do. They're two of the chefs at Kennedy Space Center who cook for the astronauts before they leave the planet. We were trying to come up with this creative way to serve butter, right? So Bill put it in a pastry bag and seasoned it and twirled it on the plate and it would look like the… Vapor Trail.

The Vapor Trail. Vapor Trail butter. Yeah. What is this? They said, you know, they're just used to butter on the plate and they're like, well that's Vapor Trail butter. We take every opportunity we can to show them some creativity. Make them smile, you know?

There is a traditional crew dinner that's a barbecue. It's a barbecue chicken. It's brisket. It's sausage barbecue chicken, it's brisket, it's sausage, special beans, and everything has the name of, you know, Kennedy Space Center beans, Kennedy Space Center brisket. So that's always a special meal. They are really into tradition. They really, they like to eat what other astronauts that had come before them ate. There are some special meals that we always do for them and that it's always on the list.

We actually just do steak and eggs, if they request it, on launch day. if they request it, on launch day. NASA chefs Bill Farina and Joe Alfano. They spoke with reporter Brendan Byrne with our partner Central Florida Public Media. That's our program today. It's produced by WLRN Public Media in Miami and WUSF in Tampa by Bridget O'Brien and Grayson Docter. WLRN's Vice President of Radio and the program's Technical Director is Peter Meritz. Engineering help each and every week

from Doug Peterson, Ernesto Jay, and Jackson Hart. Our theme music is provided by Miami jazz guitarist Aaron Leibos at AaronLeibos.com. Thanks for listening and supporting public media in your neighborhood. I'm Tom Hudson. Have a terrific weekend. media in your neighborhood. I'm Tom Hudson. Have a terrific weekend.