An ode to The Gasparilla Cookbook
And what it tells us about Tampa
The last time I was here I wrote about Florida as a constellation of spectacles, and I can’t believe that I forgot to include Gasparilla, which was last weekend.
A few months ago, while trawling through the Friends of the Library book sale in Gainesville, I picked up a copy of The Gasparilla Cookbook. I didn’t know much about it: that it’s in the Southern Living Hall of Fame or that it’s still in print and on a 50th-anniversary edition. All I knew was the serendipity of flipping it open and seeing a Haslam’s sticker on the inside cover, signaling that somehow this book came to me from St. Pete. Swoon.
Published in 1961, the introduction starts like this: At a famous restaurant in New Orleans (could it be Brennan’s? Galatoire’s? My money is on Antoine’s), a woman asks her server for dinner recommendations. She wants something “new and different.” Le filet de pompano en papillote (pompano cooked in a paper bag), he suggests. “We have that at home,” the woman says. Le filet de truite amandine (trout garnished with an almond sauce) is next. We also have that at home. Then comes le coeur de filet de boeuf marchand de vin (beef served with a red wine reduction) and langoustine thermidor. All French, and all of which are served at home.
“Where are you from?” the server asks, incredulous.
Tampa.
“This is Tampa,” the introduction goes on, “named by the Caloosa Indians long before the advent of the Spanish Conquistadors. This is Tampa, which has been occupied in turn by Spanish treasure seekers, missionaries, pirates, U.S. troops garrisoned here during the Seminole Indian Wars, a French Count who was the head surgeon of Napoleon’s Navy, pioneers from southern states, pioneers from northern states, Union troops, Confederate troops, Cuban cigar makers from Key West, troops in the Spanish-American War, Tin Can tourists, wealthy tourists, real estate speculators, Air Corps personnel in World War II, and last of all an influx of permanent residents who have made this the fastest growing area in Florida.”
It’s signed by the Junior League of Tampa, but I really want to find the woman, or women, who penned it and shake her hand.
The Gasparilla Cookbook is, as most cookbooks are, a product of its time. There is a thick swath of haute French influence (Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published by Knopf that same year) and an entire subsection dedicated to congealed salads. Sprinkled in are some surprises, including more than a few nods to New Orleans—a couple of gumbos, beef grillades, and a “Gasparilla ice cream” that looks an awful lot like bananas foster (created at Brennan’s) sub pineapple—as well as references to the internationalism of Tampa’s community. There’s a recipe for feijoada (the Brazilian equivalent of Hoppin’ John), lebkuchen (German Christmas cake-cookies), tyropitta (Greek cheese-filled handpies), and papas rellenas (Cuban fried potatoes).
And then there are the recipes that make my heart do a happy dance: lime pie, a Cuban sandwich (with salami, darlings), kumquat marmalade, Grouper chowder (eat your heart out, New England), devil crab, and guava turnovers.
Despite the not-subtle jab at New Orleans in the beginning of the book, I can see the Junior League’s point that the two places are similar, evident by the fact that they call Ybor City “the Latin Quarter.” Tampa is, as they demonstrate, an amalgamation of influences from immigrant groups the world over who made the area their home, and those influences are woven into the fabric of its vibrant cultural landscape.
So why was the waiter so confused?
The answer lies, I think, in a critical difference between the two places.
In The Gasparilla Cookbook, the Junior League tries to position Tampa’s culinary landscape as one that echoes that of New Orleans. Tampa has star power à la Galatoire’s (Bern’s opened in 1956), it has renowned restaurants à la Antoine’s (The Columbia opened in 1905), it has little shops where you can pick up coffee and staple pastries à la Cafe du Monde, like guava turnovers from La Segunda (opened in 1915) or flan from Alessi (opened in 1912). But, and this is worth unpacking, Tampa’s cuisine is not pedestaled on the driver of what has canonically been considered classical fine dining.
Tampa’s dominant influences are Cuban, not French.
Which makes Gasparilla’s raison d’être so strange; it’s modeled after Mardi Gras (the names are eerily similar, no? Move a few letters, flip one, and split another in half). In 1904, a society editor for the Tampa Tribune asked an engineer from New Orleans for ideas to spice up Tampa’s May Day parade, and he suggested something like Mardi Gras but with pirates. He got together with a group of men in what would become Ye Majestic Krewe of Gasparilla—yes, there are krewes here too—rented costumes from the Big Easy, and staged a horse-drawn invasion at the Tampa Bay Hotel (now the University of Tampa), where elites from around the country came to stay during the harsh winters up north.
Eventually the invasion took to the bay, and the rest unfolded from there. A myth about Jose Gaspar formed, though it’s unlikely that he was actually real (The Gasparilla Cookbook will lead you to believe otherwise), and crystalized the region’s iconographic infatuation with privateers-cum-pirates-cum-buccaneers. Now over 70 krewes participate in one of the country’s largest outdoor festivals; people dress up, they fling beads, and they drink a lot.
Which is all good fun, and bartenders make great money that weekend, but a New Orleans festival cloaked in pirate garb and Captain Morgan sponsorships misses the boat. Gasparilla isn’t a celebration of local culture—it’s a celebration of a century-old marketing gimmick. And if Florida is bound by spectacle, then it’s booned by those marketing gimmicks.
The Gasparilla Cookbook rescues some of what the Gasparilla festival neglects, I think, and the beauty of Tampa comes through in its yellowed pages, in recipes for ham jambalaya and segetinger (which I think is a sauerkraut goulash) and chocolate pompadour (a recipe from Barbados). “For those of you who, like the waiter, have never heard of Tampa, this book has been compiled.” I don’t think the book fully accomplishes the aim of putting Tampa on the map; but what it does accomplish is a visible gesture toward the ways that Tampa, like New Orleans, has a rich, diverse, and thriving foodscape.
That foodscape is just not French.
If you don’t believe me that this is significant, the Beard list of semifinalists came out last week. It doesn’t contain a single mention of Tampa.
Not surprisingly, there are 12 nods to New Orleans.
Field Notes: The Dolly Parton book launch was a lots of fun. Afterward I had drinks with my friends Tyler, Patrick, and Julio. Julio’s book, Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 from UNC Press, should be high up on your list of books to read.
Tasting Notes: Here’s a recipe from The Gasparilla Cookbook, which you can buy here. I had a helluva time picking this out because there’s just so much to choose from: an artillery punch from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s son, filet salteado from the Columbia Restaurant, and a dessert called Sunshine Island, which won second place at the All-Florida Orange Desserts Contest. I settled on the dressing below, a riff on a thousand island, because it is probably one of the easier things to make. It apparently comes from a guy who cooked for King Alphonso of Spain in the summers.
“Pelicant-Be-Beet” Salad Dressing:
Combine 1 pint mayonnaise with
1 1/3 cup ketchup
1 cup beets, drained and finely chopped
1/2 cup pickle relish
1/2 cup green pepper, finely chopped
1 large egg, hard boiled and finely chopped
Onion juice (to taste)
(Optional) 1 tbsp olive oil
(Optional) 1 tsp paprika
Makes 1 quart
End Notes: A year before The Gasparilla Cookbook was published, in February 1960, Black students from Middleton and Blake high schools staged a sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Tampa as part of a regional effort to desegregate restaurants. There’s no explicit reference that I can find in the cookbook to Black contributions to Tampa’s culinary and political landscape, so I’d like to include a note about it here.
Engaging with the broader civil rights movement, students worked with the Florida chapter of the NAACP to stage a weeklong protest at Woolworth’s, mirroring other sit-ins that occurred at Woolworth’s locations across the south including Greensboro, NC, and Jackson, MS. In Tampa, according to Andy Huse, the police department cooperated fully with the protesters, preventing the kind of violence that erupted at other protests around Florida, like in Jacksonville and Tallahassee.
In From Saloons to Steakhouses: A History of Tampa, Huse provides an excellent account of the sit-in in the chapter “A Seat at the Nation’s Table.”
