Her initial instinct was to clam up about the place she still considered home. Over time, she began to see the potential in doing exactly the opposite. As a descendant of Africans who were enslaved on Florida plantations, she felt that the state was underappreciated as part of the American South’s Black history, including its Black culinary history. Like many Southerners, Damon grew up eating barbecue, gumbo, and hush puppies; she also adored foods more specific to Florida, such as stone crab and datil peppers—a fruity, spicy variety cultivated in St. Augustine, where a free settlement for escaped slaves was established in the eighteenth century, and where Damon’s mother and grandmother were born. In 2022, she organized the Florida Water Tour, a series of dinners at restaurants in New York and other cities, featuring dishes that evoked classic Southern cooking and Florida’s sticky, tropical climate: root-beer-braised turkey necks, green beans cooked in coconut milk, roast chicken bronzed with earthy, bright-orange achiote, also known as annatto.
Online, Damon has cheekily adopted the label of Florida Woman—an epithet more likely to evoke antics of the “Tiger King” variety than those of an earnest Black millennial—and sells nineties-style “Floridacore” T-shirts in homage to such institutions as Publix and Waffle House. The recipes that she develops for her social-media accounts and for the Times and Southern Living magazine deftly combine her worldly palate and her reverence for tradition. In the caption for an Instagram post about fermenting boiled peanuts into miso, she joked, “I’m living George Washington Carver’s wildest dreams.”
The marsh tour and the Pub Subs were part of a meticulously planned itinerary that Damon had deemed a Big Florida Weekend—a primer for the uninitiated, and also a research trip for her forthcoming début cookbook, “Cooking with Florida Water: Recipes, Stories, & History of the Unsung South.” Currently, she lives in Savannah, Georgia, where she works as the culinary-operations manager for Grey Spaces, the restaurant group co-founded by the chef Mashama Bailey. On her days off, Damon steeps herself in Floridiana, studying vintage cookbooks like “Florida Fixin’s,” from 1992, and “The Gasparilla Cookbook,” a pirate-themed volume, published in 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 as enthusiastic about the state’s most polarizing dishes as she is about its obvious crowd-pleasers, aiming to conjure an image of Florida beyond the loud luxury of Miami and the kitsch of the Keys. Her book will include an adaptation of the Orange Crunch Cake served at the Bubble Room, a campy restaurant on Captiva Island, and a recipe for crab chilau, the unofficial dish of Tampa, a spicy Sicilian-Afro-Cuban seafood stew. But there will also be a fried-gator po’boy and backwoods deep cuts like raccoon with sweet potatoes. “I had to make a decision. I was, like, Either it’s possum, it’s raccoon, or it’s squirrel,” Damon told me. “I don’t think I could fit all three in there.”
From Publix, we drove to Crystal River, in Citrus County, where, after an appropriately chaotic central-Florida afternoon—I briefly lost my rental-car keys in a wildlife refuge, stranding us until Damon persuaded an indifferent park ranger to help rescue them—we ended our day on the patio of a waterfront restaurant called the Crab Plant. As the sun set, and no-see-ums and mosquitoes began to feast on our bare skin, we split half a pound of steamed stone-crab claws, forking the slippery, tender meat from their shells; a pile of plump, cornmeal-crusted fried frog legs, which tasted like chicken with the texture of a firm-fleshed white fish; and a slick, snappy sausage made from gator cut with pork. Damon was especially interested in a creamy smoked-mullet dip, which was served in a small deli container with a side of crackers. Despite its reputation as a bait or “trash” fish (in the sixties, Florida’s conservation board tried to rebrand it as “Lisa”), the oily, strong-tasting mullet is so central to the state’s cuisine that Damon is considering having one tattooed around her left kneecap.