Carmellini Andrew - American Flavor

Urban Italian

To our families

Contents

WHEN I THINK ABOUT AMERICAN FOOD, I THINK about the road. Ever since I was a kid, Ive spent a lot of time driving across the country, and thats how I learned firsthand about regional American cooking.

Im a Midwesterner born and raised, but my dads a Florida boy: he grew up fishing in the Miami canals, hanging out on the beach, not wearing shoes much. When he was seventeen, he moved north to Ohio to work with his uncles in the terrazzo business. After he met my mom, he decided to stay in Ohio for goodbut he never got used to those flat, gray, icy Ohio winters. Every chance he got, hed head back down south, and when I was lucky, I got to go with him. Nothing stopped him: not bad driving weather, or work, or major life events. One of my first memories is driving home from Miami with my dad and my Uncle Jimmy in my dads yellow Pontiac Tempestand finding a new baby in the house when we got there. My brother had been born while we were heading south.

My mom sometimes flew down to meet us in Miami, but she didnt really like to do the road trip. I cant blame her. Those trips were everything youd expect from a two-day drive with two boys in the car, and then some: my brother and me fighting, my dad yelling at both of us, too much food in the car, not enough washing of bodies or changing of clothes. So most of the time, it was just the guys.

I loved being on the road. I used to try to stay awake, no matter how tired I was, to watch the Rust Belt winter turn into green southern endless summer. We would leave Cleveland really late at night; by the time the sun came up, wed be in the foothills of Appalachia. Our first stop was always at a pancake house in Beckley, West Virginia. Even though we were only a couple of hundred miles away from Cleveland, that pancake house felt really foreign to me, because it served two things I could never get back home: buckwheat pancakes and fried mush. Thats basically sweetened polenta, made into patties and then fried. When its ready, you drizzle it with maple syrup and maybe some crumbled sausage meat. It was pretty much the best road food ever.

After Beckley, wed drive straight over the Appalachian Mountains till we hit a particular rest stop in the North Carolina Piedmont. We almost never stayed in hotels: why pay for a room, my dad would say, when you can sleep in the car for free? So wed pull off the road and sleep right there in the car, our feet hanging out the open windows. (This was back in the day when you could do stuff like that without getting your throat slit by a crazed rest-stop maniacor at least before we knew we should be worried about crazed rest-stop maniacs.)

Wed cook on the side of the road, too. My dad had a Coleman gas-fired stove hed haul down to Florida with us, and in the mornings wed eat rest-stop fry-up. That was an open-faced sandwich, just ham and eggs and bread, with maybe some coffee (I know, I knowbut it didnt exactly stunt my growth, or my brothers, either). Breakfast, like most activities, usually included what my mom would call tussling between me and my brother, which made my dad upset; or we wouldnt clean up our mess in the back seat or on the picnic table, which also made my dad upset; or we wouldnt be ready to go when he wanted to hit the road, and that, too, made my dad upset. Once he got so mad, he threw a can of Coke at my brother. Vince ducked, and the Coke hit this big burly West Virginia trucker in the head. They almost went Swing City. It was exciting, the road.

WITH MOM AND AUNT SYLVIA IN FLORIDA

When we got down into South Carolina, wed hit another restaurant for dinner. By then we were into Southern cooking for real: it was all Alabama slaw, rice and gravy, country-fried steak. The weather would get warmer; wed make our way down I75 or I95; the land would flatten out; when it got so a bump in the road counted as a hill, we were in Florida. Wed cross the Suwannee River, and then wed stop for citrus at Boudrias Groves in Fort Pierce. Wed tried every citrus place on the road to Miami, and this one had the best stuff: grapefruits and oranges and red oranges too, and red orange juice, which was like drinking paradise. We always brought a case of fruit and a couple gallons of orange juice down to Miami, because even though it was just down the way, there was no way you could get citrus like this in the city.

We ate plenty of very local citrus in Miami, though. My grandmothers place in Little River had a double lot, and it was full of mango trees and grapefruit trees and orange trees and Cuban banana trees and sour orange trees, even a sapodilla tree. For breakfast Id eat ripe grapefruit right off the tree, sprinkled with sugar, and after dinner, Id have caramelized fresh-picked bananas with sugar and ice cream and a little bit of rum (my Italian family didnt exactly believe in the no-drinking-till-youre-twenty-one thing). If I was really lucky, my aunt or my grandma would make a sour orange meringue pie.

There was always fresh fish at my grandmas place, too, even though we didnt catch much of it ourselves: we didnt have the touch. Wed spend hours fishing from a bridge or off the beach; the guys on either side of us would be reeling in yellowtail snappers, and all wed catch were sunfish. At the end of a long day of fishing, my aunt would go down to the docks and buy fish right off the boats. Shed cook up Southern feasts with my grandma just about every night when we were in Miami. My grandmas kitchen was the best joint around.

But even though the food at my grandmas place rocked, my favorite thing to do in Miami was to go out to a fancy restaurant for dinner. Wed go to Cliffords on Route 1, which was real 70s Miami fabulous: plush blue curtains, flocked velvet wallpaper, prime rib. I had stone crabs for the first time at another fancy high-70s joint in the city, and it blew my mind. You didnt get anything like that back in Ohio, that was for sure. For me, Miami was the gastronomic Promised Land, the epicenter of culinary cool.

The ride home was roughI hated leaving behind the sunshine and heading back into the sad, gray Ohio weather. My dad would give us a treat right near the end: in southern Ohio, wed always stop either at the Clifton Mill, an American Inn with American Inn Fare, or at the Golden Lamb, in Lebanon, Ohio, another Olde American Inne (really old: there was a sign saying Mark Twain had spent a night there). These days, the Golden Lamb has a gift shop attached to it, selling Christmas ornaments and overpriced souvenirs, but back then it was the fancy place to have dinner. The men were in suits and ties; the women wore high heels and had their hair done. There was deep-pile carpeting, classical music, and wait staff in formal wear. My dad was a sharp dresser, and usually he was pretty strict about appropriate clothingwe always went to church in jackets and ties, we dressed up for family parties, and we cleaned up when we went out to eat. But wed walk into the dining room at the Golden Lamb in our sweatshirts and jeans and tennis shoes after twenty-four straight hours on the road without showers or toothbrushes or pretty much any of the basics of personal hygiene. We were stinky. We were gross. People edged away. It was the best.