My husband and I met as committed vegetarians, but once we got together, we began to eat fish. First it was small, overpriced bits of it that had been flown to restaurants in St. Louis, and then we ate much larger, fresher, cheaper entrees when we moved to Miami.
The mid-90s were a revolution in the restaurant industry in the U.S., as diners with disposable income were looking for more variety and fresher ingredients, and the gourmet movement that had initially been touched off by the likes of Julia Child gained momentum. We were happy recipients of this new food bounty. In the mid-1990s, transporting fish by air to the Midwest was cheaper and easier, making it a more likely menu item, and we found it hard to resist. We tried salmon for the first time although in retrospect, I’m sure this salmon was most likely farmed and not wild caught. There is a huge difference between the two, which anyone in my neighborhood--an old Scandinavian fishing town annexed by Seattle but independent nonetheless--could tell you. We bought smoked salmon and ate it with bagels and cream cheese, inspired by an old St. Louis Central West End deli called Kopperman’s, which featured bagels and lox on its menu. Our wedding menu consisted of gazpacho soup and salmon cheesecake.
But our fish consumption was few and far between until we moved to Miami.
It was in some ways harder to be vegetarians in Miami than it had been in St. Louis. The population of Miami is 65% Hispanic, and most Miamians are Cuban, owing to first the close proximity of Miami to Cuba and the resulting long-term ties between the two places and second to the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, in which as many as 125,000 asylum-seekers made it to Florida during the exodus sanctioned by Fidel Castro. I won’t attempt to explain Miami to you, as other writers have already done a better job than I can do, (most notably Joan Didion, with her book named after the city, and even she is limited, perhaps, by the fact that she is not Cuban and writing only from an outsider’s perspective). What I’m concerned with for the purposes of this post is the Cuban diet, which favors meat.
Popular foods vended on the streets of Miami include: fried croquettes of dough stuffed with ham or pork; fried potato balls with ground beef; and the Cuban sandwich, which is thick pieces of buttered white bread laden with cold cuts and cheese, thinly sliced, the entire stack pressed together. The Cuban sandwich is a menu item in South Florida McDonald’s restaurants. Most people assume Cuban cuisine would quite naturally feature seafood, but this is not the case. Cuba is an island, but it is a big island, and much of the cuisine is influenced by inland agriculture and Spanish colonialism, which accounts for the copious attention paid to pork and beef. A slab of beef or pork or even chicken slathered in mojito or some other aromatic sauce is the main feature of many Cuban dishes. Beef or chicken are often stuffed with sausage. Tamales always contain beef, and although arroz y frijoles is a dietary staple, the frijoles are often cooked with diced ham. Cuban cuisine is a vegetarian minefield.
The hub worked at the Miami Library and found himself a minority both as vegetarian and what Miami Cubans called an “Anglo,” regardless of his protests that his people are Germanic. A longtime coffee lover, he was easily sucked into the cultural event known as the Cuban coffee break, which occurs several times a day and is always a communal affair. The coffee is strong and steamed with plenty of sugar. A group of workers orders una colada at a walk-up window. The woman behind the counter is neither young nor called a barista in the Seattle sense. She is an older woman, a professional who has been making Cuban coffee ostensibly since birth. She produces one Styrofoam cup of syrupy brown coffee accompanied by a stack of little white plastic thimbles. Whoever ordered the coffee pinches the rim into a spout and doles out thimblefuls to the group. Most slug it back like a shot, but there are people who prefer to sip from their thimbles.
Also sold at these walk-up windows are ham croquettes and guava pastries. Once the hub succumbed to the congenial pressure of his coworker, Armando, (who fought for Castro but was then kicked out of Cuba on El Jefe’s orders). Armando wouldn’t let up until the hub ingested a fried ham croquette. He was sick all afternoon and doesn’t know whether it was the meat itself on his vegetarian system or the quality of that particular ball of fried ham and dough.
One popular Miami fast food chain is Pollo Tropical. We liked it because we could order vegetarian: arroz y frijoles (they made it without pork), fried yucca (which is a lot like French fries, only more fibrous), plaintains, yucca in garlic sauce. A veritable starch fest, if you're choosing to forgo the pollo but still craving el tropical.
Miami Cubans did not ‘get’ vegetarianism any more than they got that the hub wasn’t really “Anglo." Vegetarianism for any Cuban wishing to retain his or her culinary cultural roots is untenable. The only place we came across tofu while in Miami was in the few Japanese restaurants there. The hub’s friends at the library constantly tried to get him to eat meat and kidded him about the fact that his abstinence from animal flesh did not make him skinny, as if he should waste away on a meatless diet instead of sporting the inevitable slight paunch of a man in his late forties who is not obsessed with his physique.
Library-sponsored events held few choices for him, as even the paella, which looked promisingly laden with tomatoes and seafood, contained not just chicken, but also sausage.
In the midst of Miami at the turn of the last century, which is to say, in the midst of a Miami that with its dominant Spanish language and Cuban culture might as well be the capital of Latin America instead of a minor U.S. city, we learned to love fish.
You could eat fish and thereby appease your Cuban companions. There was always a fish entrée on the menu, and there were a few Cuban restaurants focused more squarely on seafood, a contemporary influence on the cuisine, owing in part to American diets more often opting for fish due to its health benefits and in part to the influence of more sea-centered Caribbean cultures.
Miami is of course a maritime city, and seafood is prevalent. Sushi is popular there. I remember ordering pan-seared tuna at a popular Coconut Grove restaurant and being surprised to learn that pan-seared means rare. I ate it anyway and loved it. I had never tasted fresh, good-quality fish before. There was something primal about its briny flavor, the feeling of iron and protein surging through your veins.
Lest you think the hub’s influence at work in my dietary choices, let me explain something: I led this charge toward pescatory indulgence. He is what I like to call “meatsqueamish.” (A play on the names for cities in the Pacific Northwest, which are Anglicized derivations of Native American words: Sammamish, Seaqualish, Snoqualmie. There is also “seasqueamish,” coined when I took the helm of a fishing publication.) The hub is much less inclined to eat meat than I am--unless there is a tuna melt in the vicinity. He loves him some tuna melts. I would order sushi and even big hunks of sashimi while he stuck to veggie rolls, miso soup.
One fish dish we could both consistently get behind was ceviche, which is a Spanish-Caribbean concoction of white fish marinated in lime juice. Done well, it is tart and tender. We ate ceviche at restaurants in Miami where there were large aquariums full of the fish that might end up on your dinner table, something the hub found disturbing, but not enough to deny himself a copious helping of ceviche.
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