Croquetas + Croqueta Preparada: Croquettes are one of those foods which, despite their persistent presence in any number of cuisines, I tend to associate exclusively with the past, memories of both outmoded faux-French Continental cuisine and the ‘80s-excess-oriented buffet tables of my early youth. I remember finding a certain comfort in an item so closely resembling one of the few things I ate at the time: fish sticks. While the croquette usually has high-culture aspirations (despite, in my experience, being invariably filled with some goopy version of Chicken Cordon Bleu), the two things actually very similar in construction, with a whipped filling making up the soft center for a heavily breaded, log-shaped fritter. I stumbled upon a different iteration last year at an Indonesian restaurant, in a Dutch-derived form known as the Rissole, but didn’t think much of it.
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Another trip to Florida means, as is the case with a trip to anywhere further than the local corner store, another round of exhaustive investigation and cataloguing of everything stupid thing I stuffed into my bottomless maw. That said, let’s cut to the chase, in the first of a pair of posts dedicated to this voyage to America’s southernmost corners, this one dedicated to the pleasures of traditional old-Florida eating.
When I think back to meals eaten in the muggy, mysterious state of Florida, a few crystalline memories come to mind, most of them bubbling up from from the distant past: a Burger King Kids Meal with a vanilla milkshake, enjoyed with relish in the back of a rental car during a torrential downpour; a similarly arrayed, differently proportioned burger at Cosmic Ray’s Cafe in TomorrowLand, where I sat puzzled by the retro-chic conglomeration of past with future; another Burger King meal, eaten 20 years later, this one delayed by a comical series of highway misadventures, most notably my reflux-stricken father forgetting to take his pre-meal acid blockers, forcing us to drive 40 miles down 95 in search of a second Burger King, apparently the only highway restaurant capable of catering to his affliction.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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