Fight Fire With Fire

 by Fred Thomas

Yes, it's hot. In the banana republic known as Miami, it is very hot, but not so hot as, say, Chicago or New York City in a heat wave.

Instead, it is consistently hot here, day in and day out. The summer's heat triggers frequent brief hallucinations, delicious 60-second trips: Should I get my navel re-pierced (remembering that hot July day a few years back when the initial deed was done with unspectacular results in an Ybor City parlor), or should I chat up The Miami Herald features editors to inquire why its writers cannot pair a verb and a noun. These are not cold-weather ideas.

The heat alters the way we think. It is five-thirty in the morning, the sky is patent-leather black, illuminated occasionally by a distant flash of cloud-to-cloud lightning. The temperature is 85 degrees, the morning low. I am on my balcony, sweating, wondering if tequila goes with morning coffee. Tequila -- not for the bite but for the passion -- would be perfect for this heat. I stare out to the Atlantic, and she denies the irrefutable truth of the tides: The water is dead still, there is no movement.

In an hour, the paperboy will huff to the door with soggy newsprint. Barely past daybreak the serious tanners will be poolside, and the parade of Hatterases, Chris-Crafts and exotic Fountains and Cigarettes will run through the intracoastal cut, sassily spraying rooster tails announcing ribald intent as subtly as baying satyrs on the make, noisily accelerating through the chute to a course of zero-nine-zero, east into the sun, the cargo of PYTs pointing bared breasts full-front to the sun, heads tossed back languidly, daring -- daring! -- sunburn.

Were the hinges on the gates of Hell this hot, there would be lines of adoring supplicants, fighting for a good lounger and prime azimuth of Hades fire. But we know that real Hell would demand politically correct sunscreen, a rotten -- and demonic -- punishment. The tanners poolside, and by the Atlantic 50 steps away, are serious; they stew in mink oil, a curious and expensive oil reportedly extracted from a gland around a mink's derriere. SPF: minus 12.

Fight Fire With Fire

So: five-thirty, 85 degrees, I'm partially delirious from the heat. How, I wonder, would Tabasco and mango pair up? Magnificently. Coconut-encrusted broiled grouper with Scotch bonnet peppers and acidic red onions in a tangle? Precious. And I am not the only one with this obsession for pairing heat with the mundane. It seems that the best way to deal with the heat is to turn up the heat in the kitchen. When assaulted by the sun and sand and sticky car seats, the best antidote very well may be equally fiery cuisine. Fight fire with fire. Just as you wouldn't serve a trifling young red with Chateaubriand, you wouldn't serve namby-pamby cuisine when shaded pavement blisters bare feet.

This is not just my theory. Hot-weather nations (Thailand, Cuba, Mexico come to mind) and the American Southwest have long regarded heat -- by way of peppers and their derivatives -- as a hallmark of the cuisine, and have refined the pepper crops' intensity over the centuries, just as Dom Perignon perfected Champagne and its grape.

Florida has been relatively slow getting into the embrace-the-heat cooking style. The early-bird joints always seemed to specialize in fried seafood, and the cuisine today is just past the crawling stage. Indeed, the culinary lexicon now includes a few serious treatises on the amalgam of the best of the Caribbean fashioned by high-toned French, Spanish and South American toques beyond the usual jerk chicken and pork cliché from the starving and overtaxed nation of Jamaica. Thank God. (And while offering heavenly thanks, let us also rejoice that the sobriquet Floribbean is being scuttled as the cuisine develops its own legs and outgrows cutesy names.)

I am here to recommend two hot-weather cookbooks with Florida emphasis. One cookbook I've found workmanlike -- and always within arm's reach -- is Steven Raichlen's literate Miami Spice: Latin America, Cuba and the Caribbean Meet in the Tropical Heart of America. Another book I've found helpful, though not a bedside reader, is Jean-Pierre Brehier's Sunshine Cuisine, the companion to the PBS series of the same name. (Sunshine Cuisine is out of print, but your local PBS station may know where to find a copy.)

Raichlen, a Coconut Grove resident and writer, has solid cooking chops -- and, always a bonus, good journalistic skill. I like the cookbook writer who can file a deadline story about a supermarket burning down as well as he can wax poetic about the virtues of the Key Lime. His Miami Spice is at once a thorough cookbook, a travelogue and a primer on the weird stuff sold in third-world supermarkets: yuca, name, chayote, sapote, boniato. His style is breezy, packing tidbits in passing without being pedantic or condescending, a writing device the cuisine newcomers -- and aren't we all? -- will find comforting. (In contrast, how many French cookbooks have you read that start with: "Make paté brisee," with nary a clue to the ingredients or method?)

Miami Spice takes you, the reader/tourist, into Little Havana, Little Haiti and into the downtown Miami restaurants and Miami Beach hotels for best-of recipes, from the Fountainbleu's cheesecake to famed Joe's Stone Crab mustard sauce (Combine 4 teaspoons Coleman's dry English mustard, 1 cup Hellmann's mayo, 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce, 1 teaspoon A-1, a little salt and cayenne pepper. Chill.). He takes you into Latino supermarkets to introduce you, gently, to the odd little ingredients you won't find at the local A&P. His lyrical sidebar -- half play-by-play sportswriter, half wine spectator -- on passion fruit includes this passage:

The easiest way to eat a passion fruit is to cut it in half with a sharp knife, working over a bowl to catch the juices. Inside the 2-inch sphere you'll find a wet, bright orange pulp comprised of hundreds of small juice sacs embedded with tiny, brunch black seeds. Passion fruit flesh has the tartness of lime juice, the sweetness of honey, and a perfumed flavor reminiscent of guava, lychee, and pineapple. Small wonder it's beloved throughout the Caribbean, Central and Latin America, Africa and Asia.

And regular readers of TW3 spitball goddess Colette Bancroft will find delight in Raichlen's sidebar on Meyer's Fire, named after the brainy sidekick of Travis McGee, author John D. MacDonald's beloved boat-bum character. Writes Raichlen: "In the book Dreadful Lemon Sky MacDonald describes Meyer's 'Superior Cocktail Dip,' a virulent mixture that has been known to make the unsuspecting 'leap four feet straight in the air after scooping a tiny portion on a potato chip.'"

The concoction is divine and simple to put up. To 2 Tablespoons of dry Chinese mustard in a bowl, add about 2 Tablespoons of Tabasco sauce, enough to make a thick paste. Let stand for about three minutes, then add 3 ounces of cream cheese and 3 Tablespoons of mayonnaise and mix well. Serve with chips or fresh vegetables. And watch your guests light up. Given this heat, I'm making this mixture by the pound (it doubles and quadruples without ill effect), serving with local nachos.

This delighting book offers recipes for dinner parties as well as for dinner in. One that has captivated me is Raichlen's rum-soaked veal chops with pineapple salsa, even though finding veal chops in a Latino market in Miami is near impossible.

The cuisine of Florida -- the allusive pairing of Caribbean ingredients with common foodstuffs, especially fish -- is being taken seriously because the great dining halls of Miami have hired top-drawer chefs. One is Frenchman Jean-Pierre Brehier. His book, Sunshine Cuisine, is a nice little overview of the cuisine.

Brehier, like most Florida chefs, is in love with seafood and the requisite use of peppers, or other means of heat. Want to fight off the effects of a good day in the sun? Try his radish and cucumber salad with chive vinaigrette, a yin-yang dish that will have your tastebuds tripping. His French roots -- once a chef at Le Vendome -- show with his garlicky shrimp aioli, and his new Florida roots show in his grilled chicken salad with chili mayonnaise. Yet it appears his real love is the abundant Florida seafood. Brehier offers nearly two dozen takes on fish, all dressed up with salsas, sauces and relishes. Favorites: sauteed salmon with citrus and chili salsa and mahi-mahi with ginger-lime sauce. Other non-fish winners: lamb chops with an aggressive cumin vinaigrette, and silky roasted garlic flan.

Selected books reviewed in The Scarlet Pumpernickel may be purchased at a discount on the Books For Cooks aisle at The Bookstall.

Fred Thomas has been a writer and editor for more than two decades, as a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, as tabloid editor at The Tampa Tribune, as group editor for a chain of Florida magazines, and as founding editor of Southern Homes. Now at home on the beach in South Florida, he specializes in writing about food and architecture. He knows the secret of perfect French fries.