Another repeat, I believe I published this here before, but I’m not sure. It was my third article for Florida Wildlife. They’ve gone out of business, so I guess they won’t mind if I print it here again.

The slow and sleepy Palm River emptied into Mckay Bay, a little estuary located at the extreme northeast corner of Tampa Bay, as far away from the Gulf of Mexico as it was possible to be and still be officially salt water. The 22nd Street Causeway and bridge separated the two bays and joined the community of Palmetto Beach to the north and what used to be open country to the south. The famous Seabreeze seafood restaurant and the shrimp boat docks were there, and across the road, a drive-in movie. The rest of the landscape was mangroves and water, it was the edge of the city; Tampa was a small town then and I was a young boy growing up in paradise.

Palmetto Beach (Desoto Park to our Cracker neighbors, for some unfathomable reason) was the southernmost part of Ybor City, the Latin Quarter of Tampa, with its rich history of cigar factories and Cuban and Italian immigrants. My grandparents had moved there from the old country as young men and women, early in the twentieth century to work in that industry. My mother and father were born there, as was I. By the 1950s, after the Depression, the strikes, and the cigar-making machines had put an end to the cigar culture, Tampa was starting to grow up and diversify into a commercial and manufacturing center. We were Cubans, with the language and culture of that nation, but we were Americans too. Our roots ran deep in Palmetto Beach, my grandfather’s first job had been working with his wife’s brother, a waterman crabbing the waters of Mckay Bay; his first house, built on pilings on the water, was blown away by the storm of ‘29. They found the roof four miles up the Palm River. The rest had vanished, along with everything they owned, but the pilings are still there to this day. My mother’s ashes are there too, under the black water, at her request, along with her brother’s. I scattered them there myself.

We lived all over Tampa, but we never strayed far from Mckay–we had relatives that lived there and we visited often and there was always great food at the Seabreeze and family nights at the drive-in. The bridge across the estuary was a favorite destination too, we often went fishing there at night, as did many Tampans, Colored, Cuban and Cracker, a place where everyone could meet in peace and enjoy the cool breeze off the water and swap advice and tall tales, even if the fish weren’t biting and the mosquitoes were. I can still remember the smell of the place–stale bait and fish offal, sea weed and bird droppings, the mangroves and mudflats and oysterbars at low tide. But it was not unpleasant, the place was biologically very productive, it was the smell of the sea, the smell of life. It was wonderful.

The Tampa Bay ecosystem was a great shallow bay fed by many freshwater streams and bordered by thick mangrove forests. The bottom was sand and turtle grass, and supported many fisheries, including the ubiquitous mullet and blue crab. Even today, after decades of industrial development and phenomenal population growth, the Bay supports both commercial and sport fishing on a grand scale. At mid-century, while I was growing up, it was a magical place for wildlife, although I didn’t know that at the time. I thought every place was like that. The blue crab, or jaiba, in the Cuban dialect, was king of the Bay. It is the same blue crab, Callinectes Sapidus, found all up and down the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, the same blue crab so prized up in the Chesapeake. It formed a part of everyone’s diet, and it was cheap and easy to get; if you didn’t want to pay for it you could always catch your own. There were so many blue crabs in season that anglers considered them a nuisance, when they were running you couldn’t keep bait on your hook. It didn’t matter whether you were fishing on or off the bottom, the crab is a strong swimmer and could steal your bait anywhere you put it. We all quickly learned the way to catch them on hook and line, tricky but not impossible. The crab was wily, but he was greedy too. If you reeled him in slowly you could bring him alongside, and if you were fast you could yank him up into your boat or pier before he realized what was up. Of course, the scrap was just starting. The crab is a fearless and aggressive fighter, and he will defend himself vigorously. We all learned the hard way how to avoid those claws! I say “he” because we always threw the females back in. To this day, I don’t know enough about crab reproductive biology to know if this was a valid conservation measure or not, but we did it anyway, it was what we learned from the old-timers, and it was how we insured there would always be blue crab to catch and to eat. They made good bait, too, and were plentiful enough to be used that way.

There are lots of ways to eat the beast, a variety of delicious seafood dishes and even the croquetas de jaiba sold at every Ybor City street corner from little carts lettered in Spanish–a bite of croquette, a drop of tabasco, a bite of croquette, another drop of sauce…But I remember most the jaiba enchilada, Tampa’s contribution (along with the fine, hand-rolled cigar) to world civilization. Strictly speaking, an enchilada is a Mexican meat dish, served on a tortilla and flavored with chile. But in the Cuban kitchen, an enchilada is a chicken or seafood dish, served with a thick sauce over rice. No chile is involved at all. There is no chile in Cuban cuisine.

Tampa has a substantial Italian immigrant community as well, and the Italian tradition of serving seafood over pasta was strong there, the result was the essential Tampa dish, jaiba enchilada, or spaghetti with crab meat sauce. Everyone in town was in on the secret, our Cracker neighbors knew the recipe too, and they honored us with their own quaint pronunciation, Crab Chilao. There is no special secret to making the stuff, no guarded recipe, just whip up your best spaghetti sauce and add lots of fresh boiled crab meat. Pour it liberally over No. 8 pasta and you are in business.

Of course, there is a little bit more to it than that. To do it right, the process has to be a bit more elaborate. Making a good Chilao was a weekend-long affair, and required an entire extended family. It all started on a Friday night, when the entire clan gathered at the 22nd Street Causeway in their cars, with all their tackle and coolers full of Cuban sandwiches (roast pork, ham and swiss with mayo, mustard and pickles on French bread) and cold beverages. While the women and youngsters gathered under the picnic shelters and prepared the spread, the men would wade out into the bay with lanterns, dip nets and a floating wash tub. The crabs would swim by, attracted by the light and they’d get scooped up and placed in the tub. The harvest went on until late into the night. The leftover ice from the coolers was then packed with the crabs to chill them for the ride home.

The next morning, the women would get together and clean the crabs, removing the sweet white meat and throwing it in to simmer in big aluminum kettles of tomato sauce. Usually, it wasn’t just crab meat, there was often a collection of the usual suspects, meatballs, Italian and Spanish sausage, sometimes even an entire pork chop or two, anything that was available in the kitchen. The men would play dominoes, smoke cigars, and drink demi-tasse coffee. By evening, the sauce was ready, and the aluminum pots, sealed with tinfoil, went into the refrigerator to cure overnight. Sunday afternoon, well after lunch, the family gathered, the coffee and the dominoes were put away and the sauce, after simmering over a slow flame all morning long, was ceremoniously poured over the steaming white noodles. Dinner was served.

I left Tampa after college, there was a hitch in the Navy, I worked a year overseas, and lived for decades up North and out West. I eventually moved back to the Sunshine State, although the twists and turns of life and career eventually led me to South Florida where I now live. I go to Tampa once or twice a year now, on business or to visit old friends, my family has mostly passed on now. It’s changed a great deal over the years, although in many ways I’m amazed how little it has changed. I can still get a decent plate of Crab Chilao, but I have to look for it now, and it’s never as good as the one Mom used to make. I usually try to make it into town over the Causeway, the bridge is new, but it’s in the same place where the old one was. The Seabreeze and the drive-in are gone. I stop in Palmetto Beach for a moment and look at the water that covers my mother and Uncle Manny’s graves. It’s all fading now, but sometimes, if the time and tide and wind are just right, I can take a deep breath and I smell the bay, the same bay, and yet not the same bay of my childhood. The kids growing up there now are not Cubans, they are Mexican and Central American, the Spanish is understandable, but strangely accented, and even the Palm River is gone, replaced by the new flood control canal. They will have their own memories of this place, which has actually changed very little in some ways. Many of the houses I see were there when I was a kid, they’re over a century old now. On the pilings where my mother’s place used to be, a small seafood wholesaler has built a pier and shack where his mullet skiffs and crab boats tie up. Off in Mckay Bay, I can see the floats of crab traps. There are still blue crab here.