Southern Foodways: Minorcans of St. Augustine

Photo courtesy of Southern Foodways

Here’s an old St. Augustine saying we don’t hear much any more: “Mullet on the beach!” It’s the battle cry of the Minorcans, a multicultural group descended from indentured workers brought to northeast Florida in the eighteenth century.

The shout could clear out churches, businesses and schools as Minorcan families dropped everything and headed for the beach, hand-sewn castnets in hand, after the schools of mullet running off the coast. Though the call to arms has faded over the decades, “mullet on the beach!” suits the Minorcans: it speaks to the close knit, self-sufficient nature of a people who have long relied on area waterways for food and commerce.

The Minorcan presence along Florida’s First Coast is traced back to 1768, when Scottish speculator Andrew Turnbull cast his colonial sights on northeast Florida. Turnbull hoped to cultivate indigo for Europe’s fashion markets, and purchased 100,000 acres south of St. Augustine. He populated the tract with indentured laborers from across the Mediterranean, believing them to be best suited to Florida’s climate.[1]

Turnbull’s workforce included recruits from Greece, Italy, and Minorca, a small island off the coast of Spain; the Minorcan contingent easily outnumbered the others. But plantation conditions in Florida proved harsh, and in just nine years, nearly 1,000 of Turnbull’s workers died from malnutrition, malaria, scurvy and gangrene. The remaining 300 fled to British St. Augustine in 1777, where they were granted parcels of land to settle.[2]

Since then, the vibrant Minorcan community has fortified the culture and foodways of the Nation’s Oldest City. The nexus of Spanish island culture, disparate Mediterranean traditions, and New World adaptations intrigued visitors. An author for the 1939 Federal Writers’ Project Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State, for example, recorded St. Augustine’s tempting, yet foreign, Minorcan offerings: “On narrow, twisting side streets, Minorcan restaurants offer pilau (a highly seasoned potpourri of rice with boiled meat, fish, or fowl), fried shrimp, chowders, and gopher (land turtle) stew.”[3]

Today, roughly 26,000 Minorcan descendants live in St. Johns County, Florida. Contemporary Minorcan cuisine is a throwback to times of scarcity, and reflect regional and seasonal availability. Dishes like pilau (pronounced perlow or perloo)—a baked amalgam of rice, tomatoes, protein and spices—stretched limited ingredients to fill hungry mouths. The Datil pepper, a spicy pepper endemic to northeast Florida, helped preserve and flavor a variety of sauces, soups and stews. Family recipes for Minorcan clam chowder and smoked mullet memorialize important connections to area rivers, estuaries and beaches.

In September 2015, St. Augustine will celebrate its 450th anniversary as the longest continually occupied European settlement in the United States. This collection of interviews is a small snapshot of a diverse, proud people whose local tenure helped keep the Nation’s Oldest City afloat—and fed—for 450 years.

Courtesy of Anna Hamilton at the Southern Foodways Alliance