Around lunchtime one recent Friday, the chef Kia Damon stood in front of a produce display at a Publix grocery store in St. Cloud, Florida, bobbing her head like a d.j. “Yeah! Yeah! Take a shower!” she said, holding a finger in the air as a sprinkler system released fine sprays of mist onto neat rows of cabbage and kale. “Me next!” Damon, who wore loose denim overalls with a baggy T-shirt and a vintage Orlando Magic hat, was eager to cool off: we’d just spent several hours on an airboat tour of the marshes of Lake Tohopekaliga, scanning the waters for gators and herons under the high glare of the sun.

Like Wawa, in Pennsylvania, and H-E-B, in Texas, Publix—founded in 1930 by a former Piggly Wiggly manager in Winter Haven, Florida—is a regional chain that commands an almost religious devotion. “There was a summer that I spent living with my mom when my mind was really clouded, my heart was really clouded,” Damon, who is thirty-two and grew up in Orlando, told me. “My brain was, like, Just need to go to Publix.” After perusing some locally made products—including Falling Iguana hot sauce, named for the stunned reptiles that drop from trees during cold snaps in South Florida—we got in line for Pub Subs, as the chain’s beloved sandwiches are known. For the past few years, Damon’s order has been jerk turkey with spinach and creamy Havarti on a multigrain hoagie roll; for a first-timer, she recommended a sub with chicken tenders, which get chopped up to insure optimal distribution. “I don’t trust other people’s delis,” Damon said, watching an employee behind the counter wrestle butcher paper around a heaping foot-long sub. “I trust what’s happening here.”

Publix is one of the many Florida fixtures that Damon takes very seriously. In her early twenties, after a few years of cooking in Tallahassee, she moved to New York, where she was briefly the executive chef at a California-inspired, Mexican-ish restaurant called Lalito, and then the culinary director of the women-in-food magazine Cherry Bombe. Almost immediately, she determined that being a Floridian was a liability: “They’re, like, ‘Oh, so is it true that y’all eat gator? Is it true that everyone over there is a redneck?’ ” She dreaded being stereotyped as “trashy” and “backwards,” but she also resented the assumption that she looked down on where she’d come from. “ ‘You’re just running away to the North from Florida because you hate it,’ ” she recalled people saying.

Her initial instinct was to clam up about the place she still considered home. Over time, she began to see the potential in doing exactly the opposite. As a descendant of Africans who were enslaved on Florida plantations, she felt that the state was underappreciated as part of the American South’s Black history, including its Black culinary history. Like many Southerners, Damon grew up eating barbecue, gumbo, and hush puppies; she also adored foods more specific to Florida, such as stone crab and datil peppers—a fruity, spicy variety cultivated in St. Augustine, where a free settlement for escaped slaves was established in the eighteenth century, and where Damon’s mother and grandmother were born. In 2022, she organized the Florida Water Tour, a series of dinners at restaurants in New York and other cities, featuring dishes that evoked classic Southern cooking and Florida’s sticky, tropical climate: root-beer-braised turkey necks, green beans cooked in coconut milk, roast chicken bronzed with earthy, bright-orange achiote, also known as annatto.

Online, Damon has cheekily adopted the label of Florida Woman—an epithet more likely to evoke antics of the “Tiger King” variety than those of an earnest Black millennial—and sells nineties-style “Floridacore” T-shirts in homage to such institutions as Publix and Waffle House. The recipes that she develops for her social-media accounts and for the Times and Southern Living magazine deftly combine her worldly palate and her reverence for tradition. In the caption for an Instagram post about fermenting boiled peanuts into miso, she joked, “I’m living George Washington Carver’s wildest dreams.”

The marsh tour and the Pub Subs were part of a meticulously planned itinerary that Damon had deemed a Big Florida Weekend—a primer for the uninitiated, and also a research trip for her forthcoming début cookbook, “Cooking with Florida Water: Recipes, Stories, & History of the Unsung South.” Currently, she lives in Savannah, Georgia, where she works as the culinary-operations manager for Grey Spaces, the restaurant group co-founded by the chef Mashama Bailey. On her days off, Damon steeps herself in Floridiana, studying vintage cookbooks like “Florida Fixin’s,” from 1992, and “The Gasparilla Cookbook,” a pirate-themed volume, published in 1961 by the Junior League of Tampa, that includes recipes for Cuban shrimp creole and grapefruit-aspic salad.

As an aspiring “stewardess of Floridian history,” Damon is as enthusiastic about the state’s most polarizing dishes as she is about its obvious crowd-pleasers, aiming to conjure an image of Florida beyond the loud luxury of Miami and the kitsch of the Keys. Her book will include an adaptation of the Orange Crunch Cake served at the Bubble Room, a campy restaurant on Captiva Island, and a recipe for crab chilau, the unofficial dish of Tampa, a spicy Sicilian-Afro-Cuban seafood stew. But there will also be a fried-gator po’boy and backwoods deep cuts like raccoon with sweet potatoes. “I had to make a decision. I was, like, Either it’s possum, it’s raccoon, or it’s squirrel,” Damon told me. “I don’t think I could fit all three in there.”

From Publix, we drove to Crystal River, in Citrus County, where, after an appropriately chaotic central-Florida afternoon—I briefly lost my rental-car keys in a wildlife refuge, stranding us until Damon persuaded an indifferent park ranger to help rescue them—we ended our day on the patio of a waterfront restaurant called the Crab Plant. As the sun set, and no-see-ums and mosquitoes began to feast on our bare skin, we split half a pound of steamed stone-crab claws, forking the slippery, tender meat from their shells; a pile of plump, cornmeal-crusted fried frog legs, which tasted like chicken with the texture of a firm-fleshed white fish; and a slick, snappy sausage made from gator cut with pork. Damon was especially interested in a creamy smoked-mullet dip, which was served in a small deli container with a side of crackers. Despite its reputation as a bait or “trash” fish (in the sixties, Florida’s conservation board tried to rebrand it as “Lisa”), the oily, strong-tasting mullet is so central to the state’s cuisine that Damon is considering having one tattooed around her left kneecap.

Damon knows that few of her readers are likely to try her recipes for mullet or raccoon or gator, even if she includes tips on where to order each frozen online. For her, that’s no reason not to publish them. She showed me an unedited headnote from the book, a defense of chitlins, or stewed pig intestines, a dish that she studiously avoided every New Year’s Eve for the first twenty years of her life. “There’s a joke amongst Black southerners that goes ‘We don’t gotta eat chitlins anymore because we’re free,’ ” she writes. “Why eat slave food? . . . But there’s more to it than that. At least to me. The value in chitlins is how enduring the recipe is. We’re talking centuries of true farm to table, whole animal eating.”

The next morning, we stopped at a gas station near Damon’s mom’s house for breakfast: fried chicken gizzards, fried fish, and cheesy grits pooled in butter, served in Styrofoam containers. We were on our way to the Florida Strawberry Festival, an annual event in a place called Plant City, the sort of extremely on-the-nose name that is common in Florida. (Damon was beside herself to learn, during one of our drives, that Orlando is situated in what was once known as Mosquito County.) It was at her first strawberry festival, Damon told me, that she became conscious of her state pride. “We’re driving into Plant City, and, the closer you get, you start to see all the strawberries everywhere, and the place looks like Candy Land,” she said, describing a uniquely Floridian mix of agricultural splendor and theme-park excess. As we made our way through an exhaustive list of everything she wanted to eat, including a buttermilk corn dog and a strawberry-crunch funnel cake that she’d seen on TikTok, a man about her age stopped her and asked how he knew her. It turned out that they’d worked together, in high school, in concessions at Universal Studios—a rite of passage for Orlando teens—serving Butterbeer at a Harry Potter-themed pub.

The last and most important item on Damon’s list was the strawberry shortcake from St. Clement Catholic Church, which runs a make-your-own station every year. (A sign advertised the parish as “Trinity Centered, Discipleship Driven. . . . . . & Shortcake Emphatic!”) Women wearing green aprons, with white doilies pinned to their heads, presided over comically huge metal mixing bowls of freshly whipped cream and locally grown berries, which we spooned onto small rounds of cake. “Over time, folks have been, like, ‘Oh, I don’t really care for the St. Clement shortcake, it’s just O.K.,’ ” Damon said. “But for whatever reason it’s always a ten out of ten to me. It’s never not delicious.”

To some, the Plant City fairground, pungent with the scent of livestock and swarming with people in strawberry-themed clothing, might have verged on nightmarish. It was hard to find shade; each car on an enormous Ferris wheel was emblazoned with the face of a different U.S. President. When the heat began to break, late in the afternoon, a welcome breeze turned sinister as it kicked up dirt, covering our sunscreened arms and faces in a thin layer of grime. But Damon was in her element, bounding around in a “Dirty South” jersey, a cowboy hat fitted atop the bandanna she had tied around her head. “This is it,” she had told me the day before, as we got into the car with our Pub Subs. “This is Florida. You’re hot. You’re overstimulated. The A.C. isn’t going on fast enough.” Still, she said, “I wouldn’t bother being from anywhere else.” ♦