The Yearling Restaurant
14531 East County Road 325, Hawthorne. 352-466-3999. yearlingrestaurant.net.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park18700 S. CR 325, Cross Creek. 352-466-3672. floridastateparks.org.
A crucial part of any road trip? Road food. I don't mean string cheese and Doritos (don't judge me; it's not like I eat them at the same time. Usually), I mean regional dishes. You can't swing a dead cat in Florida without hitting someone claiming they have the world's best key lime pie. Usually they don't (that honor goes to the Key Lime Products store at MM 95.2 in Key Largo), so much so that I'm rarely inclined to order it.
As much as I love local food, I don't typically take a road trip only to find a certain meal — with one exception: Cross Creek and its sour orange pie.
Never heard of sour orange pie? Odds are you aren't the only one.
Sour oranges, also called Seville oranges, hail most recently from — appropriately enough — Seville, Spain. They arrived via a convoluted route that began in southeast Asia, went on to Arabia, then to Sicily and, finally, to Seville. That was in the 12th century. Today, the popular notion of the Florida orange has more to do with the juicy Valencias used in orange juice, the seedless navels you can eat without picking out seeds, or the sweet honeybells available for a narrow window every year. However, for 500 years, the bitter Seville orange was the only orange in Europe. It was also the first orange to make it to America.
The sour orange looks like a lemon on steroids. The uninitiated will often insist you are, in fact, holding a lemon. You'll know you're not because the juice is not quite as sour as a lemon, the fruit is huge, and, oh yes, it's orange. Even if you think you haven't tasted sour oranges, you have. Sour orange juice features prominently in mojo pork. In our home, the sour orange also finds its way into sour orange margaritas, a delightful concoction of tequila, Tupelo honey from north Florida, brown sugar from south Florida, and the juice of several sour oranges.
If you want sour oranges in Florida, you have to drive. The closest place that grows them, The Citrus Place in Terra Ceia, doesn't let you stroll onto their groves, and they only have a smattering of these trees, so they don't sell the oranges. If you call and sweet-talk the owner, he might be persuaded to send his son into the groves to gather a few for you. Near Disney, at Lake Louisa State Park has a few wild trees by the cabins, although not enough for much of a pie. Down south, several wild trees remain on a privately held tract of land near Fisheating Creek, near what historians believe are abandoned Seminole settlements. Aside from the whole "private property" thing, trespassing isn't as easy as walking on property — we needed a swamp buggy to enter.
Finding sour oranges, then, becomes an adventure in itself. Once you get home, making the pie also has its challenges. The lesser-known sour orange pie puts the symbol of Florida food — key lime pie — to shame. That is, of course, when the pie is well-made. One cannot adapt the key lime pie recipe to the sour orange, as some local purveyors of pie do. Rare enough are these precious sour orbs that every time I fail at making a pie, I want to cry. And so I content myself with tasting it in restaurants, although it's quite a drive to the nearest one — all the way to Cross Creek, just outside Gainesville. The world knows Cross Creek because writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings made it famous in her book by the same name; she also set The Yearling in the same sort of Florida environment.
If you loved The Yearling, congratulations. I hated it. The deer dies, y'all. It's a horrible story. But I do love Cross Creek, Rawlings' stories about life on the Florida frontier. If you read our feature about Craig Pittman's Oh, Florida!, you'll know the book contains Florida stories, albeit of a less "aw, shucks" variety than Rawlings'. Nevertheless, she, too, tells Florida stories — about wrapping a brilliantly-colored coral snake around her wrist because she didn't know the snake's incredibly deadly powers, about parties and run-ins with her colorful neighbors, about the poverty and beauty of her neighbors.
In true Florida fashion, Cross Creek local — and a woman Rawlings considered a close friend — sued Rawlings for invasion of privacy, over the way Rawlings depicted her in Cross Creek. The courts found in favor of Carson — and awarded her one dollar.
How very Florida.
Rawlings book about Florida food and entertaining — Cross Creek Cookery, sort of a frontierwoman's Martha Stewart Living — doesn't contain a recipe for sour orange pie (although you can find the proper way to cook Florida black bear as well as gopher tortoise), but the restaurant on the creek, The Yearling, serves one of the two best in the state (I ate the other at Southern Charm, not so far away, which leads me to believe the sour oranges here have magic things)
The Yearling's dining room looks like a set out of Rawlings's life — and is much more enjoyable than seeing her actual house as part of a state-guided tour, largely because you can dine on fork-tender venison, juicy duck breast, Florida catfish, or any other Florida-themed dishes. This is Florida country food, and not unlike the food Miss Marjorie prepared when she lived just down the road. Drizzled with chocolate, this pie makes the perfect end to a meal at the storied restaurant. So long as you've come all this way, you may as well pop over to Rawlings' estate, now a historic state park, and wander through the remaining groves, the garden and past her old yellow Oldsmobile. The estate offers insight into a culture unheard of in the populated Tampa Bay area.
That pie, though... that's the reason to make the trip. The venison and redfish and park? They are, so to speak, gravy.
