"I see that you have armbands that let you ride all the rides for one low price. How about an all-you-can-eat armband?"
I'm asking what I consider an obvious question, but the Florida State Fair ticket taker gets a little flustered. "Oh no," she says. "That doesn't seem like a good idea."
Hmm, maybe she's right.
I maneuver through the Chevy exhibition hall — resonating with the sounds of microphone-wearing demonstrators hawking magic pans, Swiss peelers and arthritis-relieving snake oil in live infomercial fashion — and turn right. A few hundred feet later, I realize that I've passed an unbroken stretch of 20 food stalls — just one-tenth of the Fair's food vendors.
I didn't want my Fair odyssey to become an ode to the greasy and gooey and sweet, a paean to a time and place when eating food this bad for us was acceptable, before we started taking obesity and diabetes and trans-fat and nutrition into consideration. I didn't want that, but my mouth knows better. It's already in a salivary stupor triggered by the olfactory assault of dozens of open trailers that are frying dough and grilling meat. The Fair smells so damn good.
There may be lots of vendors, but there is also an immense amount of repetition. Meat? Most places serve it on a stick or in a bun. Men and women tend wide griddles loaded with chopped peppers and onions turning translucent as they sweat out their juices next to intestinal coils of Italian sausage specked with pepper and caraway. Other stands feature piles of smoked Polish links and sizzling shaved beef or chicken.
Want veggies? Except as a garnish for the meat, foods that are grown in the ground are inevitably cooked in oil at the Fair. You can have battered and deep-fried mushrooms/cauliflower/broccoli/onions, but potatoes are the way to go. It's one arena where Fair vendors have a leg up on 99 percent of the restaurants you visit. In those places, fries usually go from pre-packed freezer bag straight to the oil.
Here on the midway, actual potatoes are cut — often while you wait — and then plunged into bubbling fat. There are also improbably thin chips piled in a tangled mass a foot high. Sure, the only toppings are anonymous neon yellow cheese sauce, dried scallions and crunchy imitation bacon from a shaker. Ignore all that. These crisp wonders require only a generous sprinkling of salt to achieve glory.
Halfway through this exercise in gastro-intestinal fortitude, I come upon a brilliant piece of ancillary marketing strategy: a Tums booth. More than a booth, actually. The heartburn medicine has sponsored an entire pavilion featuring shade, chairs and entertainment. I grab a sample for later.
Here are a few things I learned this year: Roasted corn covered in margarine isn't worth $3; "Apples in a Bowl!" might be the most unassuming advertisement I've seen in years; food vendors with seats shaded from the relentless sun should be rewarded with your business; the best food is likely the stuff from locals like Alessi, Rigatoni and even Publix, but that's not what we're here for. Oh, and the food stall workers never seem to sweat — after years of slaving over bubbling cauldrons of oil and sizzling griddles, it's like they've become immune to heat.
I eat fantastic barbecued pork chops served by a stand from Louisville, Ky., hearty grilled dogs on soft buns, mahogany-stained smoked turkey legs, disappointingly flaccid funnel cakes, disappointingly dry elephant ears and inedible, doughy pizza. I drink tart lemonade squeezed before my eyes and poured over shaved ice from a half-dozen stands that run together in my mind, even though most are manned by independent operators. Festooned with shiny metal and flashing lights, the trailers look more like slot machines than restaurants.
I have to hoof it through half the fair — past the whirling machines that seem designed to produce nausea in the smallest square footage possible, past the 50-cent freak shows, past a lone rollercoaster labeled "the Zyklon," before I find the deep-fried grail I've been seeking since I got here.
Here's how it works: Grab a Twinkie, impale it on a skewer, dip it in pancake batter and drop it in a fryer set to 375 delicious degrees. This booth — run by the hefty, corn-fed Jaskiewicz family from the Midwest — has the only culinary innovation I've found at this year's fair: strawberry, blueberry or chocolate batter as an alternative to the typical vanilla. I guess there's a lot of time to think up new ideas when you travel for seven and a half months in tight quarters with your family.
That sure is some fine eatin', especially the strawberry-dipped Twinkie, but the final product is a little repetitive, like stuffing a donut inside another donut. You know — almost too much of a good thing. Almost.
Oreos work better — the chocolate cookie melts into the batter and the lard filling turns warm and gooey — but Snickers are where the fryer achieves greatness. The chocolate melts, the nougat runs, the caramel softens, the peanuts crunch and my soul sighs with pleasure. Yeah, it's bad for ya. But sometimes bad is what life's all about.
That's the thing about the Fair. The rides, the halls full of show cows and pedigreed rabbits, the gauntlet of aggressive carnies in the midway — for me it's all just an excuse. The Florida State Fair tells me that it's OK — for a few days each year — to escape the shackles of health and nutrition. Take a break. I enjoy food guilt-free, just this once, secure in the knowledge that I have a Tums sample in my back pocket.
This article appears in Feb 14-20, 2007.