Wilderness hospitality

Guest bedroom is furnished as it would have
been in the late 1800s. (Gerri Bauer photo)

Trading, fishing, guiding visitors - they were some of the ways pioneers in undeveloped parts of Florida made their living in the late 1800s. The Pacetti family of Ponce Inlet did so, and more, at a time when the area was a true wilderness.

Even the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse didn't exist at first. Bartolo and Martha Pacetti sold 10 acres to the U.S. government for use as a light station. The Ponce Inlet Lighthouse was constructed in 1887.

By that time, the Pacettis operated a thriving fishing resort and boarding house adjacent to the lighthouse grounds. They'd built the structure in 1881 using the $400 earned from the land sale. It was an upgrade from the wooden cottage that had already become known for Pacetti hospitality.

In a joyful moment for history seekers, the restored Pacetti Hotel re-opened in 2024 as a public museum owned by the Ponce DeLeon Inlet Lighthouse Preservation Association. I recently toured the hotel and enjoyed every minute.

The Pacetti Hotel is now a public museum.
(Gerri Bauer photo)

There's a lot of history packed into the building, now named the Constance D. Hunter Historic Pacetti Hotel. And several people worth noting, from modern times to the past:

• Constance Hunter, whose foundation partially funded the recent restoration
• The Gamble family of Procter & Gamble fame. Olive Gamble did the first restoration. She and subsequent relatives hosted family and friends there.
• Fishing and hunting guide and building caretaker Jesse Linzy, who lived at the hotel and worked for the Pacettis starting in 1907. In the 1930s, he married "Miss Ida," the personal cook and maid who arrived with Olive Gamble. In the short-sighted ways of the era, we don't know her surname before she became Ida Linzy.

Each person deserves a blog post but today's belongs to the Pacettis. 

Bartolomeu Clemente Pacetti was born about 1823. He was a descendent of the Pons and Pacetti families who were part of the ill-fated Turnbull Colony (1760s-1770s) in nearby New Smyrna Beach. The colonists arrived from Minorca, Greece and Italy as indentured servants. Most went north to St. Augustine when the colony collapsed, but others stayed nearby. Bartolo inherited some of the Pons family land.

Martha Jane Wickwire Pacetti was born in Florida in 1844 to pioneers from Vermont and Georgia. Her local roots also ran deep. Her ancestors included the Osteen family, whose name lives today in the Florida community of the same name in Volusia County. 

The Pacettis had five children. The family lived and ran their popular resort in a beautiful, bountiful waterfront location. But it was isolated. And the living wasn't easy in the 1880s, 1890s and early 1900s. It was nonstop work, as you learn from museum exhibits. 

Martha gained a reputation as an excellent cook of the fish and wild game the land and sea produced. One visitor said she set a "capital table" and was said to be the best fish cook in Florida. Bartolo, his sons Gomez and Bert (who later became a federal wildlife officer), along with Jesse, became renowned as guides. 

The Ponce Inlet Lighthouse
is seen through a window in
Pacetti Hotel. (Gerri Bauer photo)

As the years continued, notables such as businessman James Norris Gamble and artist William Aiken Walker found their way to the resort, along with many others. They included the lighthouse builders, its keepers and their families.

Today, visitors can tour the beautifully restored building and view bedrooms furnished as they were in the different time periods. They can immerse themselves in period details shown in exhibits and explained in wall board displays that include period photos. A short video acquaints guests with the property's history. You can even rent the facility for weddings and other events. Learn more at www.ponceinlet.org

Go see the hotel. And the lighthouse complex, which I'll write about next month. They are both so worth it.

Side view of the waterfront hotel.
(Gerri Bauer photo)

Sweet recipe for sweet potatoes

Easy to make and tasty to eat! This was made
from the adapted recipe, using homegrown
sweet potatoes. (Gerri Bauer photo)

(If you're here for the recipe and not the blog post, skip right down to the end of the post!)

Recently, I read that some Hastings, Florida, potato-chip farmers are diversifying into sweet potatoes. The University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences article called the tubers a re-emerging crop. I never realized sweet potatoes had vanished from the state's farms. A weevil caused the industry's demise about 30 years ago.

The crop was a standard item during pioneer years. One old history book talks of a famous "Forty to a Hill" sweet potato venture established commercially in Alachua County in 1891. Specifically, in tiny Waldo, which has a population today of about 1,000.

I didn't quite get 40 sweet potatoes out of the one I planted last spring, but it was a healthy harvest. The taters were tender and yummy, and cultivation was minimal. Actually, I was kind of surprised at the result. My husband and I were experimenting when we planted one potato in an old recycling bucket filled with a mix of oak leaves and pine straw. We did little except incorporate organic fertilizer into the soil-less mix when planting, and then water during dry spells.

Ease of cultivation helped make the tasty tuber a nutritional staple for pioneer settlers. In a letter to the Florida Agriculturist newspaper in 1892, one poor newcomer to the state bemoaned that "I am so tender that I even don't know how to grow sweet potatoes." He was ashamed to admit it.

The editors obliged him with cultivation information. But the advice included a suggestion to add tobacco stems to the soil to provide potash. Wonder how that worked out. Elsewhere in the same issue another reader wrote that sweet potatoes cost 70 to 80 cents a bushel that year.

After our big harvest, we let the tubers cure for a couple of weeks and started to feast on them - plain except for butter added to the cooked potatoes. But who can resist sweeter sweet potatoes during the holidays? For Christmas dinner, I made Orange Sweet Potatoes that were a big hit. The preparation is super simple.

My recipe is adapted from one by a cook named Elsa Wiedemann. Hers is featured in Treasured Recipes, the 1983 cookbook published by the Guild of the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Daytona Beach.

The differences from the original recipe is my addition of maple syrup when reheating, and one change in preparation. If you cook the dish the night before, the sauce thickens on its own in the refrigerator overnight. It stays nice and creamy when reheated. (The original recipe calls for the sauce to be boiled down to a thick consistency on the stovetop after the potatoes are cooked and removed.)

If you think about it, either version could easily have been made by a pioneer Florida cook. Except she or he likely would have used cane syrup as the sweetener.

You don't need to wait until a holiday to make this. Enjoy!

ORANGE SWEET POTATOES WITH MAPLE SYRUP
4 medium sweet potatoes
1 cup orange juice
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup butter
Dash salt
1/3 cup real maple syrup, or more to taste

Pare the sweet potatoes, slice thickly, and place in saucepan. Add all other ingredients except the maple syrup. Bring to a boil and let simmer until potatoes are tender, about 30 minutes. Remove from heat. Cool and store in microwaveable container. Chill overnight in refrigerator. Before reheating, stir in the maple syrup. Reheat and serve.

Here's the original recipe if you'd like to try it, too.

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Oblong hush puppies? Apparently

This recipe was found on a postcard
tucked inside a vintage cookbook
 from the 1920s. (Photo: Gerri Bauer)

The summer grilling season has officially started, so of course I'm thinking about food. More than usual, I mean. In Florida, grilling season runs from January to December.

Floridians have been cooking outdoors forever. In pioneer days, outdoor cooking was done to keep heat out of the house and lessen the risk of fire. Kitchens were often in detached buildings, for the same reasons.

But whether one cooked indoors or out, over a wood stove or a fire pit, certain traditional foods often showed up on the menu. One such food is the hush puppy, a corn-based fritter flavored with onion and deep-fried. I long assumed hush puppies of yore resembled hush puppies of today - small rounds about the size of golf balls. A hand-written heirloom recipe I found tucked inside an antique cookbook reminds me never to assume.

The recipe for Tallahassee Hush Puppies is on a postcard mailed in 1949 to a Mrs. Edwin Haynes of Canton, N.C., from someone named Edna, obviously a relative or friend on first-name basis. The ingredients are familiar: cornmeal, baking power, chopped onion, milk, salt. The shocker is that Edna instructs the cook to hand mold her dough into oblong pones. She even gives specific dimensions.

I realize I'm a Yankee, but I've lived in Florida for many, many years. I have never seen an oblong hush puppy. Edna notes that she found her recipe in a book of old Southern recipes. Makes me wonder what the original source is. I'd love to know.

The recipe is below, if you want to try it out. First, can I just say that finding such a handwritten note tucked inside a vintage cookbook I bought at a flea market is like finding buried treasure. And it wasn't the only surprise I found in The Rumford Complete Cook Book, by Lily Haxworth Wallace, "lecturer, teacher, and writer on domestic science."

Numerous penciled recipes cover blank pages in just about every chapter. They're all written in cursive, too. There's even a ration card used as a bookmark.

I'm not sure which previous owner left their mark for later generations to find. First published by the Rumford Company in 1908, the cookbook was popular enough to go into second and third printings. My version is from 1928 and bears signatures of four owners, including me. I'm guessing "Thos. E. Haynes" was the first owner, as his name is written splashily, on an angle, across half the inside cover. The rest of us share part of the opposite page.

I still haven't read through all the additional recipes that someone - possibly Mrs. Haynes - penciled throughout the book. She also jotted notes here and there. One of my favorites is on page 118. "Good try this" is written next to the recipe for French Rolls, with an arrow drawn to the recipe name for added emphasis. Good recipes know no eras. I think I'll give those rolls a try. But first, the hush puppies. Thanks, Edna.

TALLAHASSEE HUSH PUPPIES
2 cups corn meal
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 and 1/2 cups sweet milk
1/2 cup water
1 large onion chopped fine

Sift the dry ingredients together & add milk & water. Stir in chopped onion. Add more milk or meal as may be necessary to form a soft but workable dough. With the hands mold pieces of the dough in pones (oblong cakes about 5" long & 3" wide, & 3/4 thick). Fry in deep hot fat until well browned. Found this in book of old Southern recipes. - Edna