Florida cowboy: Carl Allen - part cook, part pack rat - has dedicated his Auburndale cafe to the memory of his state's frontier days.

In all his 72 years, Carl Allen has seldom ventured far from the central Florida back-country land of his birth. "I never left it," he says with a rueful smile, "but it's just about left me."
Urban sprawl has almost overtaken him. If you go looking for Mr. Allen at his restaurant outside Auburndale, you won't see enough undeveloped land in the 50 mile drive from Tampa to convince you that Florida still has much back country remaining - and in truth, it hasn't.
Which makes Carl Allen, a self-described pack rat, all the more valuable to his state and the preservation of its history.
The son and grandson of range-riding cow hunters, he has collected and saved everything he could get hands on from Florida's frontier days. The artifacts cover every square inch of his sprawling, five-room cafe.
"The early cowboys down here rode what they called ponies, tough little horses that had got loose from the Spaniards and lived wild," he explains.
"The riders carried whips that they cracked when they rounded up the bony longhorn scrub cows that roamed through the brush. That's why they - and eventually, any native resident of the state came to be called Florida crackers."
Slim, bald and bespectacled, the cowboy-clad Mr. Allen looks like-he just rode in from the range.
In fact, it's more likely that he's been working on his weekly newspaper column or painting a Florida frontier scene or adding to his collection of memorabilia or dealing with some of the musicians who play for him three nights a week (bluegrass on Thursdays, gospel on Fridays, country on Saturdays).
Or cooking (though he leaves most of that to others now). His place is, after all, a restaurant first and foremost, and Mr. Alleft likes to serve as much "frontier food" as he possibly can. He remembers much of it from his own childhood experience.
"My mother taught me to cook on a wood stove," he says. "I was a teenager during the Great Depression, and in those days, she and my grandmother could make a nice dish out of practically nothing. That always impressed me."
The menu at Allen's Cafe features plenty of seafood, freshwater fish, chicken and beef, along with slaw, white beans, grits, hush puppies and corn bread.
But there's also a sampling of the fare of bygone days: rattlesnake-, armadillo, alligator tail, rabbit, turtle, frog legs, deer, wild turkey, quail, poke sallet, swamp cabbage (hearts of palm - tender shoots of the sabal palm tree), guavas and fiery hot sauce made from "bird-eye" (datil) peppers.
"My ancestors and the others who came in here after the Civil War learned survival from the Indians, as the Spaniards had done centuries ago," Mr. Allen says.
"They never knew nothing but hard times, making do, living off the land. But there was something romantic about all that to me. I've always wanted to hold on to time, cling to the past. This place is about all there is left of it."
Surrounded by his menagerie of artifacts and antiques, Mr. Allen lives for the frenzied weekend evenings when the musicians come to play and sing their nostalgic tributes to the past, and upward of 300 -customers jam the place to listen, eat and socialize.
They may get a bit of alligator tail or rattlesnake meat to go with their stock orders of fried chicken or catfish or shrimp, and they may eat the homemade biscuits and gravy, or the grits and greens, or the corn bread and beans.
If there is homemade pie or berry cobbler, they'll certainly go for that in a big way.
But mainly, I suspect, the customers come to look and listen and wonder, to sample Carl Allen's smorgasbord of history, to get a literal and figurative taste of the Florida that used to be.
It may not be the very best restaurant fare you ever put in your mouth, but. it's mighty tasty all the same, and the experience will hold your attention like a cow hunter's whip-crack.

John Egerton is the author of "Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History."