The first time I truly knew it was summer, I was about 10 years old, holding a sandwich too big for my hands while at the beach. It was nothing more than wheat bread, crunchy peanut butter and homemade jam. My grandmother made the jam herself—raspberries that’d pucker your entire face, blueberries she collected on hikes and strawberries as sweet as rock candy. 

Picture it: the always-cold waves of a New England beach, the rocks where I plunked snails into a bucket and the sweet-crunchy-salty perfectness of a PB&J. It’s the kind of summer memory we spend the rest of our lives trying to recreate.

To be perfectly honest, that moment happened in April, so it was technically still spring. But you eventually discover that summer is something more than a notation on the calendar. It’s never a specific date—Memorial Day, the summer solstice—but more of a feeling or a shift in the light, a time when food starts to taste like a place again. And nothing tastes more like summer in Florida than something put between bread: a Cuban eaten outside a ventanita, a grouper sandwich served poolside, a Pub-sub devoured on somebody’s boat.

Coming into summer this year, I’ve found myself daydreaming not just about barbecue, but about sandwiches. Maybe it’s because both are best eaten outside, ideally near a body of water or a cooler of beer. Maybe it’s because both rely on the humble alchemy of heat and time. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been thinking about this roundup of the best grouper sandwiches, plotting a weekend drive that could double as lunch, over and over again.

Or maybe it’s because I can’t stop thinking about the Central Florida pitmasters who are coaxing miracles from meat: beef that’s smoked and sliced at Peebles, pulled pork egg rolls at The Brack Shack, mustard sauces sharp enough to bite back at Carter’s—which makes me reminisce on my great Florida barbecue road trip, where I hit some of the best pit-stops from St. Augustine to Miami. There’s something about barbecue that demands patience and reverence, and yet there’s something about eating it on a bun, with slaw and sauce, that reminds you not to take it all too seriously.

Barbecue and sandwiches are foods meant to be eaten in motion—by the side of the road, at a picnic table, or on a tailgate. And that’s why I love them this time of year: because they remind me that even now, even grown, I can still find summer in my hands.

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