Parkesdale Farm Market, Plant City
Close your eyes. Imagi—Wait, open your eyes. Dammit, you can’t hear me. I’ll wait.
Okay, sorry about that. Imagine closing your eyes and imagining the reddest, ripest, juiciest strawberry you’ve ever tasted. That initial tart tingle, the juice welling behind your lips, the sweet sugar on your tongue, the soft, warm flesh speckled with the tiniest of seeds. That fragrant scent unlike any other. Now, how would you like to try that for real? How’d you like to try that with vanilla ice cream? Or with shortcake and whipped cream?
The strawberry is a singular fruit and Plant City is Florida’s official home of the ruby gems with the strawberry season kicking off as the new year dawns. The Strawberry Festival is held for one week in March but for nearly five months out of the year, from January through mid-April, the place to be for all things strawberry is Parkesdale Farms, famed for their lip-smackingly delicious strawberry shortcake and their out of this world milkshakes.
Though we are new residents of the state, I am not a virgin to the euphoric experience that is a Parkesdale Farms strawberry shortcake. After graduating AIT at Ft. Rucker, I spent February of 1994 in Florida visiting my Florida extended family. One memorable day, I was treated to a Parksdale strawberry shortcake and it was bliss. I’ve never forgotten it and a return trip was tops on my list of things to introduce to my wife upon our settling down in Tampa.
Plans were made to take Christa’s parents there when they arrived from Pennsylvania so they could all experience the first time joy together. We drove out on a Wednesday afternoon to avoid the lunchtime rush. Even so, the line wound out of the building and was just reaching the side parking lot when we queued up—just in time to meet my grandfather and his wife who drove out to join us for the sweet treats.
Though this was not my first Parkesdale shortcake, I was tense with the antici…pation of what they might be most famous for: the strawberry milkshake. Chock full of fresh strawberry chunks, the milkshakes are said to be a thick, frosty, berry legend and not to be missed.
They must have run out that day in ‘94.
Parkesdale Farms
3702 W Baker Street
Plant City, FL 33563
Phone: 813-752-0502
Toll-Free: 888-311-1701
Fax: 813-752-4005
November – April
Open seven days a week
9 am – 6 pm
May – October
Open Tuesday – Sunday / Closed Monday
9 am – 6 pm
Closed for Vacation: First two weeks in August
Strawberry Shortcake Season: January to Mid April
www.parkesdale.com/
Parkesdale Farms was founded in 1956 by R.E. “Roy” Parke, Jr.—a big name in Florida Strawberry circles. The ten acre strawberry farm blossomed into hundreds of acres of all kinds of produce as Parkesdale made its contribution to putting the “plant” in Plant City (actually, Plant City was named for railroad man Henry B. Plant, but it’s a nice coincidence), and helped make it the winter strawberry capital of the world.
According to their website, the Parkesdale Farm Market was opened in 1969 by Roy’s daughter Cheryl and her husband Jim Meeks. I don’t know when they started selling the shortcake and milkshakes, but those dates should be recognized as a local holiday.
Speaking botanically, the strawberry isn’t a berry at all but is …something else. I don’t remember the details. Something about the fruit not really being an ovary and the seeds being the true fruits (actually individual ovaries containing even tinier seeds). Which I guess makes the strawberry an inside-out womb of sorts, swollen with pink juices. Yuck.
Suffice it to say, the folks in the white coats want you to call them “accessory fruits”, but that just makes me imagine a giant red false-fruit slumped over the wheel while Tim Roth tells him he’s not blind but just has blood in his eyes. I’m sticking with berries—it’s in the name and strawaggregate-accessoryfruits is too cumbersome. And I haven’t even gotten to the part where they’re unrelated to straw.
The line didn’t take too long to wind down and as we advanced we watched an employee sort oranges straight from the groves into mesh bags using a machine so ancient looking but ingenious in its simplicity that some Amish men I know would be amused to watch it roll.
We had plenty of time to get our order straight. Shortcake smothered with strawberries and whipped cream is just one option from the menu. You can get just the berries, no sugar, with sugar, with real whipped cream, with ice cream, with shortcake, with shortcake and whipped cream, and any combination thereof. Choose a menu item number and decide on a quantity as you snake through the serpentine.
When our turn arrived I spit out my order like requesting soup in a Seinfeld episode (a curse borne by many members of my generation) and stepped to the left. There was no need for such formality, however, as the staff are very pleasant and everyone in line is in a berry chill mood.
Sorry.
There was an assembly line: One person cut yellow sheets of cake into portions and stacked them in a pyramid of styrofoam bowls. Another person scooped sliced berries from bins of sugared and un-sugared fruit, repeatedly replenished by more persons slicing them fresh in the back. Yet another person operated a hose that dispensed frothy mounds of whipped cream from probably a magical dimension with marshmallow clouds and chocolate streams.
A sixth or seventh (I lost count) employee filled shaker tins with ice cream and strawberries and latched them into the mixers. As she poured the pink frozen treats into plastic cups, I had a fleeting vision of bathing in the stuff.
Maybe if I win the lottery…I’d get hypothermia and frostbite the hard way. I’ll stick to my plan of one day floating in a vat at Hershey’s.
She capped the shakes with a lid and stacked them on trays in an adjacent freezer.
A plastic tray was set with our shortcakes as our milkshakes were pulled from the freezer. We walked back to find a table on the far side of the building.
The seating area is a mulched space under a tin roof and shielded from the road by lattice and greenery. A fiberglass strawberry throne is present for folks to sit in for photos and is flanked by a map of North America on the left and a map of the world on the right; map pins mark the hometowns of visitors. I wondered if the pin I stuck in New Castle, Delaware 24 years ago was the one there now. Lancaster was already pricked to oblivion and there were no pins left to plot, so Christa’s dad abstained.
We sat at a picnic table and dove in with hardly a word. I had recently gorged myself on two shortcakes from the Catholic church (if you don’t know—now you know) at the Strawberry Festival in March, so I hadn’t had the benefit of a six-month strawberry fast that the others had. Still, oh, man, it was so good.
The sweet cake here was different than the baking powder biscuit served at the Festival. It was firm and moist with a large crumb structure reminiscent of my mom’s homemade cake from the Betty Crocker Cookbook. As they themselves aptly describe it: “A little like a biscuit with a touch of cake, our shortcake is just sweet enough to compliment the juicy strawberries and moist enough to soak up all the sugary flavored berry juices.”
The berries were tart-sweet and the sugar drew out all the juice, melting into a melange of fragrant and flavorful syrup that blended with the whipped cream and became a pink cloud of strawberry heaven. Too flowery? You didn’t eat it. Trust me, it’s a heavenly berry cloud.
I scraped my bowl clean and moved on to slurp the extra-thick milkshake through the narrow straw, collapsing the sides like the lungs of a tubercular snake—I’m kidding. Seriously, though, these shakes were thick, but not quite as un-suckable as a Frosty. My wife gave up on using the straw and went with a spoon from the shortcake. Mine wasn’t as solid, it probably spent less time in the freezer than hers.
I’m not going to wax florid here—It was a damned good strawberry milkshake and just what you’d expect a shake to taste like when made of premium ice cream and chock full of fresh sliced ripe and sweet strawberries. It was better than any strawberry ice cream I’ve ever had. I will dream about this milkshake. [Editor’s note: And I did]
As we ate, my grandfather reminisced with a wide grin and longing glint in his eye about when my aunt would bring Parksdale strawberry milkshakes to him and my uncle to cool off while working in the hot Florida spring sun. It was a cool and overcast March this day, but these sweet treats were no less de-lovely and delicious. I couldn’t ask for another. I was full—satisfied, happy and full. We patted our tums and cleared the table then went to explore the market side of Parksdale Farms.
Besides strawberries, local citrus, produce and plants, Parkesdale Farms also sells gift baskets, strawberry cookies, strawberry bread, pickles, and preserves. Some of the fruits and vegetables are local, some domestic some imported. The quality was great and the pricing was reasonable. Some were bargains, some not so much, but overall, a well-stocked source for fresh produce if you’re passing by. But as long as they have these milkshakes why would you pass. Stop in, and buy some carrots and broccoli so you don’t feel like a total glutton.
Though Christa’s parents hail from the garden spot of Pennsylvania, the local produce wouldn’t appear at stands for a few more months. It was a rare occasion to be browsing a bountiful farmer’s market in March. Roy picked up a bag of juice oranges to take back to PA and we bought some grape tomatoes that wound up lasting for weeks on our counter and, though they grew wrinkled, were just as sweet when popped in the mouth on a pass through the kitchen. Tomato raisins.
Of course, there are plenty of strawberries for sale–flats and flats of strawberries at incredibly good prices.
They had a nice selection of houseplants, flowering and garden plants (strawberry plants are available in October), and fruit saplings, too. There is also the requisite souvenir shop with the usual tat including alligator heads and honey sticks. Get a t-shirt, if you’re so inclined. You’ll not want to forget the name of the place where you had the strawberry milkshake that ruined all others’ strawberry milkshakes to come.
Parkesdale Farms is a fine regular stop for plants and produce all year round, but it’s an obligatory destination come strawberry season. Get your fill of shortcake several times throughout the spring. The shakes are available year round and you can sip them down while spending the summer through winter with eyes closed, mouth watering as you imagine that singular taste, that marvelous scent, that cool, creamy sweet sensation that’ll give you one good reason to long for the end of cool winter and the cusp of sultry summer: shortcakes smothered in those sweet-tart berries that aren’t berries— strawberries.
Thanks for reading!