Innholdsfortegnelse for June/July 2019 i Garden & Gun

EDITOR’S LETTER Island Escape EXPLORING THE SOUTH’S WILD BEAUTY WITH A CUMBERLAND ISLAND LOCAL DAVID DIBENEDETTO Senior Vice President & Editor in Chief Growing up a river rat in coastal Georgia, I was a student of all of the state’s fifteen barrier islands, but the wildest ones enthralled me most. Even their names seemed to conjure adventure—Ossabaw, Blackbeard, Wassaw (where I left plenty of tracks in the sand), St. Catherines, Sapelo, Wolf, and the crown jewel, Cumberland. At eighteen miles long, it is the largest of the islands and was once primarily owned by the Carnegie family, of steel and philanthropy fame. Here there were remains of forts, mansion ruins, wild horses—the stuff of a young explorer’s dreams. I first visited the island when I was fifteen. And though that…

LETTERS “Every trip to Kentucky has me hauling a suitcase of White Lily flour back to Oregon” ROLL OUT THE WELCOME Several weeks ago, I received a subscription offer to your magazine. It was a surprise to me, a traditional woodchuck Yankee. I took a chance and mailed my check, and the April/May 2019 issue arrived. Russell Worth Parker’s Good Dog essay was worth the subscription price. I’ll be looking forward to the next issue. Amy Brill Sutton, Vermont When my April/May 2019 issue of G&G arrived, I jumped for joy seeing Scott Peacock’s name. He is my biscuit god, and I have been following his recipe for nearly a decade. But I knew little about the man. Every trip to Kentucky has seen me hauling a suitcase full of…

ARTS The Past in Bloom A BIRMINGHAM ARTIST’S BOTANICAL TAPESTRIES UPDATE A CENTURIES-OLD TECHNIQUE By Elizabeth Hutchison PHOTOGRAPH BY GRAHAM YELTON Cheerful zinnias and tall papery cosmos, petite sunflowers and delicate white dill dot the fence line leading from the house the artist Emily Morgan Brown shares with her husband and three young daughters to her backyard studio in Birmingham, Alabama. Nearby, blueberry bushes flank rows of strawberry plants. There’s a fig tree that will be heavy with fruit come July. And a vegetable garden yields the likes of heirloom tomatoes, okra, and mint. “My girls love watching the bugs, too,” Brown says. “We lift rocks and spy on roly-polies, ladybugs, and caterpillars.” All of it—bloom to bug—serves as inspiration for Brown, who picked up her first sketch pad as…

Strange Delights A Florida native dreams up weird and wonderful stories Jacqueline Stofsick (2) In the opening tale of Karen Russell’s Orange World (Knopf), two Florida girls flee hotel jobs, go prospecting for adventure out West, and take a chairlift to a party in an avalanche-crushed lodge where their dance partners are ghosts with eyes of gold. That kind of surreal storytelling made the Miami-raised author’s debut novel, Swamplandia!, a Pulitzer finalist, and blooms madly again across these eight stories. In “Bog Girl,” a man who cuts peat in Europe falls for an ancient swamp vixen; in “The Bad Graft,” a Joshua tree takes root in the rocky soil of a young heart; and in the title story, a new mother weans the devil himself. It’s tempting to say Russell…

ANATOMY OF A CLASSIC Miami Spice COOL CUCUMBERS MEET SZECHUAN HEAT IN CHEF RAYMOND LI JR.’S SURPRISINGLY REFRESHING SUMMER SIDE By Kim Severson Food and prop styling by Charlotte Autry The way he tells it, Raymond Li Jr.’s path from a trouble-prone kid to the executive chef at Palmar, a modern Chinese restaurant with Latin influences, is a tale worthy of its own Netflix series. Li’s grandfather owned a Cuban Chinese restaurant in Havana. His father landed in Miami in the 1980s and met his mother, who is Colombian. “Growing up, I would have a Cuban empanada in one hand and a Chinese sausage in another hand and eat some Colombian soup later in the day,” he says. He also got into plenty of trouble. Eleven years ago, drunk, Li…

FORK in the ROAD Morning Glory ONE OF A NEW GENERATION OF BREAKFAST SPOTS, KENNY’S IN CHATTANOOGA GIVES THE FIRST MEAL OF THE DAY THE RESPECT IT DESERVES BY JOHN T. EDGE Illustration by Michael Spitz PHOTOGRAPHS BY KATHRYN MCCRARY The duck confit biscuit is an expression of country-boy cooking. The duck confit biscuit is an expression of gentrified city cooking. Both of these statements are true. But after eating two great breakfasts in two months at Kenny’s Southside Sandwiches in downtown Chattanooga, I now believe that the former is more true than the latter. Glossed with homemade jam, that duck leg biscuit tastes like something a hunter cooks for his buddies, wraps in tinfoil, and passes out by the sack to eat in the blind as the sun rises…

SOUTHERN ACCENT Floating an Idea BOWLS OF WATER KEEP QUICK-TO-WILT GARDENIAS GOING By Haskell Harris PHOTOGRAPH BY MARGARET HOUSTON Fragrant but fragile gardenias rarely hold up for long in conventional arrangements. That’s why the Charleston, South Carolina, floral designer Sara York Grimshaw prefers to float the delicate flowers in bowls of water—to support them and hydrate the easily bruised petals, all while casting the nostalgic aroma throughout a room. “The bloom of the gardenia naturally wants to lie flat, and gardenias absorb water through their petals and stems, which makes floating them an easy and ideal way to keep them healthy,” she says. Leave a bit of greenery on a few of the cuttings for contrast. And for maximum drama (and the ultimate party trick), stagger multiple bowls of the…

GOOD DOG Ode to Joy A PATIENT PUG LIFTS AWAY THE WORRIES OF A HOMESICK POET IN KENTUCKY BY ADA LIMÓN ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN CUNEO miss my family,” I told him as he bent over his desk, at work on a story that he needed to file that afternoon. I was good at knowing when Lucas—now my husband—was on deadline and invariably interrupting him just hours before a story was due to talk about my feelings. He looked up from the gray computer glow and sighed. Not an entirely annoyed sigh, but a sigh that said, “This? Now? Again?” We had been living together in Lexington, Kentucky, for three months. We first met in New York City, and then I moved home to Sonoma, California, to write. He, on the…

A TOPSAIL LIFETIME Measuring the years in trips to a North Carolina island BY RANDALL KENAN My daddy was so cross-eyed, he could stand on Wednesday and see Monday and Sunday at the same time.” I overheard this from a man on the now-destroyed Scotch Bonnet pier on North Carolina’s Topsail Island while fishing with my mother one afternoon. My mother continued pier fishing well into her early eighties and excelled at it. She was some type of fish whisperer, for she and her son-in-law would go down to the piers at all times of day or night when word came to shore that the fish were running. Croakers, mackerel, pompano—our freezers would be stuffed for the year. Catch and release was never a thing for my family. Growing up,…

FLORIDA IDYLL On Amelia Island, bumming around gets elevated to an art BY JOHN GRISHAM Cedric Angeles / Intersection Photos The small Southern towns of my youth were far away from salt water. There were six of them, all within an hour of Memphis, and all so landlocked that I did not see an ocean until I was eighteen years old. For us, a day at the beach meant a trip to a large reservoir dug by the army. Because of this minor blemish in an otherwise wonderful childhood, I have always been drawn to long sandy beaches, preferably in warmer climates and with a nice resort nearby. We have found many of these from the Carolinas south and throughout the Caribbean. Twenty-five years ago, we discovered Amelia Island, a…

Why Foxfire Matters to Me Southerners share how the Appalachian book series shaped their lives “The first book became a revered foundational text for any self-respecting hippie, me among them. It was also an affirmation of the wisdom of the region and the people I came from—something the culture at large did not acknowledge. My daughter now has the full set and uses it in her classroom in the Western North Carolina school where she is a teacher and my grandson a student. Talk about an unbroken circle.” —Ronni Lundy, author, Victuals “We had Foxfire in my high school library. My grandparents grew up in the foothills of the North Carolina mountains, and these books reminded me of how they were raised and lived. I also love folk music, and…

Sweet Tooth Finding treasures from the sea Clockwise from top left: William Hereford; Margaret Houston; Jenny Everett I often joke with Jenny that if the house catches fire, grab the kids first, the dogs next, and then my Megalodon tooth. I found it when I was thirteen. My jon boat’s anchor miraculously snagged it while dragging along the bottom on a windy day. I’d collected plenty of shark teeth by then, but I’d never found one as big and as perfectly preserved, its serrated edges still sharp enough to cut even after spending at least three million years in the mud. And while many friends have suggested it belongs in a frame, I keep it on a shelf so I can let others feel its heft or run my own…

Social Chatter GARDENANDGUN.COM AND BEYOND WE ASKED... How do you describe summer heat? On Facebook, you shared your favorite Southern expressions for temperatures hotter than the hinges on the gates of hell. It’s like walking in dogs’ breath. Walter Schwarz Hotter than Georgia asphalt. Heather Smith As hot as burlap underwear. Kelli Gathright Hotter than Billy blue blazes. Kimber Williams I’m ’bout to smother. Sandra Yarboro Hotter than chicken-fried hell. Dee Thompson Hotter than two foxes “fornicating” in a forest fire. Barbara Lawson Air you can wear! Nancy Thornton-Waterhouse Hotter than a two-dollar pistol. Anne Dolan I just saw a hound dog chasing a rabbit—and they were both walking. Christine Clayton Hutchinson…

INTERVIEW Fortunate Son WINSTON GROOM LOOKS BACK AT FORREST GUMP, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE OSCAR-WINNING FILM ADAPTATION’S DEBUT By Monte Burke Film characters, clockwise from top: Paramount/Courtesy Everett collection; AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo; Paramount/CourtesyEverett Collection; United Archives GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo; Album/Alamy Stock Photo Winston Groom recalls being pretty satisfied with his 1986 novel, Forrest Gump. It was reviewed favorably by many literary critics and sold around 30,000 copies in hardcover. By then, Groom was in his early forties and in the midst of creating a nice, steady writing career. After graduating from the University of Alabama, he had done a stint in the army and a tour in Vietnam. He’d worked in Washington, D.C., as a reporter for the Washington Star, covering the court system, and then quit that job…

PRESERVATION Time Capsules A NORTH CAROLINA CENTENARIAN SAVES A SINGULAR SET OF HISTORIC TOBACCO-COUNTRY STRUCTURES By Madeleine Rowley PHOTOGRAPHS BY GEOFF WOOD Mary Lib Winstead sits in the living room of the Merritt-Winstead House, where she was born in 1918. The windows are cracked against the stifling heat of a Roxboro, North Carolina, summer—the house never had central air installed, but that doesn’t seem to bother Win-stead as she describes her lifelong love of restoration. In the carport, her 1980 GMC Caballero even sports a supportive bumper sticker: “Historic Preservation Is the UltimateRecycling.” For almost half her life, Winstead has worked to save historic buildings in Person County, just south of the Virginia border—an especially impressive feat considering she is now 101 years old, and just last fall finished her…

TOOLS Heirloom Varieties GORGEOUS SUMMER TOMATO SLICES DESERVE ELEGANT SILVER SERVERS TO MATCH By Haskell Harris Food and prop styling by Charlotte Autry PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHNNY AUTRY When it comes to tomatoes, Southerners aren’t always a finicky bunch, happily eating them off the vine or slapped on white bread with Duke’s. Though we’re certainly not above sitting at a table to enjoy them in a more traditional manner either. Enter the sterling-silver tomato server, an implement invented in late-Victorian England to “separate the refined from the unrefined,” according to Patrick Dunne, the epicurean antiques expert and owner of Lucullus in New Orleans. “Eating tomatoes was a very late thing in European culinary history, and this discreet kind of serving piece was made possible by the Industrial Revolution post-1870,” he says,…

WHAT’S IN SEASON Summer’s Other Melon BUY IT FRESH AND TREAT IT RIGHT, AND CANTALOUPE MAY BECOME YOUR FAVORITE BITE OF THE SEASON By Jenny Everett In the 1930s, North Carolina wasn’t just known for barbecue and scuppernongs. It was also famous for growing a spectacularly sweet summer treat: cantaloupe. Planted by German settlers in the small community of Ridgeway, the melon quickly became known as the “Ridgeway cantaloupe” (a forerunner of the hybrids we enjoy today) and went from local farm stands to plates at the country’s fanciest restaurants, including the one at New York’s Waldorf Astoria. Perhaps most famously, the melons were served at the White House when King George VI met with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939, shortly before World War II. These days, California produces about…

Eye Opener New Orleans’ Turkey and the Wolf team does breakfast Scotty’s Collard Greens and Grits, strewn with roasted peanuts, topped with salsa macha. A Grand Slam Mc-Muffin, stuffed with a sausage patty and a crunchy hash brown rectangle, crowned with a paper American flag. Roasted Carrot Yogurt, spooned atop a raft of house-baked granola: Molly’s Rise and Shine, a new New Orleans breakfast joint from the crew behind lunchtime standout Turkey and the Wolf, decorated with late-twentieth-century pop culture icons, is a study in joyous maximal-ism and retro-kitsch coolness, refracted through a fun-house mirror. The conceit is goofy, but the food is no joke. —J.T.E.…

MADE IN THE SOUTH Family Seats A LIFELONG LOVE OF GARDENS INSPIRES HANDCRAFTED OUTDOOR FURNITURE By John Kessler PHOTOGRAPHS BY KATE THOMPSON Anne and Will Massie were in high school when they went into business together for the first time. The siblings, born fifteen months apart, borrowed their dad’s orange International Harvester Scout and spent their summer days shuttling just-picked Silver Queen corn and sun-warm tomatoes they grew from seed on their grandmother’s farm to restaurants,country clubs, and nursing homes throughout Lynchburg, Virginia. It was gratifying work, though Anne still remembers with dismay the time a cook unceremoniously dumped her carefully packed tomatoes on a counter, where they skittered and splattered. Perhaps that’s why the next time she had an idea for a garden-related business venture, Anne came up with…

THE MOUNTAINS EVERY TIME Memories and marvels rekindle each summer in the forests, waterfalls, and valleys of Western North Carolina BY C. MORGAN BABST The man and I drove all day through the Shenandoah Valley and entered the Blue Ridge by sunset, finding the turnoff only after dark. We serpentined into the mountains until our cell service slipped, until we were singing along to a station tuned to silence. The road to Cashiers ambled through low wet forest, skirted sheer drops that whispered in the darkness of falling water. At the end of it, there was a hedge, a gate, an old fellow in a rocking chair to nod to, then a fireplace roaring on a screened porch, a tumbler full of Scotch. I fell asleep to the sound of…

THE TOO-MUCHNESS OF GALVESTON Cotton-candy-sticky amusement—and how to escape it BY ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN I am not a birder. I like one bird: the pelican. I might have died not knowing this, but nine years ago I moved with my family from New England to Austin, Texas, looked around, and realized we were far from the ocean. So we drove that summer to Galveston, which immediately felt, to use a Yiddish word, haimish. Familiar. I love Austin. I feel at home in Galveston. It has a working harbor, a Pleasure Pier, an air of stubborn survival. I can recognize the soul of a place that has suffered, one that has been bitten and kicked by hurricanes. Until the 1900 Galveston hurricane—still the deadliest natural disaster in the United States—Galveston was one…

RIPE IDEAS FIVE SOUTHERN CULINARY PROS SHARE THEIR FAVORITE RECIPES—from a CELEBRATORY STRAWBERRY FIZZ to a NOSTALGIC MIXED-BERRY SALAD to a SKILLET COBBLER with a SWEET SURPRISE By Phillip Rhodes Food Styling by Charlotte AutryPhotographs by Johnny Autry N o . 1 The Healthy Start Prop styling by Charlotte Autry Baked Oatmeal Jessica and Stephen Rose The Peach Truck Nashville, Tennessee Nashville is known for many things—music, hot chicken, bachelorette parties. That fresh peaches aren’t one of them was a disheartening discovery for Stephen and Jessica Rose when they arrived there in 2010. Stephen grew up in Fort Valley, in the heart of central Georgia’s peach country. On a trip home, a simple idea struck: Bring the peaches to the people. The Peach Truck—a 1964 Jeep Gladiator J200—is…

CONTRIBUTORS “You can see the sights, burn some calories, and get a po’boy—or a sno-ball—afterward” —Maurice Carlos Ruffin on running with streetcars, p. 140 John Grisham WRITER More than thirty years ago, a small-town Mississippi lawyer named John Grisham arose early before work to write. After he finished that first book, A Time to Kill, Grisham began writing The Firm, which became 1991’s top-selling novel and kicked off one of modern history’s most celebrated writing careers. Grisham, who was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, will release his next legal thriller in October. He’s also writing another book set on fictional Camino Island, which takes inspiration from Amelia Island, Florida—Grisham’s favorite place for “serious loafing,” as he calls it in his ode to summer by the shore (“Classic Weekend Escapes,” p. 101).…

BOOKS Halls of Horror A REAL-LIFE ATROCITY INSPIRES COLSON WHITEHEAD’S HEARTBREAKING NEW NOVEL By Jonathan Miles In 1961, outside of Savannah, Georgia, a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker named Jerry Cooper got into the wrong Chevy convertible. The driver had stolen the car, and Cooper—fully unaware—was unlucky enough to be riding shotgun when the police tracked it down. Charged with auto theft, Cooper was sent to a reform facility called the Florida School for Boys, later christened the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. Not long after his arrival, school employees—suggesting he’d failed to disclose the escape plan of another student—roused him from bed and led him to a small white building where they punched loose his front teeth, broke his foot, and whipped him with a leather strap until he lost consciousness.…

DRINKS Smash Hit AN EAST TENNESSEE DISTILLERY KNOWN FOR MOONSHINE MAKES A RYE THAT REALLY ROCKS By Wayne Curtis Food and prop styling by Charlotte Autry PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHNNY AUTRY Roaming Man Tennessee Straight Rye Whiskey, made by Sugarlands Distilling Co. in the tourist mecca of Gatlinburg, is a diamond amid rhinestones. The distillery attracts more than a million visitors each year—chiefly tourists drawn by its moonshine variations, which include unexpected flavors such as peanut butter and jelly, blueberry muffin, and maple bacon. All are sold in mason-jar-style containers. And then there’s the rye—beguilingly rich and complex, freighted with toffee and toasted grain notes, and sophisticated beyond its years. “We love the moonshine, and it’s a lot of fun,” says Ned Vickers, president of Sugarlands. “But we wanted to do…

TASTEMAKER Counter Intelligence AT ASHEVILLE’S INNOVATIVE BENNE ON EAGLE, CHEF ASHLEIGH SHANTI FUSES SOUTHERN FOOD TRADITIONS By John Kessler PHOTOGRAPH BY JACK SOROKIN “My great-grandmother, who lived by the Dan River in southern Virginia, would never feel like she was Appalachian, but she was” Ashleigh Shanti grew up in a secluded house surrounded by acres of woods near Virginia Beach. But she has an explorer’s soul, and over the past decade her cooking career has taken her around the world. After she’d served as a culinary assistant to chef and television personality Vivian Howard, chef John Fleer hired her last fall to helm the kitchen at Benne on Eagle, in Asheville’s Foundry Hotel. Her menu—influenced by everything from her grandmother’s tabletothe resultsofaDNAtest—considersthe often-overlooked connection between African American heritage and mountain…

HOMEPLACE Open House CONTEMPORARY MEETS COMFORTABLE AT AN ALABAMA LAKE GETAWAY By Josh Green Styling by Ginny Branch Drive an hour northwest of Birmingham across rippled farmland, through forests impenetrably thick with yellow pine, down serpentine country roads beside mossy cliffs, around the coves of 21,200-acre Smith Lake, and you’ll arrive at the modern weekend retreat of Carter and Lynlee Hughes. But finding the front door of the Magic City couple’s home is an entirely more difficult matter, because it doesn’t really exist. It’s that sort of architectural unconventionality, carved precisely into a former cow pasture, that makes the Hugheses’ lake house remarkable. Carter grew up on the Sipsey River, skipping school to ski the lake. As far back as he can recall, the “cow lots” always stood out—gently sloping…

CLASSIC WEEKEND ESCAPES WHETHER IT’S THE WEST VIRGINIA HIGHLANDS OR THE BEACHES OF THE LOWCOUNTRY, THE SOUTH’S MOST BELOVED GETAWAYS HAVE BECKONED GUESTS FOR GENERATIONS. LOAD UP THE CAR AND GRAB THE ROAD SNACKS—THESE DESTINATIONS REMAIN JUST AS ENTICING AS EVER GUY MARTIN PHOTOGRAPH BY WILLIAM HEREFORD ILLUSTRATIONS BY GARY HOVLAND PHOTOGRAPH BY WILLIAM HEREFORDILLUSTRATIONS BY GARY HOVLAND TIME WAS, SUMMER WAS THIS: YOU woke, ate some fresh biscuits with molasses, and walked outside, and the South had laid all the bright wonder and possibility in the dew at your feet. Whether you hunted arrowheads poised on their little pedestals of red dirt after a rain, or kept a wary eye on a copperhead as you stole wild blackberries from the bushes over its lair, or fought a yellowfin tuna…

DUE SOUTH TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE FOR THE SOUTHERN SOUL GOOD SIPS Grape Expectations UNCORK A BOTTLE (OR TWO) AT ONE OF THE SOUTH’S INVITING NEW WINE BARS By Gray Chapman PHOTOGRAPH BY RUSH JAGOE Every six weeks, June Rodil unsheathes her stash of colored pencils and gets to work creating a fresh wine menu for the Austin, Texas, bistro June’s All Day. Rodil is one of fewer than thirty women in the country to earn the title of master sommelier (she recently announced she’ll be helping to open three new Houston restaurants and assisting with their wine programs). Her wine lists, painstakingly researched, represent some of the best bottles on the market. At June’s, they’re also bedecked in doodles and cartoons. “No, it’s not some tome,” she says. “The menu…