Innholdsfortegnelse for August/September 2019 i Garden & Gun

EDITOR’S LETTER A Taste for Barbecue SAVORING THE SPREAD OF AN ICONIC SOUTHERN FOOD DAVID DIBENEDETTO Senior Vice President & Editor in Chief One of my all-time favorite dove shoots happened a little more than five years ago. It was a simple affair. My friend Jason Harkey had a field near Mayesville, South Carolina, that was holding a steady number of birds and also provided a perfect place to work our dogs, both Boykin spaniels. When I pulled up around noon, Jason had a Styrofoam clamshell filled with a couple of pounds of pulled pork from Scott’s Bar-B-Que in Hemingway on the tailgate, along with a loaf of Sunbeam white bread, a ziplock bag stuffed with fresh pork rinds, and two bottles of Red Rock strawberry soda. I don’t remember…

LETTERS “All this time I have been using my tomato server for cranberry sauce” TOUCHING TRIBUTES Teary-eyed after reading Taylor Brown’s “Two for the Road” (June/July 2019). I lost my dad, too, and I cannot think of a more fitting way to think of him than as “a whisper in your mind.” Eddie Lewis Woodstock, Georgia In Ada Limón’s Good Dog (June/July 2019), I cried at “Lily Bean is the kindest soul I’ve ever known.” Our dogs are family, too. Deborah Martin Saint Helena Island, South Carolina WE AIM TO PLEASE What could be more Southern than an issue of G&G with Forrest Gump, the sons of the Allman Brothers Band, and floating gardenias (June/July 2019)? I think you covered it. Jennifer Powell The Woodlands, Texas All this time I…

STYLE British Invasion AN ENGLISH DESIGNER LOOKS TO THE SOUTHWEST GEORGIA QUAIL SET FOR HER NEW APPAREL LINE By Elizabeth Hutchison Daniel Shippey/Mistamina Lady Melissa Percy ranks among the best shots in Britain, but to hear her tell it, her mother and sister are even better. Her two brothers and her father, the twelfth Duke of Northumberland, are all equally skilled with a side-by-side. And though she grew up in one of the United Kingdom’s largest inhabited castles—Alnwick Castle (Hog-warts to the moviegoing public) has been in the Percy family for more than seven hundred years—the Northumberland childhood she describes was one spent ranging across heather-blanketed moors and wading waist-deep into nearby waterways. “From the age of four or five, we were out in the field with Mum and Dad…

ARTS Remaking History CIVIL WAR–ERA LOVE LETTERS GIVE A CERAMIST’S WORK NEW LIFE By Elizabeth Watson Chaney PHOTOGRAPHS BY TIM ROBISON Melissa Black Reddick sits cross-legged on the floor of a sunlit room among a small village of cardboard boxes. Her slight form is partially obscured, giving the impression of a young girl completely absorbed. The fingers of her left hand curl around the edges of a whisper-thin piece of stationery, while her right hand holds a small magnifying glass. For twenty-five years, Reddick, a professional ceramic artist whose work has been featured in galleries across the United States and collections abroad, focused on sculpture and vessels. Then suddenly, following the death of her aunt several years ago, she inherited these boxes of family relics spanning many generations, and her…

ANATOMY OF A CLASSIC Fire and Ice Cream WITH WOOD CHIPS AND INGENUITY, A SOUTH CAROLINA CHEF PUTS A SMOKY SPIN ON A CLASSIC SUMMERTIME TREAT By Kim Severson PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHNNY AUTRY For Shaun Garcia, boredom has led to some of his favorite culinary inventions. One slow day, he decided to throw some vanilla beans into a smoker at Soby’s, the Greenville, South Carolina, restaurant where he works as executive chef. “We were knocking around some ideas on how to get a little more out of vanilla but stay true to our Southern roots,” he says. “I wanted something unique, so I thought why not get a little smoke on them.” The next logical step was to make vanilla ice cream. “You get ice cream that has the sweet,…

TOOLS Pit Mastery THREE FUNDAMENTALS FOR SUCCESSFUL BACKYARD SMOKING: GOOD WOOD, WELL-DESIGNED TONGS, AND A RIG YOU CAN RELY ON By Haskell Harris and Phillip Rhodes PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHNNY AUTRY The streamlined shape of Weber’s Smokey Mountain Cooker calls to mind the company’s classic charcoal grills; so does its dependable performance. At twenty-two inches wide and with two cooking grates, the largest model (shown here) can swallow a pair of whole briskets easily. And since the Weber weighs in under seventy pounds, it can even make the trek to the tailgate ($439; weber.com). Rösle’s grippy sixteen-inch stainless-steel tongs have a locking mechanism that’s based on gravity instead of tension. Point the tongs down and gently squeeze them to open; point them up, squeeze again, and the lock slides shut to…

SOUTHERN STYLE Fired Up for Fall ESSENTIALS FOR GATHERING ROUND THE FIREPIT WITH PANACHE By Haskell Harris FIREPIT Georgia’s Sea Island Forge fire kettle checks every box for a Southerner. Inspired by kettles used to make cane syrup in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South, the deep, wide ductile-cast-iron construction allows a fire to breathe, and the clever stand includes a hand-twisted boot rail on which to prop your feet. A handy spark screen keeps the blaze in check. Consider this your new family heirloom ($2,610; ggfieldshop.com). CHAIRS Relaxing by a fire when the weather finally breaks is one of the great pleasures of the season. Do so in comfort in these camp-inspired chairs by Hay. Powder-coated steel protects the frames from the elements, and cushions crafted from quilted Teflon-coated fabric…

PART 1 BBQ Nation Smoke SIGNALS TAKING THE TEMPERATURE OF TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY BARBECUE JOHN T. EDGE MEMPHIS-STYLE BEEF RIBS! I recently saw that banner flap in the breeze outside the third location of One & Only BBQ, a new Memphis-based minichain. Later that day, I stopped for a chopped pork sandwich with slaw at Tops Bar-B-Q, a fifteen-unit Memphis institution founded in 1952. Tacked near the register, a blurry photograph promoted barbecue wraps. Made with flour tortillas, they looked like burritos that got lost in transit from Texas. ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRITT SPENCER Andrew Thomas Lee In Memphis, where dry-rub pork spareribs and pork shoulder sandwiches became twentieth-century coins of the barbecue realm, and where pork obsessives still convene each May to crown world champions of whole hogs, pork shoulders, and pork…

DUE SOUTH LODGE Minding the Manor AN ACCIDENTAL EARL WITH A SOUTHERN LEGACY WELCOMES HISTORY-LOVING TRAVELERS TO THE ENGLISH ESTATE HE SAVED By Mike Grudowski Paul Massey/House & Garden © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd. If you closed your eyes and tried to picture a quintessential English country manor, you’d probably come up with something very much like Shaftesbury Estates, in East Dorset near the country’s south coast. The east side of the gargantuan redbrick main house looks onto a stately avenue of beech trees, planted in double rows on either side and extending some three-quarters of a mile toward the horizon. Not far away, you might spot a fisherman wading the shallows of the River Allen, a pristine stretch of spring-fed, clear-flowing chalk stream that looks like a setting…

How Do You Take Your Bourbon? Recently, during a Pappy Van Winkle bourbon tasting at Blackberry Farm, at an event for members of our Garden & Gun Society, I asked Julian P. Van Winkle III if there was a correct way to drink bourbon. Neat? On the rocks? With a splash of water? Van Winkle is the president of the Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery. His answer? Any way you like it. He divulged that he sometimes adds one ice cube and a lemon twist to his Pappy, and he also makes a mean old-fashioned with it. In other words, whatever your preferred brand of bourbon, don’t let anyone tell you how you should or shouldn’t drink it.…

Social Chatter GARDENANDGUN.COM AND BEYOND WE ASKED... What’s the best style of barbecue? On Facebook and Instagram, we started a food fight by asking you to name the South’s tastiest regional ’cue. I never met BBQ I didn’t like, but Memphis is my fave. @teresabaierl Texas style on Saturday night. Eastern North Carolina on Sunday after church. Johnathan Stancil Whole hog, because you get it all. Bob Christian North Alabama pulled pork, red sauce, hot mustard slaw. @fifty shadesofgrayson Vinegar above all. You want that sweet mess, go eat some molasses. @fouractual I bleed mustard sauce. Andrew Price Just like tacos, all types of barbecue are God’s children. All have their place. JacobWade If it’s pork, it’s BBQ. Don’t try to foist brisket or godforsaken chicken on me. Roger Davis…

Tennessee Titan A Volunteer State favorite returns with a bevy of guests Drew Holcomb & the Neighbors DRAGONS Drew Holcomb is having a moment. Along with founding and coproducing the sold-out Moon River Music Festival this September in Chattanooga and curating his vinyl-only subscription service, Magnolia Record Club, the Memphis-born singer-songwriter will release Dragonsin August. His seventh studio album with his band the Neighbors, Dragonsveers from the two-step, hand-clap opener “Family” to quieter folk with guests the Lone Bellow and majestic harmony-filled tracks with superstar songwriters Natalie Hemby and Lori McKenna. —M.H.…

TASTEMAKER Creative Loafing MEET THE RISING TALENTS BEHIND RICHMOND’S WOOD-FIRED SUB ROSA BAKERY By Kinsey Gidick PHOTOGRAPH BY SCOTT SUCHMAN Siblings Evrim and Evin Dogu know there are easier ways to bake bread. But for the co-owners of Richmond’s Sub Rosa Bakery, using regionally grown grains and baking in a wood-fired masonry oven aren’t negotiable. Not when the resulting smoke-kissed flavors of their farmhouse ciabatta, salami and cheese croissants, and beef börek are so remarkable. Not even when a fire nearly destroyed their bakery in 2013. They rebuilt, determined to keep sharing their love of old-world flavors, and now, seven years in, Sub Rosa has become a River City staple. But the Dogus—children of Turkish immigrants, they were born in Baton Rouge and spent their formative years in Northern Virginia,…

MADE IN THE SOUTH Bronze Menagerie A MARYLAND ARTIST BRINGS A LIFE IN THE FIELD TO HIS STRIKING SCULPTURES By Steve Russell PHOTOGRAPHS BY JASON VARNEY Working in his one-man studio in Ijamsville, Maryland, the acclaimed sporting sculptor Walter Matia is surrounded by putty knives, loop cutters, and other tools of his trade. Nooks brim with maquettes (scale models) of shorebirds, foxes, and raccoons. What’s missing? Any view of the actual great outdoors. Amid the clutter there are elements of the natural world to which Matia sometimes refers, from dried cattails to a freezer containing specimens of bobwhite quail and pintail ducks. And should he desire a muse while fashioning the life-size form of a gundog that currently occupies his worktable, he can turn an eye to Pip or Tink,…

GOOD DOG Name That Dog! A TIME-TESTED, MOTHER-APPROVED, NO-FAIL METHOD FOR FIGURING OUT WHAT TO CALL A NEW PET—IN SIX EASY STEPS BY SCOTT GOULD ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN CUNEO I.  I he way I heard it, the dog was just there, treading water down in a cold ditch somewhere in North Georgia. This was six months or so before I adopted him. A pair of kind souls driving through saw him huddled in the weeds, just off the shoulder of one of those narrow mountain highways, so they swooped down, dried him off, and took him to a vet in Greenville, South Carolina. He spent some time in the shelter before my girlfriend, who never met a lonely mutt she couldn’t foster, took him in. Then came the sudden bout…

TURNING UP The Heat A NEW GENERATION OF BARBECUE JOINTS ARE DOING RIGHT BY TRADITION—AND BLAZING NEW TRAILS KATHLEEN PURVIS Bow & Arrow AUBURN, AL Given his background—born in Alabama, raised in Texas—barbecue was personal for David Bancroft. “When I was growing up in San Antonio, everything was beef driven,” says the chef and owner of the farm-to-table restaurant Acre in Auburn. “Giant beef ribs and sausage, smoked meats. That food was the first thing I trained myself on.” So it seems only natural that for his second restaurant, Bancroft would take a decidedly meat-centric tack. He calls Bow & Arrow “a Texas smokehouse meets an Alabama potluck.” Meats are smoked over post oak and pecan wood on a turning grate custom-made by the Georgia grill maker Kudu, and sides…

Louisiana TIMEPIECE Along Bayou Chenal, in a corner of a parish near Baton Rouge, Jack and Pat Holden tend to an unrivaled tribute to the Acadian and Creole ways of life By CJ Lotz Photographs by William Abranowicz Off a winding Louisiana road, down an allée of spindly oaks, past an ancient split-cypress fence, grows a garden. There, Jack Holden points his pruning shears at the privet hedge lining a path, lilies springing as they please, and ferns seeking pockets of dappled light. “Here is my favorite, this rose,” Jack says, waving his clippers toward a tangle of vines and giant blushing flowers. Creole gardeners in the mid-1800s, he explains, cherished the Duchesse de Brabant rose, too. “I find plants in old neighborhoods, along country roads, and bring them back…

CONTRIBUTORS “Barbecue is the most terrifying thing to write about. Somebody’s going to get mad” —Kathleen Purvis on regional barbecue’s divisive nature (see p. 87) William Abranowicz PHOTOGRAPHER “In the South, the air often has a heaviness to it,” says William Abranowicz. As he captured images of a bayou estate for “Louisiana Timepiece” (p. 104), it rained. “But when the light came out late in the day and raked across all that moisture, it was magical,” he says. Abranowicz, a photographer for more than forty years, has shot for nearly every major publication in the United States, and his work appears in the collections of the Smithsonian. His upcoming photography book, inspired by the struggle for voting rights, took him all over the Deep South. Kathleen Purvis WRITER “Barbecue is…

INTERVIEW Perfect Casting TODAY SHOW NEWS ANCHOR CRAIG MELVIN WEARS HIS SOUTHERN PRIDE ON HIS SLEEVE By Allison Glock PHOTOGRAPHS BY NIGEL PARRY NBC News correspondent andTodayshow news anchor Craig Melvin was raised “in a house where there was always talking, lots of talking.” So it’s no surprise to him that he finds himself in conversation for a living, bringing to his coverage a warmth and sincerity he attributes to his upbringing in South Carolina, where storytelling was a way of life and his mother rarely ended a chat with a stranger in under fifteen minutes. Melvin, who also cohosts the third hour of Today, shares his mother’s welcoming loquaciousness and his father’s wry curiosity, and notes that even though he now lives with his wife and two young children…

DRINKS Liquid Smoke BARBECUE MEETS ITS PERFECT MATCH IN THIS BLEND OF MEZCAL AND AMARO By Wayne Curtis Modern science—bless its little, white-coated heart—has linked something on the order of five hundred chemical compounds to the flavor of smoke. Some of them are good—creating those intriguing undertones in a perfectly toasted campfire marshmallow. Other compounds are less desirable, bringing to mind an ashtray left overnight in the rain. Food and prop styling by Charlotte Autry PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHNNY AUTRY Makers of Scotch and mezcal have devoted generations to figuring out how to highlight the pleasing smoke flavors while shunning the off-putting. Scotch takes on its smoky tang during the drying of the barley malt, which is often done by beleaguering it with the smoke from dried mosses, sedges, and such,…

FORK in the ROAD Cajun Seasoning LOUISVILLE CHEF PAUL SKULAS GIVES THE SOUTH’S BEST-KNOWN REGIONAL CUISINE A MODERN HELPING OF KENTUCKY FLAVOR BY JOHN T. EDGE Illustration by Michael Spitz PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEREMY KRAMER My father and I worried over the cast-iron skillet, turning ash white on a gas grill licked by a blue flame. Was the skillet really hot enough? Had we coated the fish with enough melted butter? Did it matter that we had mixed our own spice blend instead of using the chef ’s brand? I was home from college. My father had recently remarried. Gathered in the backyard of his new wife’s brick ranch in suburban Macon, Georgia, we were trying to reconnect. Together, we had watched the chef on a morning television show, wearing whites…

IN THE GARDEN Kentucky Reverie A LEXINGTON COUPLE TAP A CELEBRATED GARDEN DESIGNER TO CREATE THEIR DREAM LANDSCAPE—AND HIS By Michael Graff PHOTOGRAPHS BY CAROLINE ALLISON Long before he was one of the South’s great garden designers, and before he made his name creating imaginative rooftop terraces for city-dwelling celebrities, Jon Carloftis was just a Kentucky boy gazing out his parents’ car window as they drove through the elms and oaks of Lexington’s Richmond Road. The majestic 1920s homes along the east side of the city were mesmerizing. He had two favorites, one of which was a three-story redbrick house with white columns at the doorway. Carloftis’s mother always teased her son that he’d like an outhouse if it had columns. Decades later, around 2010, he received a call from…

HOMEPLACE Bywater Dream A NEW ORLEANS STYLIST BLENDS HISTORY AND BEAUTY WITH APLOMB IN HIS COLORFUL CREOLE COTTAGE By Jessica B. Harris PHOTOGRAPHS BY CEDRIC ANGELES Kerry Moody’s Creole cottage in New Orleans’ Bywater district winks at passersby from a thicket of elephant-ear-shaped taro plants. Set back from the street, the house emerges from the earth like the ginger blossoms showing off their exotic coloring nearby, all yellows and greens and splashes of red. Cross through the iron gates, step along the bricked path, and you enter a sanctuary created by the man who for more than three decades served as stylist, general manager, floral design wizard, and enduring fixture at Lucullus, the city’s late and lamented culinary antique shop. Now that the esteemed French Quarter destination has moved on…

PART 3 BBQ Nation MADE WITH Love THE VIDAL FAMILY ARE PUTTING THEIR OWN SPIN ON TEXAS BARBECUE, ONE SMOKED BRISKET TACO AT A TIME KATHLEEN PURVIS PHOTOGRAPHS BY LEANN MUELLER When you get to Valentina’s Tex Mex BBQ in Austin, Texas, don’t expect a fancy building...yet. Even so, Miguel and Modesty Vidal have already built one of the most popular barbecue restaurants in town: It’s three trailers (one where they serve the food, two where they prep and cook), several outdoor smokers, plus a covered patio and an open barn with picnic tables. ¶ “I don’t need Valentina’s to be some huge, crazy operation,” Miguel says. What they both wanted when they started out in 2013 was to create a relaxed, comfortable place that feels like the backyard gatherings…