Innholdsfortegnelse for October/November 2020 i Garden & Gun

EDITOR’S LETTER Ready for a Close-Up INSIDE OUR COVER SHOOT, AND A FEW TRICKS FROM A PHOTOGRAPHER WITH A NOSE FOR DOGS DAVID DIBENEDETTO Senior Vice President & Editor in Chief PHOTOGRAPHS BY VINCENT J. MUSI According to Vincent J. Musi, a photographer who specializes in animal portraiture and has shot everything from a honeybee to an elephant for National Geographic, there are secrets to getting every animal to look its best. For a series of in-your-face portraits of big cats, for instance, an assistant held up raw beef on a stick to get just the right look from a lion at the Houston Zoo. But the snow leopard wasn’t such an easy mark. “I discovered I had to sing to it,” Musi says, “a cross between Frank Sinatra and…

LETTERS “My yield mother to no substitute would rind for watermelon pickles in her chicken salad” SIMPLE PLEASURES “Happy as a Mudlark” (August/September 2020) brought back so many wonderful memories of my adventures with my eighty-two-year-old mom doing the “Sanibel Stoop” along the Thames. I never knew that our digging in the mud had a term. Faryl Hart Richmond, Virginia Great article about my favorite fish as a young boy in the 1950s (“River of Roosters,” August/September 2020). At daylight, my brother and I would set up half a dozen cane poles on forked sticks in the Waccamaw River, and before all the rods were baited, one would go off with a longear sunfish. Around lunchtime, my dad would pull out a cast-iron skillet and fry up a mess of…

TALK OF THE SOUTH INTERVIEW Man of Action ETHAN HAWKE TAKES ON THE FIERY ABOLITIONIST JOHN BROWN IN A NEW MINISERIES By Monte Burke Ryan Pfluger/AUGUST If you stand for the Lord, the Lord will stand for you!” So bellows the abolitionist John Brown, as played by the Texas native Ethan Hawke in his starring role in the spirited Showtime miniseries The Good Lord Bird, which begins airing October 4. Hawke, the forty-nine-year-old four-time Oscar nominee, also executive produced the miniseries—which is based on the 2013 National Book Award–winning novel by James McBride—with, among others, his wife, Ryan, and Jason Blum (Get Out). ¶ The Good Lord Bird tells the story of Brown—played in a winning, full-throated manner by Hawke—as told by a fictional, formerly enslaved child named Onion. Freed…

TALK OF THE SOUTH ARTS Organic Talent FLETCHER WILLIAMS III DRAWS, PAINTS, AND SCULPTS ART FROM THE LOWCOUNTRY’S ABUNDANCE By CJ Lotz Untitled, acrylic on paper, in the double parlor PHOTOGRAPHS BY JACQUELINE STOFSICK In Fletcher Williams III’s hands, Spanish moss, pulled down from a live oak, transforms into a brush saturated with paint. Discarded picket fences twist and turn in a sculpture that reaches to the sky. Stems link into a blanket beneath palmetto fronds curled into roses. Williams collects these familiar textures of his South Carolina Lowcountry home, then reimagines them and reshapes their forms. “I’m not sure if the material comes first or the idea,” Williams says. “But I let the materials lead most of the time.” This past summer, Williams impressed Charlestonians and visitors with his…

Desert Blues A genre-bending stunner from a West African powerhouse Songhoy Blues OPTIMISME What would you get if Jack White and Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti showed up at Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint to jam? Something like Songhoy Blues, an electrifying rock quartet from Mali. The group’s third album, Optimisme—released by the Oxford, Mississippi, label Fat Possum Records—pulses with frenetic desert blues, spellbinding guitar heroics, and urgent rhythms. The songs, including the band’s first in English, “Worry,” are a call to continue to fight for equality for all races and creeds. It’s some of the best-sounding protest rock you’ll hear in 2020. —M.H.…

ANATOMY OF A CLASSIC Super Beans A KICKED-UP TAKE ON A ONE-POT MAINSTAY By Kim Severson Pandemic cooking has made stars out of forgotten kitchen staples, especially the humble bean. Ryan Hacker was only a few months into his new job as executive chef at the beloved French Quarter fixture Brennan’s Restaurant when New Orleans closed its dining rooms. “I never had this much time at home before,” he says. While he helped plan for reopening, he spent time teaching his two young daughters to cook family recipes. One of them was soup beans, a simple one-pot meal that over the years he has transformed into something he has nicknamed Southern cassoulet, after the French meat-and-bean stew. Often associated with Appalachia, soup beans—traditionally long-simmered pinto beans sometimes bulked up with…

OUR KIND OF PLACE The Persistence of Pearl A GARDENER FINDS PEACE AT PEARL FRYAR’S BACK-ROADS HAVEN, WHERE THE SOUTH CAROLINA TOPIARY ARTIST SHAPES HIS OWN STORY By Shani Raine Gilchrist Peter Frank Edwards/Redux I don’t typically shy away from garden work, but this year was different. Maybe the heat indexes were more oppressive—the stresses of the world certainly seemed so—or maybe I flat out did something terrible to make the soil more intent on feeding weeds than my tomatoes. When I’d look out over the raised beds from the window of my study in Columbia, South Carolina, I felt anything but the calm that scientific reports claim gardening brings. All I saw was a lengthening to-do list. I needed a retreat from the ongoingness of writing projects, breaking news,…

Mail-Order Meat A Kentucky source for top-quality beef I love trips to my local butcher (especially for a teres major cut), but recently I received a box of American-raised Wagyu beef from Kentucky’s Black Hawk Farms and put it to the test. We grilled the outside skirt steak and served it with a panzanella with local heirloom tomatoes, and the results had both our kids and our guests digging in for more. We also used the company’s ground beef to make simple sliders in a cast-iron skillet, and the buttery flavor blew us away. A longtime supplier to restaurants, the farm has just recently started shipping its humanely raised beef to the public. It’s one of the tastier packages you can get in the mail. Black Hawk Farms…

Social Chatter GARDENANDGUN.COM AND BEYOND To devein or not to devein shrimp? A recent gardenandgun.com story got readers fired up about whether or not to remove the dark, gritty line along a shrimp’s back. Deveining is just a waste of shrimp-eatin’ time. Mike Burch Once you know what the line is, you can’t unknow it. Mark Richardi It will not kill you, otherwise I would be dead long ago. J Robin Hall It’s just terroir. @glotoriousc My back hurts when I am through deveining, but it is so worth it. Christine Eklund If it bothers you, add some hot sauce and chase it with a shot of whiskey! You’ll be fine. Carlos Del Valle For little bitty shrimp, I don’t, but for jumbo Gulf shrimp, oh, yes. Micheline Maynard How…

TALK OF THE SOUTH BOOKS Lift Every Voice A NEW ANTHOLOGY HIGHLIGHTS THE STORIES OF SOUTHERN WRITERS OF COLOR By Jonathan Miles Jacqueline Stofsick Not even a geographical place” is how William Faulkner’s Chick Mallison, in Intruder in the Dust, regarded the North, “but an emotional idea.” Mallison may just have well—and more accurately—been describing his native South. Yet even more nebulous, and more emotionally charged, is the notion of Southern identity—especially for people of color. For A Measure of Belonging, a thoroughly timely anthology, the writer and editor Cinelle Barnes marshals twenty-one considerations of what it means to be a Southerner of color. The assembled essayists, most of them young, are African American, Native American, Puerto Rican, Filipina, Peruvian, Indian, and Korean, but all of them—whether by birth, choice,…

ASK G&G Beasts of Burden COOP CAVEATS, HOLIDAY ETIQUETTE, AND A JAZZ GENIUS By Guy Martin ILLUSTRATION BY BRITT SPENCER Q/A Wondering: Home more and acreage aplenty, so wouldn’t it be fun to bring in some pigs and chickens? While we admire the impulse to set up the Southern homestead circa 1925, with the chickens out back and the hogs quartered in Great-granddaddy’s barn, could you please prune your vision of agrarian bliss to one species? Farming’s most deceptive axiom is that any animal you allegedly “own” requires you to work for it, not the other way around. As future employers go, chickens are nominally the beginner’s easier choice. Your goal is to create a setup that will give you a break from your 24/7 imitation of Sisyphus, say in…

DRINKS Clear Winners SMALL-BATCH SOUTHERN VODKAS STEP UP TO THE PALATE By Wayne Curtis Vodka has long been your friend who can do just about everything, yet refrains from being the center of attention. It can sharpen any beverage—Orange juice! Tomato juice! Red Bull!—but lingers in the background, smirking rather than shouting. That’s partly by design. For years, the federal agency that oversees alcohol has defined vodka as a spirit “without distinctive character, aroma, taste, or color.” It’s been the wallflower liquor. Food and prop styling by Charlotte Autry PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHNNY AUTRY That changed this past spring. After long consideration, the feds quietly dropped that definition. Vodka is defined now by how it’s produced rather than how it looks or tastes. This recalibration wasn’t aimed at opening the floodgates…

MADE IN THE SOUTH Fine Lines TWO CULTURES MERGE IN A VIRGINIA STUDIO TO CREATE ETHEREAL AFRICAN-INFLUENCED FURNITURE By Latria Graham PHOTOGRAPHS BY JARED SOARES Two and a half hours south of Washington, D.C., outside of Columbia, Virginia, in a former three-car garage on the north side of the James River, the designer Jo-mo Tariku and the woodworker David Bohnhoff are redefining contemporary African furniture. In the studio, African mahogany shavings cover a section of the floor as they collaborate on museum-worthy chairs and stools, and the smell the wood casts off as the day heats up permeates the space. Born in Kenya and raised in Ethiopia, Tariku came to the United States in 1987. After studying industrial design at the University of Kansas, he eventually moved to the suburbs…

BEYOND THE COVEY FROM HARDSCRABBLE ROOTS, A ONETIME FARMER CREATES HIS QUAIL WOODS DREAMS IN NORTH CAROLINA, WHERE GOOD DOGS AND GREAT FRIENDS MAKE MEMORIES THAT STRETCH BEYOND THE FIELD BY T. EDWARD NICKENS PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER FRANK EDWARDS Dexter worms through cinnamon fern turned auburn in the chill of fall. He takes a halting step and stops, trailing birds on the run. Ten feet away, Emma honors his point, her flanks quivering. Vaulting through open pinewoods, they are a jealous pair, eyeing each other with sidelong glances, desperate to be the first on point. But once one has a muzzle full of bird scent, the other bends to instinct and training, locking up tight to prevent bumping the birds. THEY ARE BROTHER AND SISTER, TWO ENGLISH SETTERS AS DIFFERENT…

CONTRIBUTORS “I think of barbecue as communal food. It brings people together for the best of times” —Adrian Miller, who interviewed Texas pitmaster Derrick Walker, p. 55 Adrian Miller WRITER Among the many titles Adrian Miller has held throughout his career—James Beard Award–winning culinary historian, attorney, staffer to President Bill Clinton and then Colorado governor Bill Ritter Jr.—perhaps the tastiest is his gig as a certified barbecue judge. “I always think of barbecue as communal food,” he says. “It brings people together for the best of times.” He is currently working on a book about the history of African American barbecue, tentatively titled Black Smoke, and for “Pit Boss” (p. 55), Miller interviewed the pitmaster Derrick Walker of Smoke-A-Holics BBQ in Fort Worth. Through all of Miller’s hands-on research, one…

WHAT’S ONLINE Sit, Stay, Smile Do you have a good dog? Of course you do! Give your pup a shot at doggy fame by entering Garden & Gun’s Good Dog Photo Contest. Upload a photo of your pooch and vote for your favorites at gardenandgun.com/gooddog. The winner will appear in our December 2020/January 2021 issue. Phillip Walker G&G on the Go Get G&G on your phone, tablet, or computer. The iPad edition brings G&G’s stunning photography to your screen and adds enhancements to make each issue an immersive experience. The magazine is also available on Apple News+. See all of our digital subscription options at gardenandgun.com/digital . Join Our Instagram Party Follow us on Instagram to go behind the scenes with some of the South’s top musicians and…

Seasonal Eating Three Can’t-Miss Fall Cookbooks It’s not always on the menu at her Chauhan Ale & Masala House in Nashville, but Maneet Chauhan serves a tamarind gin and tonic when a guest asks for a tipple inspired by India. The chef and Chopped judge shares that recipe and more vibrant odes to her native country in Chaat (Clarkson Potter). For I Cook in Color (Running Press), the Atlanta chef Asha Gomez celebrates Southern ingredients and worldwide flavors: a Vidalia onion soup capped with Gruyère; a crawfish boil perfumed with cumin and saffron. The North Carolina chef and TV personality Vivian Howard provides pep talks aplenty in This Will Make It Taste Good (Voracious), as well as the Little Green Dress sauce she plops on everything from deviled eggs to…

TASTEMAKER Pit Boss DERRICK WALKER, THE OWNER AND PITMASTER OF FORT WORTH’S SMOKE-A-HOLICS BBQ, ON LEARNING THE CRAFT, SMOKED BOLOGNA, AND “TEX-SOUL” By Adrian Miller PHOTOGRAPHS BY FREDRIK BRODEN AGE: 43 HOME BASE: Fort Worth, Texas KNOWN FOR: His restaurant, Smoke-A-Holics BBQ, which he took from a pop-up that began in 2003 to a food truck and now a brick-and-mortar location. Walker calls his style Tex-Soul, and with help from his wife, Kesha, the Fort Worth native has made Smoke-A-Holics an essential gathering place for some of the best barbecue in the city. His barbecue mentor: “When I was twelve years old, my grandfather pulled up to the house with his truck, and he had a smoker behind it. I had never seen anything like it before in my life.…

WHAT’S IN SEASON How Sweet It Is STOCK YOUR PANTRY WITH SORGHUM SYRUP AND IT JUST MIGHT BECOME YOUR FAVORITE CONDIMENT By Jenny Everett ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN BURGOYNE From hot sauce to rémoulade to Old Bay, smearing, drizzling, and sprinkling our way to bonus flavor is a Southern sport. And if you’re looking for a hit of sweetness, chefs like Rob Newton, the executive chef at the Capital Hotel in Little Rock, consider sorghum syrup the MVP of the pantry. “I think of sorghum as the workhorse you can use in a lot of different ways,” he says. “It’s not as delicate as maple syrup, which you don’t want to cook with. And it doesn’t have that burnt sugar, bitter quality blackstrap molasses can have. It’s sort of right there…

HOMEPLACE Texas Double Take THE BROTHERS BEHIND YETI CREATE A STRIKING HUNTING CAMP FOR THEIR FAMILIES By Tom Foster Certain times of year, when you walk outside these walls, you better have your head on a swivel,” says Ryan Seiders, one half of the founding duo of the coolers-and-camping-stuff company Yeti. He and his brother Roy, the other Yeti founder, are ambling around the twin hunting lodges they had built at Paloma Ranch, a seventeen-thousand-acre spread of mostly raw land they bought a few years ago in far South Texas, a couple of hours south of San Antonio and minutes from the Mexican border. It’s rough country here—mesquite brush, huisache, prickly pear, relentless sun, rattlesnakes. Ryan gestures to the waist-high smooth white wall that surrounds the two houses and the…

An Elevated Oyster Shooter Yield: 4 servings Run-of-the-mill oyster shooters in a shot glass throw back fiery and fast. But when Jeff Mattia, the chef-owner at Pyre Provisions in Covington, Louisiana, wanted a shooter to savor, he grabbed a bottle of Tito’s and mixed in fresh juice and mild green Tabasco. Sure, it’s a little fancy, but this shooter hasn’t forgotten where it came from: “Gulf oysters are at least two bites,” Mattia says. “So our shooter is a big gulp.” INGREDIENTS 4 oz. Tito’s vodka 4 oz. green juice (Mattia juices spinach, celery, parsley, and lemon; you can make your own or use any store brand) 1½ oz. Tabasco green pepper sauce 2 oz. lemon juice 2 dashes liquid smoke 4 lime wedges 1 tbsp. barbecue rub 4 shucked…