Innholdsfortegnelse for August/September i Garden & Gun

EDITOR’S LETTER I did not grow up in a family with a collection of cast-iron pots and pans. I purchased my first piece, a twelve-inch Lodge skillet, during my stint in New York City with my now wife at a hardware store at Ninety-Seventh Street and Broadway. I had come home from an offshore fishing trip with a haul of yellowfin tuna, and Jenny, as always, knew exactly how we should cook it. (Rub the tuna with cumin, coriander, cayenne, salt, and pepper. Drop it in a smoking hot skillet for a quick sear. Serve in chunks in taco shells with avocado salsa.) That was seventeen years ago, and that skillet still rests atop our stove—having handled everything from buttermilk biscuits to venison burgers. Though we’ve since added to our…

“Disappearing into the woods is a portal into another dimension of mind” FOOD FIGHTS I am sure the Sanguich restaurant in Miami (Fork in the Road, June/July 2022) serves a fine Cuban sandwich, but you have to travel to Tampa to find Cuban sandwich perfection. While we in Tampa may debate which area restaurant serves the best, inevitably the winner is the Columbia Restaurant, open since 1905. Don Ottinger Tampa, Florida I have lived in North Florida for forty years and have a son in Tampa Bay. I regularly read the Tampa Bay Times and I think that there are going to be some very unhappy people because your “Cuban” story doesn’t recognize that the sandwich was invented (in this country) not by the recent wave of Cubans, but by…

Inside her home studio on a quiet street in Lexington, Kentucky, the basket weaver and designer Emily Ridings turns out a breathtaking range of pieces that offer both contemporary flavor and old-fashioned high artistry: sand-colored handbaskets with brown leather straps, structured baskets of all shapes and sizes, woven bracelets and cuffs, reed hats, bud vases, and cane basket purses. But when dreaming up her first showstopping basket-inspired design—a billowing hoopskirt that would go on to star on a New York City runway—Ridings initially leaned on her grandmother’s expertise. Brainstorming that summer of 2017 at Grandma Judy Ridings’s house in nearby Richmond, the then rising senior at Pratt Institute in New York had never woven a basket herself. For as long as Emily could remember, though, her life with Judy, a…

RESTAURANTS USED TO BE DIVERSIONS. We traveled to Nashville to see big and blingy concerts at the Ryman or small and raucous shows at Robert’s. Music defined that destination. Just as Atlanta trips revolved around Braves games and High Museum exhibits. And Charleston visits demanded tours of house museums and knowledge of earthquake bolts and gib plates. (New Orleans was the exception that made clear the possibilities.) That was then. Now we squeeze in art and games after lunch. Music comes after dinner. We travel to eat. And we recognize that the best path to knowing a town or a city often leads through a restaurant that reflects a place’s mores and appetites. To make the point, let’s stick with Nashville, a fast-growing and sometimes bewildering city where three-story honky-tonks…

Melissa Martin isn’t much interested in arguments over what makes food truly Creole or Cajun. The Louisiana native and Mosquito Supper Club owner would rather talk about bayous. While Martin could tout her James Beard Award, or brag about how she sells out dinner tables each night, she’s determined to use her restaurant as a tool to fight climate change and environmental injustice, immersing diners in local seafood and striving toward more sustainable practices in her kitchen. As guests convene at a communal table in a nineteenth-century home in Uptown, they have the potential to dine with folks from as near as Tremé and as far as the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, Martin rolls out a menu built on the area’s bounty. Velma Marie’s oyster soup, an ode to her grandmother’s…

A few months ago, I hopped on a flight to Atlanta for a tasting session with Sam Davis, the new executive chef at the Garden & Gun Club at the Battery Atlanta. And I’m glad I did. Davis’s take on shrimp and grits, with a coconut Creole cream sauce, surprised and delighted, and his deft handling of vegetable-forward plates left me bummed I didn’t live closer to the restaurant. Davis, who has cooked in some of Atlanta’s top kitchens, including Gunshow and Lazy Betty, first gained his chops cooking for his family while he was growing up. Thankfully, he’s now made the G&G Club his home.…

WE ASKED... What’s the best Southern dessert? In our Talk of the South newsletter, readers shared their favorite Southern sweets. Ambrosia—the well-named food of the gods. Sue J. My grandmother’s banana pudding. Bryan D. Smith Island cake from Maryland. Bob L. Key lime pie. You can’t get much more Southern than the Florida Keys. Diane S. Homemade peach ice cream. Pam C. Pecan pie (with dark Karo) narrowly edges out banana pudding. Jeff S. Cream cheese pound cake served plain or dressed up is perfect for any occasion. Julie M. Hummingbird cake. Darryl B. From my memories of growing up, it would have to be my grandma’s seven-layer caramel cake. Victoria A. No doubt, sure thing, a slice of bourbon pecan pie with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream.…

Few hatters build truly custom pieces the way Shorty Koger does anymore. Her brass and cast-iron machines are at least as old as her parapeted 1930s-era saloon-style storefront in the Oklahoma City stockyards, where they sit, hissing and steaming and bobbing with rich felt. For one, the equipment hardly exists anymore—much less anyone who knows how to use it. “It’s hard to find somebody to make a hat,” says Koger, buttoned up to her chin in a Western shirt, her own tan cowboy hat expertly perched. “This whole business is a lost art.” At Shorty’s Caboy (that’s prairie dialect for “cowboy”) Hattery, which serves as both factory and showroom, Koger and her team turn out high-end Western hats by hand, using an antique blocking machine to adjust the size and…

The victim was sixty-eight-year-old society matron Idella Long Thompson, found crumpled in a pool of blood on her bathroom floor. The year: 1948. The place: Leland, Mississippi, a drowsy little Delta town girded by cotton fields and bisected by Highway 61. And the murder weapon: a pair of pruning shears. “They were all metal, from the tip of the blades—curved, shaped something like a hawk’s beak—to the blunt end of the handles,” writes Beverly Lowry in Deer Creek Drive. “The murderer would have had to stand close to the victim, within inches, to hack into her body as repeatedly as Idella Thompson had been. At least 150 times, the coroner would report.” “There was no sense to it,” Lowry continues. “Dead was dead. Who would keep chopping away like that…

Nina Compton is an unabashed superfan of barbecue shrimp, that stalwart of New Orleans menus that drenches good Gulf shrimp in a hot bath of butter, lemon, and Worcestershire sauce heavy with garlic and black pepper. (She’s a particular fan of the version at Emeril’s. “They serve it with those little rosemary biscuits. It’s so good!”) In her kitchen at Compère Lapin, her New Orleans restaurant that shot her to national fame, she likes to take Gulf shrimp on an equally saucy journey, one that reflects her Caribbean roots, in a preparation called Rundown. Although versions are made throughout the Caribbean islands and in many other countries with a Caribbean coastline, the original began in Jamaica, where salted mackerel or other fish is simmered in spices, tomato, and coconut milk…

LOCKETS FROM TOP: This lively look by Charleston, South Carolina’s HART pairs a traditional locket shape with an unexpected green chrysoprase and aquamarine necklace ($603; harthagerty.com). The hexagonal surface of a simple Kendra Scott design has an ideal space for an engraved monogram ($240; kendrascott.com). Even at a distance, the gold and black enamel stripes of this Victorian-esque stunner by Storrow stand out, as does the diamond, emerald, and pearl star at its center ($6,290; storrowjewelry.com). Tell your own story with a commission from the Stax Advisory—this set of charms, for instance, expresses cofounder Laurel Pantin’s with a customized piece featuring a drawing by her toddler (from $10,000; thestaxadvisory.com). The size and the art deco aesthetic of this ceramic and emerald locket by Monica Rich Kosann put the art of…

The Hummingbird Way MOBILE ALABAMA “Biscuit service” could sound about as stuffy as a sweater set or chintz drapes. But as with much of his menu, chef Jim Smith takes the traditional and turns it just so. Far from fussy, four buttermilk biscuits in a cast-iron skillet (no hidden doily) appear with the iconic duo of cane syrup and butter, along with a small dish of smoked sea salt for three-part harmony. An Alabama seafood devotee, Smith adds similar subtle dimensions to Gulf gets: a sash of sauce gribiche on fried soft-shell crab; a Vietnamese-inspired strawberry nuoc cham on a half-shell oyster; a crab cake sprinkled with a confetti of pickled oyster mushroom salad. Opened in 2020, the Hummingbird Way seems right at home in the idyllic Oakleigh Garden Historic…

From the start, chef Brian Landry says, eighth-generation Beam family master distiller Freddie Noe was adamant that the restaurant at the bourbon company’s remade visitor complex—on the edge of Bernheim Forest, twenty-six scenic miles south of Louisville—serve pizza. Guests at the Kitchen Table can also order a rib-sticking triple-meat burgoo that would be the pride of any hunting camp, or spunky duck jalapeño poppers sweetened with cane syrup. In a lineup like that, pizza might sound like a sop to eaters accustomed to the same lunch at every tourist site. But Landry builds his pies on a foundation of the same yeast that for decades has invigorated every batch of Jim Beam, which he swears is what gives them their alluring tang and gravitas. His attention to detail shows throughout…

When I called my mom for comfort, she scolded me instead. “Remember, you’re no spring chicken,” she said. Eighty-one at the time, she was one to talk. ¶ I had just soared over the handlebars of my mountain bike, landing so hard in the dirt that I pulverized several bones in my left hand. Those bones turned out to be critical tools in the act of typing, which is how I earn my living as a writer. ¶ It was July of 2008, one of the crappiest years on record, and not just for the stock market. I’d recently been wait-listed for a journalism opportunity I’d long coveted, the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, followed by another rejection for a tenure-track teaching job. In between, summer pneumonia sent me to…

A s teenagers, my brother and I brokered a deal with our parents: No summer jobs at home in Charleston as long as we worked on my maternal grandparents’ peach farm in Upstate South Carolina, where the expectation was that grandkids work harder than even the best full-time employees. Long hours standing inside the open-air roadside market, hauling bushels of peaches, shucking corn and shelling peas, and dipping several hundred ice cream cones meant our dogs didn’t just bark, they howled. Nearly two decades later, the memory of those sticky hot days remains a bright spot. Those formative summers schooled us in work ethic and customer service, but they also instilled in us a genuine interest in the way food unifies people. Roadside farm stands are microcosms of the communities…

Dan Winters PHOTOGRAPHER When Dan Winters was a child, he pored over the photos in the National Geographic and LIFE magazines his parents subscribed to. “That’s when I realized that photography can be an entrée into a lot of different worlds,” says the Austin, Texas–based photographer. Winters’s work—such as portraits of Willie Nelson and a still life of Neil Armstrong’s space suit—has been featured in the New Yorker and National Geographic. For “Man of Fire and Steel” (p. 104), he traveled to Nashville, Arkansas, to photograph the renowned bladesmith Jerry Fisk. “I really related to Jerry on a maker level,” Winters says. “Plus, after the shoot, we went out to dinner and I got one of the best steaks I’ve ever had.” “Photography can be an entrée into a lot…

Marcus King swears he saw Death on the streets of Nashville last year. King and his then girlfriend were staying the night at the Bobby Hotel downtown after an exterminator had been at their house during the day. Their relationship had grown rocky, and the couple had a fight. So King went for a walk to clear his head. As he strolled down Printers Alley, he says, he saw someone wearing a green sweatshirt hunched over on the street. When King passed by, he looked down and the person didn’t have a face. Whether you believe King truly saw Death isn’t the point. We all find signs in life. (The morning of my father’s funeral, it started to snow huge, powdery flakes. My dad loved to ski and was watching…

Inside the Mexico City studio of Pedro Diego Alvarado, sunlight streams through a wall of glass onto worn wooden easels and tables laid with long silver rulers, jars jammed with brushes, and dried ears of corn. Alvarado’s dog, Tepa, chases butterflies in the garden as the painter leafs through a stack of small studies on paper. Among the colorful calla lilies, magueys, and market scenes mix photographs of familiar faces, including that of his grandfather, the iconic Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Alvarado was just a baby when his grandfather died, in 1957, but he and his mother, the architect Ruth Rivera, lived in Rivera’s famous studio for more than a decade. Today that space in the San Ángel neighborhood houses not only a museum dedicated to Rivera and his third…

The late poet, novelist, and essayist Jim Harrison soaked up every experience he could, and The Search for the Genuine (Grove Press) gathers many of his best exploits—shark tagging, grouse hunting—into a rollicking but sentimental tribute to a life wholly lived. A modern master of personal storytelling, CJ Hauser also delivers a remarkable memoir in essays, The Crane Wife (Doubleday). In the title piece, she breaks off her engagement and heads to the Gulf Coast of Texas to study whooping cranes, whose grace and fragility remind her it’s okay to have needs. Black Folk Could Fly (W. W. Norton & Company) collects writings by the Eastern North Carolinian Randall Kenan, who died in 2020. His love of family and Southern food resounds, as in an ode to scuppernongs and homemade…

When they clock off, bartenders, chefs, and servers will often enjoy a “shift drink,” a late-night libation that’s typically thirst quenching, easy to make, and cheap. At the Roosevelt Room in Austin, Texas, the co-owner and barman Justin Lavenue had the habit of popping open a cold Topo Chico sparkling mineral water, pouring out a bit to make room, then adding lime juice and absinthe. The concoction became popular among his coworkers. And then—living out the fondest dream of shift-drink creations everywhere—it made the heroic leap to the cocktail menu and received a name: Death Valley. That was back in 2017. Bar customers clamored for it, and you can still find the option on the Roosevelt Room’s list. And for good reason. For starters, the Death Valley is unusually refreshing…

Is it possible that the best restaurant now interpreting the food of Black Southerners does business outside the South? Mark the ongoing impact of the Great Migration, when six million Black Southerners left for cities like Chicago, and what chef-owner Erick Williams does here in the Hyde Park neighborhood eats like destiny. His people came out of Mississippi. “When I was growing up, my parents warned me about going back home,” Williams says. So the chef returned through the kitchen door. In homage to the lives his people made here, he pickles smoked turkey and cooks it down with collards. Gizzards come on dirty rice, drenched in skillet gravy. He serves velvet-fleshed roast chicken with stewed rutabagas that taste dank and sweet. Night after night, he makes whole the northern…

On a dewy gray morning in April, on the quiet northwestern edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a pair of retirees from Minnesota encountered a man descending the trail as they were hiking up. “Did you take in that show on the way up?” the man asked them. The couple knew right off what he was talking about: the explosive blooms of spring ephemerals, all the trilliums and fire pinks and bloodroots and trout lilies they’d been seeing flowering along the trail. “Amazing,” they said. Sensing a fellow plant enthusiast, they asked for the man’s help in identifying one peculiar flower they’d noticed that resembled a “little Christmas tree” poking from the soil. “Bear corn,” came the answer. “It’s a parasitic plant. It flowers,” but it doesn’t photosynthesize.…

Forty-five years after leaving my hometown of Mobile for college, I still find it astounding that I never lived there again. My grand life plan got waylaid by career (sportswriting) and spouse (Yankee). I soothe my yearning for home by telling myself that the Mobile I miss exists only between my ears. Time has a way of moving things along. I tell myself that, and yet on every return trip, I walk into the peanut shop and see where time has been told to take a hike. The official name is A&M Peanut Shop, yet four generations of Mobilians have simply called the narrow Dauphin Street storefront “the peanut shop.” Since 1947, when the store opened as one of hundreds of Planters retail stores across the country, the peanut shop…