Innholdsfortegnelse for October/November 2022 i Garden & Gun

ALL IN THE FAMILY I loved David DiBenedetto’s story on his Dutch oven recovery (Editor’s Letter, August/September 2022) and wanted to share a technique my grandmother used in South Louisiana to bring her cast iron back to life: She would make a hot fire and put the pots and skillets in it until all of the “junk” was removed, and then clean them up and oil them again. I still use the process today. Stefan Speligene Franklin, Tennessee I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed T. Edward Nickens’s story about the resurgence of side-by-side shotguns (Sporting Scene, June/July 2022). In 1927, my grandfather traded a bird dog for a new Ithaca side-by-side 16-gauge with a quail engraved on one side and a woodcock on the other. He shot it…

Charley Crockett is making up for lost time. In the past seven years, the Texas native has released twelve albums, including his sublime new effort, The Man from Waco. But Crockett’s career got off to a late start. After leaving home as a teenager with a guitar his mother got him from a pawnshop, he began playing and living on the streets in Dallas and around the country, including the French Quarter in New Orleans and New York City, performing for tips on the subway. His talent was undeniable. After hearing him play, an executive from Sony Music offered him a record deal right there on the R train. Sony wanted to make Crockett the next country-pop superstar, but Crockett had zero interest in molding his traditional blues and country…

BOOKS Barbara Kingsolver, who lives in southwest Virginia, turns out both highly praised fiction—Flight Behavior, The Poisonwood Bible—and nonfiction, including the best seller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. In her new novel, Demon Copperhead (Harper), she takes as inspiration David Copperfield, but sets it mostly in the 2000s in Lee County, Virginia, home to bean-and-cornbread suppers, Friday night football, and an economy that lurches from farming and coal mining to prescription pill swapping. Kingsolver’s nature writing gleams—moss in the deer-hunting woods, tobacco harvested by hand—as does her understanding of rural ways and overlooked histories, like that of the orphaned main character, whose olive skin, green eyes, and copper hair mark him as a Melungeon, a mixed-race group some call the “Lost Tribe of Appalachia.” This book is painful but hard to put…

Neal Bodenheimer is a former history major, an entrepreneur, and a lifelong New Orleanian—his great-grandfather moved to the city at the turn of the last century. All those facts converge in late October with the publication of Cure: New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ’Em, a lavish cocktail book Bodenheimer coauthored with the food and drink writer Emily Timberlake. The tome features dozens of thirst-provoking recipes, layered with essays that explore the history and drinking culture of New Orleans, along with the stories behind iconic drinks. One could make a convincing argument that New Orleans is the historic drinking capital of the known world, making Cure essential reading for anyone who understands that cocktails are more than the sum of their ingredients. “We wanted to write something about New…

Talk me through the sherries,” I say, explaining that I like the dry and nutty stuff but have never successfully navigated the thicket of amontillados and olorosos. I flirt with a Manzanilla before detouring to a white wine made from a grape used to make sherry. Close enough. As manager Tayler Buffington pours a Celler del Roure from Valencia, he talks salinity and how to pronounce the place-names attached to Spanish wines. “In Spanish, every letter is pronounced the same way regardless of context,” he says. “That makes everything easy.” What he doesn’t say, my wife, Blair, and I learn over four meals in three days at La Bodega by Cúrate in downtown Asheville: Under the spell of this new Spanish restaurant, the latest from Katie Button and Félix Meana,…

From top: BLIND BAG There’s not a more dunk-proof, mud-proof, abuse-proof duck pack out there, and few that work smarter than the Timber Pack by Sitka. The bag can hang from a tree by its integrated strap, complete with a gun hook, or stay dry on the ground due to a beefy waterproof welded rubber bottom. Bonus: The top opens as wide as a gator’s mouth, with zippered accessory pockets ($239; sitkagear.com). COFFEE JUG This burly French press BruTrek travel mug is just what the spouse ordered when it comes to silent, easy, no-mess middle-of-the-night java making. The unique vessel’s design prevents grounds from slipping back into the twenty-four ounces of liquid, which double-wall insulation and a body built as tough as a coal car keep extra hot ($50; planetary…

GARDEN & GUN PRESENTS HEROES THIS WAY In partnership with Atlantic Packaging Chris Crolley APOSTLE OF ECOTOURISM INTRODUCING PEOPLE TO THE BEAUTY OF THE LOWCOUNTRY—AND SAVING CRITICAL SPECIES IN THE PROCESS AN IDEAL DAY FOR CHRIS CROLLEY INCLUDES SPENDING time on Lowcountry waters—leading kayaking trips through the ACE Basin, stand-up paddleboard excursions on Mount Pleasant’s Shem Creek, or ferry rides to Bulls Island’s pristine Boneyard Beach. A philosopher by nature, Crolley, when he’s not pointing out a roseate spoonbill tucked into spartina or explaining the natural history of an estuary, is contemplating how humans fit into all this. As he sees it, we must save these places, a mission he and his team at Coastal Expeditions have spearheaded since the organization’s founding but made official by establishing the Coastal Expeditions…

At Georgia’s ragged edge stands a causeway made of earth piled by hand atop bricks and tires, long grown over with grass and sandspur and sea oxeye. It is a tenuous ribbon of stability cutting through mud and salt and spartina, connecting land and river in a place that is neither, perpetually a tidal shift away from becoming more of one or the other. Looking down its sandy length, I imagine all the footprints laid upon it slowly becoming manifest, one hundred years of emerging soles and toes. There are mine, of course—once tiny and tentative, then confident and bold, now hindered by age and injury. But far more of them belong to people who have meant the most to me, and who made the most of me. In this…

EQUESTRIAN Breeders’ Cup Returns to the Bluegrass LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY In 1982, Lexington horseman John Gaines proposed a season-ending event to bring together the world’s top Thoroughbreds for a day of championship racing. “Just like the NFL has its Super Bowl and Major League Baseball has the World Series, our founders believed that our sport needed a championship of its own,” says Breeders’ Cup CEO Drew Fleming. The first Breeders’ Cup World Championships took place in 1984 at California’s Hollywood Park, and nowadays the last race of the weekend—the Breeders’ Cup Classic—is considered a fourth leg of the Grand Slam of Thoroughbred racing after the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes. Lexington didn’t host its first Breeders’ Cup until 2015, the year Triple Crown winner American Pharoah went wire to…

If you’ve lived around Southerners for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard this one: You find yourself in a situation where you need a blade to, say, cut a rope or slice a smoked sausage on the tailgate, so you ask, “Anyone here have a knife?” And inevitably a weathered guy or gal says with a chuckle, “I have my pants on, don’t I?” I’m forever on the hunt for the perfect pocketknife, and I was thrilled when I recently picked up Benchmade’s Mini Osborne. A scaled-down version of the twenty-year-old classic, the Mini delivers the brawn when needed but, at under four inches closed, tucks unobtrusively in my pocket. The fit and finish are impeccable, and the reverse tanto blade is hairsplitting sharp, just the thing for when…

Tell a dog story in five words. On Facebook, on Twitter, and in our Talk of the South newsletter, readers told their sweetest, silliest, and shortest dog tales. He’s my daily under-desk companion. Cassie W. She was the best girl. Greg M. Great Pyrenees is a lapdog. Joel H. Bulldog flatulence forced soiree evacuation. Tom S. Dogs met, played. We married. Ann B. Not on my new boots! Steve S. Fed stray fajitas. Buddy stayed. Jason F. Dogs don’t live long enough. Toni B. His one blue eye mesmerizes. Lee H. Roomba went through dog poop. Tracey R. Three-legged pit bull ain’t scary. Kim G. We thought she was fixed. Michelle P. We are family, us two. Suzanne W.…

As a preschooler, Adriana Epelboim-Levy remembers, she slipped on her mother’s heels in their Caracas, Venezuela, home and felt like not only the most beautiful girl in the world, but also an empowered one. “Everything came down to posture,” she says. “It’s like the base of a building: What’s at the foundation of your posture? Shoes.” Today, inside the North Miami office of her artful footwear and leather goods brand, Alepel, Epelboim-Levy has melded that desired function with artistically inspired form: Her shoes, handmade in her native South America, sport designs hand-painted by Florida artisans, including whirling botanicals, fanciful hummingbirds, abstract shapes, and other looks such as the precise black strokes adorning her own bright white sneakers. The spark for Alepel ignited when Epelboim-Levy, a former architect who studied at…

At first, in the 1990s, a few greater white-fronted geese trickled in to Southeast Arkansas each winter, but Chase Milligan didn’t think much about it. “I was a duck hunter, like everybody else around here,” the Dumas, Arkansas, native says matter-of-factly. “And ducks are what we had.” At the time, the increase in the region’s numbers of specklebellies—the nickname for these cousins to the better-known Canada goose—happened gradually enough that Milligan figured it was driven by an overall population increase in the birds. Then, about 2005, “it was like the dam busted,” Milligan recalls. “There were just so many. That’s when we knew we had to be getting someone else’s geese.” Today, Milligan reports, he doesn’t even slow down when he sees a feeding flock of one hundred white-fronts. He’s…

Regulars at Leo’s House of Thirst, a wine bar in West Asheville, drink rosé from France’s Jura region and nibble at green garlic dip on a shaded patio. Inside, beneath a timber-crossed ceiling, couples sip orange wines from Sicily and Friuli and eat steak tartare haloed by matchstick potatoes. Developed by Drew Wallace, a champion of gastropub food and natural wines, Leo’s is a low-key oasis that does right by the snacks thirsty people crave.…

As at a modern art gallery, the polished concrete floors and bone-white walls of the downtown Birmingham shop Still Johnson purposefully keep the focus on the installations—or in this case, a stunning selection of home goods and decor from Southern makers. The abstract shapes of a Natchez, Mississippi, artist’s jet-black kinetic mobile, for instance, spin lazily in lavender-perfumed air courtesy of Hazeltine candles, poured in New Orleans. Vintage teak dining chairs gather around a sleek ebonized-oak dining table fashioned by Birmingham furniture maestro Michael Morrow. And drop cloths splashed with Peptopink and highlighter-yellow paint by the Florence, Alabama, artist Cullen Stewart hang across from Nashville photographer Tim Vogelaar’s tranquil but powerful black-and-white nature scenes. Backlit by the plentiful sunshine that streams into the shop, the owners, interior design partners Marguerite…

Some cowboys come in Hummers instead of on horseback now, but the impetus behind the Black Cowboy Festival remains the same: to honor the Black Western pioneers underrepresented in history and popular culture. For this annual weekend of horsemanship exhibitions and amateur competitions, thousands of people from hours away come to tiny Rembert, South Carolina, less than an hour east of Columbia. I learned about the festival the way most folks do, by word of mouth. In 2016, I was covering the Chitlin’ Strut in Salley, South Carolina, and I shared a plate of the event’s namesake with a man who told me about the celebration, full of country pride and riding contests. He promised the food was always good, and the music even better. I shouldn’t have been surprised…

IF you are a trout angler or aspire to be one, you owe it to yourself to visit at least once the chalk streams of England. Granted, New Zealand, Argentina, and Kamchatka beckon with marvelous trouting, but my aim here is to tell you why the fishing on the English chalk streams may very well be the most variously satisfying version of that sport to be had anywhere in the world. There are numerous reasons for this, but let us begin with a bit of hydrology. The chalk streams take their name from a subsoil band of calcium carbonate, or “chalk,” formed of compacted shells a hundred million years ago when the British Isles lay under three hundred feet of ocean. This band runs for some three hundred miles through…

I live in the same county in Tennessee where I grew up. If you had told this to the teenage version of myself, he would have had a panic attack. In the nineties, living in Winchester, Tennessee, the county seat of Franklin County, I felt so isolated; everything that interested me (music, film, books, food, museums) always seemed out of reach. I imagined that if I cared about something, I’d have to search it out, and leave. So I did, and I stayed away for nearly ten years. But the longer I stayed away, the more I felt the pull of returning, as if each new experience were preparing me to go home. In 2005, two jobs opened up at the University of the South in Sewanee, back home in…

In the Garden & Gun Society, discover a vibrant community of readers and friends. Upon joining, members unlock a slew of enticing privileges, including early ticketing for G&G events, access to a Southern concierge, curated treasures with each issue, and an invitation to the annual reunion-style Society Gathering. Need we say more? Contact Alexandra Karn at society@gardenandgun.com or 843.805.4200 for more information.…

Frederick Stivers ILLUSTRATOR An avid hunter and fisherman, Frederick Stivers has spent time in the American West, the bayous around New Orleans, and the waters of South Florida, drawing inspiration from the flora, fauna, and outdoorspeople he’s encountered. In his artwork, tarpon, bobwhites, and gundogs seemingly come alive in graphite, gouache, and watercolor. For “The Ducks of Home” (p. 140), the Missouri-based artist sketched early-morning scenes from a blind on shotshell boxes. “When I’m working with these old boxes, I realize the wear and tear on them,” he says. “Like the folks I hunt with, their imperfections are endearing.” “Like the folks I hunt with, their imperfections are endearing”—Frederick Stivers on the shotshell boxes he used as canvases for “The Ducks of Home” (p. 140) Kevin Wilson WRITER “The longer…

.01 RECIPES Thanksgiving Menu Planner You may be loyal to Aunt Lucy’s mashed potatoes, but G&G has plenty of other ideas for filling your holiday table. You’ll find recipes for no-fail turkey, smoky duck and andouille gumbo, and more festive mains, sides, appetizers, cocktails, and desserts in our Thanksgiving Favorites collection. Including: TANDY WILSON’S SWEET POTATO CASSEROLE WITH SORGHUM WHITNEY OTAWKA’S SPAGHETTI SQUASH WITH KALE AND PECORINO ROMANO CREAM HILARY WHITE’S BOURBON PECAN PIE AND MORE GARDENANDGUN.COM/thanksgiving .02 2022 GOOD DOG PHOTO CONTEST Calling All Dog Lovers IT’S TIME TO LET YOUR PUP’S STAR SHINE: OUR ANNUAL GOOD DOG PHOTO CONTEST IS UNDERWAY. UPLOAD A PHOTO OF YOUR FAITHFUL COMPANION TO BE ENTERED FOR A CHANCE TO RECEIVE A PRIZE FROM EUKANUBA, OUR PARTNER THIS YEAR, AND GET…

In many Gullah Geechee families, recipes are not written down, and it’s not always easy to learn your grandmother’s best dishes. “Children weren’t really allowed in a Gullah kitchen,” says Kardea Brown, who grew up in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. So in high school, she started writing down recipes from her great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother. After college, she embarked on a career as a social worker, but the kitchen kept calling to her, and the recipes became her culinary gold. She used them when she started catering, and they formed the backbone for Delicious Miss Brown, her Food Network show now in its seventh season. In October, she’ll release her first cookbook, The Way Home: A Celebration of Sea Islands Food and Family with over 100 Recipes. Although many of the…

In her Uptown shop, Eclectic Home, the New Orleans designer Penny Francis has built a decorator’s wonderland, where shoppers can meander through ivory bouclé swivel chairs, poppy-pink tempered-glass end tables, and Moorish throne chairs from Syria. The showroom reflects her design philosophy: a riot of color moderated by a sliver of restraint that renders harmony rather than chaos; a conversation-inducing stew of styles nearly impossible to replicate that has attracted the city’s risk-taking tastemakers for twenty-two years. “Sure, everyone loves a big, heavy European antique, but I also wanted midcentury-modern coffee tables and art deco sconces,” she says. Above the boutique, Francis’s firm guides clients tackling projects ranging from French Quarter manses to the brand-new Four Seasons residences. The shop also serves as a laboratory for her own constantly evolving…

On Jonesborough, Tennessee’s East Main Street, past the courthouse, the antique mart, and the historic little town’s single coffee shop, if you listen closely, you can hear Curtis Buchanan splitting a maple log outside his backyard workshop. Chances are, pieces of that log will become one of the elegant handmade Windsor chairs he turns out there. His creations are displayed in collections at Monticello, the Tennessee State Museum, and the governor’s mansion, and visitors to his shop come from all over—but that’s not why he does it. For Buchanan, it’s all about the tools. “Early on, I ran across a drawknife and a shaving horse, and that was the end of all other work,” says Buchanan, a handyman by nature who, when he was in his twenties, resisted the thought…

Much as I had hoped that my cornucopia of raw charisma, coupled with my mild case of celebrity, would be sufficient fuel to elicit dates as a forty-something single in 2022, I have been deeply disappointed to learn that I, too, have to travel down the well-worn but new-to-me path of online dating profiles and the ensuing small talk with strangers and awkward—sometimes awful—scheduled first encounters. I am also apparently required to have hobbies. When the dating app asked me to list them, it was a little startling to step back and gaze at the hole in my personality where mentionable hobbies should be. Don’t get me wrong: I like to do things. I’m just not listicle-level proud of all of them. Imagine a Hinge profile that reads, “If I’m…

The first night I spent in Tallahassee, the previous tenant of the house I was renting showed me how the office locked from the outside. She and her ex used to take turns locking each other in to work on their novels. The office smelled powerfully of cigarettes. I loved it, and her, at once. After she gave me the keys, she asked me if I wanted to go to Bird’s. We met two of her friends there. They were also writers. I was new to town, but already everyone I knew was a writer. I had moved to Tally from Connecticut-by-way-of-Brooklyn, to teach and study for my PhD at Florida State. Bird’s Aphrodisiac Oyster Shack, where I immediately became a regular, is not what a person might think of…