Innholdsfortegnelse for December/January 2024 i Garden & Gun

EDITOR’S LETTER Follow me on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) @davedibenedetto My family and I often like to rank our favorite seasons here in the South Carolina Lowcountry, and while my kids’ choices shift like the wind, I always lead with fall and winter. Aside from the sporting opportunities (like duck and woodcock), the return of college football, and the blessed quiet of an idle AC, it’s firepit time. By those first few days of October, the wood in my backyard rack, which I make a sport of collecting from neighborhood tree trimmers and post-storm curb piles, has been drying out for nearly a year. There’s nothing I enjoy more than inviting a handful of friends with kids and dogs in tow to hang out around the pit with some…

The Bullet Swallower, Simon & Schuster, $27 Twirl a radio dial in much of Mexico, and eventually you’ll happen upon a corrido. Centuries old and nationally cherished, corridos are narrative folk ballads relaying stories of bandits, smugglers, rebels, gunslingers, doomed lovers, and fugitives, typically based on real-life people and events. Sometimes likened to gangsta rap for their gritty, swashbuckling vibe, corridos are full of drama and desperadoes along with tubas and gut-string guitars. They’re one of Mexico’s most exquisite and enduring soundtracks. It wouldn’t be out of line to cue some corridos on the hi-fi when settling into Elizabeth Gonzalez James’s new novel, The Bullet Swallower. In fact, I recommend it. (Try global sensation Peso Pluma for the freshest take or raspy-voiced Ramón Ayala for a more vintage groove.) That’s…

Comfort food: Shuai: “We’re just trying to open restaurants that we want to eat at, and one of the biggest things I miss about growing up in Queens [New York] is the old-school Chinese barbecue—roast duck, ribs, and crispy skin roast pork.” Common ground: Shuai: “The great thing about Chinese and Southern barbecue, meaning South Carolina and North Carolina barbecue here, is that they’re both very pork heavy. Our chef de cuisine [at King BBQ], Brandon Olson, grew up outside of Charlotte, and the Piedmont style is all vinegar based. But we made it a Szechuan vinegar ’cue, using peppercorns. It still has that sweet and tangy flavor but with a hint of Szechuan behind it.” Corrie: “Originally it was going to be us doing spins on standard Southern barbecue,…

Back-to-school time brought new beginnings for me: I became an assistant professor of English at Augusta University in Georgia. In the middle of August, I found myself amid a crush of eager students toting newly purchased books and searching for classrooms. After ten years of bouncing around the country teaching wherever folks would let me, finding employment in my home region and teaching invigorating classes felt like a gift. But my ears were unprepared for the transition from wandering the woods and writing in isolation to the chaos of college. There was always a door opening or closing somewhere. I could hear my colleague clearing his throat through the wall. The air handler in the ceiling thrummed nonstop above my writing desk. Students clopped down the hall in their boots,…

New Braunfels Smokehouse began as quite the opposite of what it is today; when the building opened in 1943, it was an icehouse, where farmers stored their meat in lockers. Some locals decided to repurpose a structure out back into a smokehouse. When it became popular, the icehouse owners took note, and in 1945, they started smoking and selling their own products. Conveniently situated on a busy state highway, New Braunfels beckoned travelers, and soon, those visitors wanted their smoked meats shipped directly to them. “Getting food by mail in the 1950s was not normal,” says Hale Snyder, a third-generation owner of the smokehouse. But stellar products and customer service won over skeptics, and a modest empire emerged. The big sellers in the 1960s included the Tastin’ Box, a trademarked…

ANNIVERSARY Deep Ellum’s 150 Years of Grooves DALLAS, TEXAS For a glimpse into Deep Ellum’s 150-year-old personality, look no further than the vibrant murals painted stories high along the Dallas neighborhood’s streets and alleyways. You’ll find depictions of such local legends as the late guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, former Dallas Mavericks star Dirk Nowitzki, and bluesman Robert Johnson, along with weird and wonderful images of colorful elephants, a T. rex playing guitar, and E.T. raising his iconic glowing finger for Instagrammers to touch. Settled along Elm (sometimes pronounced “Ellum” by early residents) Street in 1873 after the Civil War, Deep Ellum became a commercial and residential hub for African Americans and new immigrants, boasting a cotton gin factory, a Ford plant, and a hungry art and music scene. “Deep Ellum…

If you’re the person who gave me a bearded lady ornament for our Under the Big Top–themed Christmas party, please let me know. I treasure it. It’s one of the best hostess gifts I’ve ever received. Others include: coasters that look like Scrabble tiles; a voodoo doll toothpick holder; a cookie jar with a chalkboard label, inside of which I now keep loose cables and on which I quoted the movie Carrie by writing “Plug It Up!”; and an expertly rolled joint that I never smoked but wagged in front of our guests like Groucho Marx’s cigar. Know your hostess. Or even better, know what’s good for her. My friend in Florida says, “I like a gift that can be used.” She suggests a breakfast basket with ground coffee and…

Santa Claus didn’t use the chimney that Christmas Eve, and he didn’t wait until we all went to sleep. It was 1973 and St. Nicholas was standing in front of me in my grandmother’s house in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. I was three years old. Mamaw’s house in Powell Valley—nestled in the Jefferson National Forest, along the Trail of the Lonesome Pine—provided the perfect setting for this life-altering yuletide encounter. When I was growing up, my parents and I would drive there from our home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, traveling on winding roads through little Virginia towns—Fancy Gap, Chilhowie, Abingdon. Christmas music faded in and out on country radio stations. As an early gift that year, my aunt Nila mailed me a set of pajamas with a red candy-cane stripe.…

01 Slay Ride No Southern terrain is too tough to traverse aboard the retro-cool Honda Trail125. The low-slung design handles effortlessly (and relatively quietly) on and off road—thanks to a suspension that smooths bumps—the raised muffler stays clear of mud and muck, and there’s plenty of ground clearance. A flat cargo rack holds more than forty pounds of gear and (hopefully) game to haul home ($3,999; powersports.honda.com). 02 On the Money Keep your walking-around cash close with this engraved sterling-silver clip from the Texas artisans at Clint Orms ($550; clintorms.com). 03 Old-Time Music For Rufus Thames of RJ Thames and Co. in Bristol, Virginia, nothing beats the sound of a 1930s acoustic guitar. The luthier crafts his custom instruments, favored by renowned pickers like Bryan Sutton and Billy Strings, using…

COUNTRY ACCENT The philosopher John Currin Howard once said (and then continued to say), “The man who does the most with the least is the man I admire.” If you know my dad, you also know he wasn’t talking about his approach to holiday entertaining—John Howard doesn’t entertain holidays at all. Instead, his mantra offers a road map for his approach to life, one I have heard and seen the fruits of for forty-five years. Whether of my own accord or to please him, I began manifesting his beliefs as early as the fifth grade, when I hawked raffle tickets to kindergartners on the school bus for a prize that I planned to lift from the ragged collection of toys that continued to hang around my soon-to-be-middle-school bedroom. When I…

Jeff Allen grew up on Tampa Bay, fishing and water-skiing before school, then showing up to first period soaking wet. “We used every moment we could to be on the water,” he says, “fishing, diving, and skiing. It was a way of life.” Years later, when he soured on his corporate gig as a financial planner, those halcyon days proved an inspiration. He started a dock repair business in 2018, but within months Dock Appeal had transitioned to making high-end accessories for docks instead. “There’s something incredible about the nexus of water and land, how it creates such deep memories and friendships,” Allen says. “To me, docks are far more than just bridges to dry land.” The Islamorada Dock Box exemplifies that philosophy. Constructed of more than two hundred pieces…

ONE FINE EARTH DAY MORNING IN 2022, my cell phone lit up with a Hawaiian phone number from a caller the device has long identified as “The Dude.” “Hello, dude,” drawled a friendly, salty voice. “I’m heading out to Folly tomorrow. You have any time to catch up and go for a paddle?” The caller was none other than Jimmy Buffett. And by God, when God’s own drunk and a fearless man calls you to go paddle-boarding, you go paddleboarding. Jimmy was in Charleston, South Carolina, where I live, to rehearse his upcoming summer tour. Per custom, he was flying under the radar. Per custom, I was expected to both honor that and be ready for whatever adventure—or misadventure—lay just ahead. I first met James William Buffett on a midsummer’s…

END OF THE LINE You know the old Christmasmorning story: A child finds that Santa has left him or her an enormous pile of manure. Under the tree somehow, I don’t know—but here’s the moral: The child, being an optimist, is delighted. Because “there must be a pony here somewhere.” Me, I don’t need a pony. But if Santa brought me one, my eyes would light up. Because must be some manure around here somewhere. It’s like manna from heaven for your compost. Wendell Berry, from his poem “The Man Born to Farming”: He has seen the light lie downin the dung heap, and rise againin the corn. “I saw some grand manure the other day,” wrote Eudora Welty in a letter to Diarmuid Russell, her agent, friend, and fellow…

On a dewy summer morning in West Texas, I gaze over a table outfitted with Q-tips, pliers, calipers, and scales. A black-chinned hummingbird, retrieved from a nearby trap, lies swaddled in a nylon stocking toe, ready to be aged, weighed, measured, and adorned with an aluminum leg band the size of a chia seed. Given hummingbirds’ size and relative fragility, banding them requires special skills gained from extensive training, along with an acute understanding of their anatomy and behavior—little wonder only around 150 master hummingbird banders exist in the United States. “It’s like a club, but a very small club,” says Charles Floyd, today’s bander, who primarily works out of the Hummer House, an observation spot here in Christoval. Like many of his fellow volunteers, Floyd has no formal ornithology…

On a Friday night at the Loud, a club in downtown Huntington, West Virginia, the happy-hour crowd is ready to keep partying. After tuning up, Daniel Donato and his band launch into a cover of Gene Watson’s 1981 chart topper “Fourteen Carat Mind” that garners whoops with the line “The cabin that I built in West Virginia / Was not enough to keep you satisfied.” As the next eighty or so minutes unfold, Donato mostly keeps his guitar jams in check. But the show hits another gear when the band gets to “Dance in the Desert.” On Donato’s sizzling new album, Reflector, the song appears in two parts, and live, he stretches it out to sixteen minutes, with two instrumental peaks that leave the audience slack-jawed. That high-wire musicianship has…

When Darian Hernandez was seven, his grandmother brought home a small paper bag filled with what appeared to be baby oranges. “She handed my brother and me these two little fruits,” says Hernandez, now the executive chef at Brother Fox in his hometown of Pensacola, Florida. “We were surprised when she ate one whole, including the peel!” Turns out, Grandma’s farmers’ market haul was a different Florida favorite: the kumquat—it’s been called the “little gold gem of the citrus family”—which is native to China but has been grown in Florida since the late 1800s. “I had no idea that this tiny fruit could combine sweetness and tartness so perfectly,” Hernandez says. At the restaurant, he likes to work with the Nagami kumquat, which is the most common variety planted in…

GOOD DOG The dog of my childhood shared a bloodline with the finest hunting dogs of his breed. Unfortunately, the closest Sparky came to hunting involved chasing noisy cars—he had an ear for VW Beetles—and rooting through garbage cans. Both appeared to be congenital talents. My memory insists he did catch a car once, barreling into its back panel and stunning both himself and the driver, but I might be mistaken. The fact is we obtained Sparky to be a pet, not a gundog. He had the talent. Blue jays used to tease him in our front yard, swooping low between the oaks to taunt him. Sparky waited patiently for one to swoop too low, which one inevitably did. But my father, Mobile born and bred, did not hunt. He…

When I became the chef at Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the early nineties, I was immediately in the weeds. It soon became clear to me that in order to keep at this, I would need to escape the madness from time to time. I had a small kitchen and a small staff, and we were busy, so anyone’s absence meant more work for everyone else. Long vacations were out of the question, but a long weekend might be okay. I needed a place where I wouldn’t have to entertain or be entertained. Pretty much my whole family lives at or near the North Carolina coast, so the beach wouldn’t work. I know too many people in New York and Boston. Lord knows I’m not a camper.…