Innholdsfortegnelse for October/November 2024 i Garden & Gun

.01 RECIPE Dolly’s Deviled Eggs Although the term deviled eggs might imply red horns and pitchforks, it’s actually a reference to the heat of the spices used in this wee delicacy. In Good Lookin’ Cookin’ (Ten Speed Press), a new cookbook from Dolly Parton and her sister Rachel Parton George, Parton shares the family recipe for gentler-sounding “dressed eggs” with mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, Tabasco sauce, and paprika—traditional and just the way Parton’s husband, Carl, likes them. Organized by months of the year, Parton’s cookbook highlights dressed eggs as a simple Easter treat, but any Southerner knows you can enjoy them year-round. PARTON’S POINTERS Add a tablespoon of minced sweet pickles to the yolk mixture If you prefer more savory flavors, throw in a tablespoon of minced olives Finish them with…

“When I retired from the clergy, I banished two things from my life: toxic people and potluck dinners” FOOD FOR THOUGHT Thanks to “Inside the Mind of a Sandwich Savant” (August/September 2024), Turkey and the Wolf is number one on my list for the next time I’m in New Orleans. Susan Lingle Abilene, Texas I like Turkey and the Wolf so much that I still go there even after I discovered from your Instagram post that Mason Hereford is a Rollerblader. Colin Shirek Petaluma, California Helen Ellis rightly named the profits and pitfalls of potluck meals (Southern Conundrum, August/September 2024). When I retired from the clergy, I gifted myself a promise to banish two things entirely from my life: toxic people and potluck dinners. The first should require no explanation.…

When Trish Andersen wanders Savannah, she sees carpet. As she pushes her son’s stroller around her city’s shady squares or rides over the serpentine creeks and wetlands that lead out to Tybee Island, the fiber artist glimpses patterns in the live oak limbs and textures in the marsh grass. She then re-creates them in the large-scale, kaleidoscopic tapestries she tufts out of yarn in her home studio. “In lots of ways, my work is this kind of dripping, blended world,” she says, “and I can’t help but think that Savannah has inspired a lot of that.” Though Andersen grew up across Georgia in Dalton, dubbed the Carpet Capital of the World for its role in inventing wall-to-wall carpeting, rugs were never part of her plan. In school, she had learned…

Thirteen years ago, I spent a curious afternoon with the Silicon Valley financier and futurist Peter Thiel. Our meeting, for a magazine profile I was writing, predated Thiel’s shift into electoral politics, where he later gained fame—or infamy, depending on your bent—as a Republican mega-donor, right-wing influencer, and, in some sense, kingmaker. (It was Thiel who introduced his former employee JD Vance to Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2021.) Mostly what we talked about that afternoon was a fantastical-sounding project Thiel was backing to establish floating microstates out in the ocean—way beyond any nation’s territorial waters, and thus beyond any government’s control—as de facto laboratories for libertarian experimentation: start-up countries, in other words. Prototype plans involved a movable, diesel-powered, twelve-thousand-ton structure with room for 270 residents. Thiel and his team…

I wouldn’t say we’re the kings of Tennessee whiskey,” Tim Piersant says. “I’ll give that up to Jack.” Jack, of course, refers to Jack Daniel, who established his distillery in 1866 and died in 1911. Piersant, who founded the craft distillery Chattanooga Whiskey a hundred years after Daniel’s death, doesn’t even pretend he can challenge Jack for name recognition or sales volume. But when it comes to quality and distinctiveness, he’s aiming to occupy a prominent seat at what has become a crowded table of Tennessee distillers seeking to distinguish themselves in the whiskey world—especially from that other state just north. Before Prohibition, Tennessee and Kentucky were both prodigious whiskey producers. Liquor retailers advertised the finest “Tennessee and Kentucky Whiskey,” as if they were one region. Then came the shuttering…

My sausage biscuit arrives with a bullet of house-made strawberry jam. Before the square of dough went in the oven, a cook shellacked it with egg wash to give the outside crunch and structure. After it emerged golden and smelling faintly of herbes de Provence, another cook brushed the top with honey and scattered salt flakes that now sparkle in the light of overhead globes. I pull silverware from a crinkly paper sleeve as a fuchsia-haired waitress glides through the room. The man in the next booth wears a Stax Records T-shirt and sips coffee from a mug with a yolk-colored logo and the slogan KINFOLK, BUSY BURNIN’ DAYLIGHT. That biscuit costs eight dollars, more than your father paid for a sausage biscuit, and probably more than you and I…

COUNTRY ACCENT China has its wok, France its sauteuse, India its tandoor, Argentina its parrilla—and we in the United States have our cast-iron skillet. Traditional European vessels that evolved here to suit the campfires of American settlers on their way west, cast-iron skillets, however, are more than a part of our history, particularly as Southerners. I believe they serve as a measuring stick for the way Americans feel about time spent in the kitchen. Even though I grew up in the rural South, that particular bastion of cast iron, my mother never cooked with it. I remember seeing a few black skillets shoved to the nether regions of the cabinet under our Frigidaire range, sticky and rusted. I assumed they must have been cheap pans that came with the stove.…

Whenever someone asks about my workspace in Oxford, Mississippi, I have two answers. The official answer is it sits a couple of blocks from the Square, inside the Anchorage Building, a small studio amid a labyrinth of hallways and offices that houses a desk, a guitar, an espresso machine, and a few shelves of books and career keepsakes. The unofficial answer: the cigar shop right across the street from all of that. Spring Street Cigars has become as big a part of my Oxford life, and my writing life, as my favorite bartenders and the colorful locals. The shop, a little brick house with hardwood floors and crown molding, nestles in a cluster of shade trees. If you include the walk-in humidor, it covers maybe a thousand square feet. A…

Follow me on Instagram and X @davedibenedetto Since its founding some seventeen years ago, G&G has been a dog-friendly company. In our original office, staffers’ pups knew the UPS guy by the sound of his steps outside the door, and there was always a spare tennis ball rolling through the hallways. When we outgrew those quarters and moved to a space that could handle the growing staff, the dogs came with us. The editorial team has no shortage of dog lovers, and we’re rarely far from a soft ear to scratch. Not all the dogs are office regulars, but with the prevalence of Zoom calls these days, there’s hardly a pooch that goes unnoticed (and, yes, even an occasional staff cat that likes to crash the virtual meetings). Recently, as…

WE ASKED… What two Southern staples should be in every pantry? In our Talk of the South newsletter, readers told us what items are never missing from their shelves. Duke’s mayo and bacon grease. What one can’t do, the other can. John F. C. Bourbon and pickled (fill in the blank). Jason M. Simple: Old Bay Seasoning and kosher salt. Rod S. Mayonnaise (Blue Plate) and sugar (white). A Southern household can’t be run without them. Willo B. Molasses and Tabasco. R. R. Steen’s cane syrup and a jar of instant roux. No haters, please—sometimes we are just busy! Brenda O. Ro-Tel and Camellia beans. Maria R. Old Bay and banana extract, because making your own banana pudding is far better and far more satisfying than the instant mixes. Stephen…

When the much-anticipated Lowland opened in Charleston, South Carolina, last year, a seemingly under-the-radar dish—the celery salad—quickly became a diner favorite. Executive chef Jason Stanhope, however, wasn’t surprised at all. “Celery has a natural salinity and a super crunchy texture,” he says. “If you think about it, most of our favorite unhealthy snacks are salty and crunchy. There is something in all of us that craves these qualities.” In much of the South, celery peaks throughout the fall—perfect timing for working it into holiday menus and game-day snacks. Fine-dicing stalks for a mirepoix is an obvious seasonal prep move (hello, Thanksgiving dressing!), and no one is going to argue with a stack of celery next to a pile of wings. To really highlight the ubiquitous veg, you can braise it…

In the open-air taller, or workshop, of María and Jacobo Ángeles in San Martín Tilcajete in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, wooden figurines in various stages of carving, drying, and decorating line shelves and worktables. There’s a blue-and-purple deer with patterns swirling down its haunches. Atop it perches an armadillo in a turtle shell, and above that, a frog with the face of a monkey. Nearby, two embracing iguanas and a crouched monkey await paint. Since they were children, both María and Jacobo have created these carvings inspired by their Zapotec heritage, an ancient Indigenous culture whose Oaxacan roots stretch back to around 500 BCE. The natural world guides the rhythms of life here. The Zapotec month has twenty days, each symbolized by a regional animal, starting with the iguana…

GOOD DOG My friend Max owns two blue heelers, both of whom are, she says, wicked smart. She once found herself apologizing to them: “I’m so sorry I can’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.” That’s just one dilemma for those of us lucky enough to have experienced a smart and contemplative dog. These nonverbal companions simplycan-not articulate the apparently complex ideas going on in their heads. From their perspective, conversations tend to be one-sided, and arguments brief and unsatisfying. Smart dogs are particularly frustrating, because we know they’re not trying to be difficult. They’re just trying to let us know their kibble bowl is empty, or that they need to pee, or that there’s a cane toad on the porch, but they have to rely on their dense…

MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER BUB SPENT HIS LIFE managing quail properties from Union Springs, Alabama, to Tallahassee, Florida. All I have of him is a weathered notebook holding newspaper clippings, letters typed on onionskin, and his handwritten thoughts on quail, dogs, and fire. One letter he received came from a Mr. Lester Varn in 1947. Agreeing to serve as a judge in that year’s Georgia-Florida Field Trial, which Bub helped organize, Varn wrote: “I surely hope there will be three outstanding dogs, – that will place themselves, as often times happens in field trials, without finding it necessary to apply the rule of one’s personal likes and dislikes about a dog. Because, perhaps no two of us ever see things just exactly alike.” Seventy-seven years later, Varn’s observation rings truer than ever…

THE GRAVY BOYS were born about ten years ago, when Tanner Dimmick and his friends were still in college. At first it was just the “Boys”: a bunch of dudes listening to music, playing poker, and getting hungry as the hour grew late. In other places, that might have meant ordering pizza or breaking into the cereal, but this was Lafayette, Louisiana, in the heart of Cajun Country. Thus, the “Gravy.” “Every house party you go to, there’s a simmering pot on the stove that’s been cooking for a mysterious amount of time,” says Dimmick, who is now thirty-two and runs the bar at Lafayette’s Spoonbill Watering Hole & Restaurant. “It’s just a communal thing. No one’s ever mad about food at one in the morning.” One thing led to…

TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE FOR THE SOUTHERN SOUL On a steamy night in Austin, Texas, the country musician Blake Whitmire crooned a familiar love song, bearded face beaming in the stage lights. We smiled at each other in brief recognition, and then I was whirling past in a series of rapid spins, the room blurry with kinetic joy. Legs burning, sweat dampening my hair, I fell back into the arms of my dance partner and the familiar rock step. This is the kind of breathless, exuberant moment that happens all evening long at the White Horse: one of the great honky-tonks, where the past and present coexist in one gloriously tangled jumble. Weekends, the bar sees throngs of tourists faced with the tough choice of a Ranch Water, a margarita, a…

“I was lucky enough last season to spend sixty days chasing chukar with both of my bird dogs” —Andy Anderson, who took the cover photo and contributed to “Best in Field” (p. 103) Andy Anderson PHOTOGRAPHER ■ Andy Anderson felt right at home while photographing the English springer spaniels at Pine Shadows in Brainerd, Minnesota, for “Best in Field” (p. 103) and this issue’s cover. “I have two bird dogs at home: English setters named Basel and Burnside,” says the photographer, who lives in Mountain Home, Idaho. “I was lucky enough last season to spend sixty days chasing chukar with both of them, and it was glorious—especially with Basel being only seven months old.” Anderson’s work has been featured in Audubon and Outside, and he’s currently working on a book…

YOUR GUIDE TO SOUTHERN CULTURE A song on MJ Lenderman’s new album, Manning Fireworks, contains these delicious lines: “Burdened by those wet dreams / Of people havin’ fun / ’Cause I know going on vacation / Brings the worst out of everyone.” The lyric, from “On My Knees,” a sneering take on human shallowness, is on his mind because the day after our conversation, he’s heading to Italy with his family for a weeklong stay “on some lake.” “Hopefully, nobody will take that line to heart,” he says drolly. Since the release of Lenderman’s 2022 album, Boat Songs, which topped many best-of lists, buzz has been building around the twenty-five-year-old Asheville native. Last year, he released a searing live album, And the Wind (Live and Loose!), showcasing his piercing, Neil Young–esque…

On the factory floor of East Cape Boats this past June, Chris Campbell, the boat maker’s lamination manager, held a hammer above the upturned hull of a new East Cape model, the Flip Pallot-inspired Skanu, and glanced at Pallot and the company’s founder and co-owner, Kevin Fenn. True to its moniker, the craft is a love child between a flats skiff and a canoe. It is twelve feet eight inches long, formed of carbon and high-performance resin. It can be poled, paddled, and rowed, or affixed with a trolling motor to zip toward remote skinny waters. It is designed to carry two anglers, or a duck hunter and a hound, or a solo explorer on a mission to go where no one could go before. At the time, the boat…

A CELEBRATION OF SOUTHERN FOOD AND DRINK The snacking cake—a single-layered, lightly topped charmer—has been getting a lot of attention lately, and with good reason. Unassuming and inviting, the cake sits on the counter ready to go when a kid comes home from school, a neighbor stops by, or someone walks through the kitchen looking for a nibble. Emma Schacke knows the value of offering a delicious, casual bite, especially during holidays when the house is full of guests. Her chewy apple cake with rye flour works perfectly. She adapted the Dutch recipe from her oma (grandmother), Hendrika Hofland, who turned ninety this year. “She has been making it my whole life,” Schacke says. “When I was growing up, we would go visit in the afternoons and each have a…

1 Gordon Setters STONEYBROOK GORDON SETTERS Union Grove, North Carolina Stephen Faust is a bit of a throwback, a description he doesn’t mind. The fifty-five-year-old North Carolina native breeds and trains Gordon setters in the spring and summer, and then guides hunts for woodcock and grouse. “Gordons just suit my style,” he says. “I want a classic foot-hunting dog.” While these handsome black-and-tan setters can open up in big country when they need to—a dog from Faust’s current litter is bound for the prairies of North Dakota—they’re better known as closer-ranging hunters. “I don’t want a dog I have to holler and scream for,” he says. “I want it to hunt for me, not the other way around.” According to Faust, the Gordon setter was once the dog of choice…