Garden & Gun

One of my all-time favorite dove shoots happened a little more than five years ago. It was a simple affair. My friend Jason Harkey had a field near Mayesville, South Carolina, that was holding a steady number of birds and also provided a perfect plac

“In the South, the air often has a heaviness to it,” says William Abranowicz. As he captured images of a bayou estate for “Louisiana Timepiece” (p. 104), it rained. “But when the light came out late in the day and raked across all that moisture, it w

NBC News correspondent andTodayshow news anchor Craig Melvin was raised “in a house where there was always talking, lots of talking.” So it’s no surprise to him that he finds himself in conversation for a living, bringing to his coverage a warmth and

Fans of Southern cooking do well to follow Sean Brock’s appetites, curiosities, and whims; almost always, something delicious this way comes. Whether he is rejuvenating Southern cuisine at the restaurants he’s helmed—most notably at Husk, which sprea

Lady Melissa Percy ranks among the best shots in Britain, but to hear her tell it, her mother and sister are even better. Her two brothers and her father, the twelfth Duke of Northumberland, are all equally skilled with a side-by-side. And though she

Growing up in Athens, Alabama, Brittany Howard spent hours in front of the piano at her grandmother’s house. Her older sister, Jaime, would always sit next to her. Blind from retinal cancer, Jaime was a creative dynamo, teaching Brittany how to write

Q Do people still get “the vapors”? We think we might know a few of the afflicted. A You know more than a few. The vay-pahs, as my grandmother Minnie mercilessly mocked them, embrace the very finest medical contradiction—they’re wholly imaginary, ye

Melissa Black Reddick sits cross-legged on the floor of a sunlit room among a small village of cardboard boxes. Her slight form is partially obscured, giving the impression of a young girl completely absorbed. The fingers of her left hand curl around

Modern science—bless its little, white-coated heart—has linked something on the order of five hundred chemical compounds to the flavor of smoke. Some of them are good—creating those intriguing undertones in a perfectly toasted campfire marshmallow. O

For Shaun Garcia, boredom has led to some of his favorite culinary inventions. One slow day, he decided to throw some vanilla beans into a smoker at Soby’s, the Greenville, South Carolina, restaurant where he works as executive chef. “We were knockin

Siblings Evrim and Evin Dogu know there are easier ways to bake bread. But for the co-owners of Richmond’s Sub Rosa Bakery, using regionally grown grains and baking in a wood-fired masonry oven aren’t negotiable. Not when the resulting smoke-kissed f

My father and I worried over the cast-iron skillet, turning ash white on a gas grill licked by a blue flame. Was the skillet really hot enough? Had we coated the fish with enough melted butter? Did it matter that we had mixed our own spice blend inst

Mention you’re a fan of mesquite and folks will assume they’re about to hear a treatise on good smoke. But Steve McHugh, chef-owner of Cured in San Antonio, is among a growing group of food obsessives who are using the beans, rather than the wood, in

Long before he was one of the South’s great garden designers, and before he made his name creating imaginative rooftop terraces for city-dwelling celebrities, Jon Carloftis was just a Kentucky boy gazing out his parents’ car window as they drove thro

Georgia’s Sea Island Forge fire kettle checks every box for a Southerner. Inspired by kettles used to make cane syrup in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South, the deep, wide ductile-cast-iron construction allows a fire to breathe, and the cle

Working in his one-man studio in Ijamsville, Maryland, the acclaimed sporting sculptor Walter Matia is surrounded by putty knives, loop cutters, and other tools of his trade. Nooks brim with maquettes (scale models) of shorebirds, foxes, and raccoons

Kerry Moody’s Creole cottage in New Orleans’ Bywater district winks at passersby from a thicket of elephant-ear-shaped taro plants. Set back from the street, the house emerges from the earth like the ginger blossoms showing off their exotic coloring

On April 13, 2018, Rock Island Auction Company (RIAC) opened bidding on a storied Colt single-action revolver from 1847. Known as a Colt Walker, the gun was designed by Samuel Colt in collaboration with a Texas Ranger named Samuel Hamilton Walker, wh

I he way I heard it, the dog was just there, treading water down in a cold ditch somewhere in North Georgia. This was six months or so before I adopted him. A pair of kind souls driving through saw him huddled in the weeds, just off the shoulder of o

Years ago, sometime around the mid-1980s, the Catfish Farmers of America asked me if I’d be willing to represent them in the Mobile Mardi Gras parade, where I would ride on a float and reign as Catfish Queen. I was living in Washington, D.C., and wri

IT RAINED EVERY DAY FOR THREE MONTHS, from late fall till spring. I’m sure a weak sun came out once or twice but never long enough to get used to. Mostly it was dank and cold, and the sky was low, like the ceiling of a coal mine, the clouds the color

Off a winding Louisiana road, down an allée of spindly oaks, past an ancient split-cypress fence, grows a garden. There, Jack Holden points his pruning shears at the privet hedge lining a path, lilies springing as they please, and ferns seeking pocke

They had flippers with chunks missing in the shape of shark bites. They had leeches marauding the wounds in their scales. Their shells had been hit by boat propellers, carving howling red divots into the tops of their backs. They had yellow-gray eyel

If you closed your eyes and tried to picture a quintessential English country manor, you’d probably come up with something very much like Shaftesbury Estates, in East Dorset near the country’s south coast. The east side of the gargantuan redbrick mai

In the early 1980s, when my father announced we’d be visiting an old hotel on Mobile Bay, rather than taking our usual weeklong summer trip to the Gulf of Mexico, I was less than thrilled. How could a stuffy old hotel compete with go-kart tracks, sou

Throughout Alabama, bars and breweries have set the standard high with both the caliber of their libations and the atmosphere in which they’re poured.Whichever area of the state you’re exploring, there’s a personality-filled watering hole that you wo

Don’t ignore vanilla, says the renowned Savannah ice cream maker Stratton Leopold. “I like vanilla a lot because that’s how you tell quality,” he says, explaining how a plain-flavored scoop reveals much about the craftsmanship and ingredient integrit

“We live in a college town, so football season is our busy season,” says Vishwesh Bhatt of Oxford, Mississippi’s Snackbar and this year’s James Beard Award winner for Best Chef: South. “That’s our time to show off.” When he can step away from the kit

I didn’t even know that Snoop Dogg, the rapper, and Willie Nelson, the Willie, had cut a record or two together. I knew that Willie was woke—in his song “Still Not Dead,” he sings, “I woke up still not dead again today,” which I have adopted as my a.