Twenty-plus years of documenting the South's vernacular art, visionary environments and traditions….plus modern art exhibits, Faulkner and Eudora, and This Week's Various. Welcome.
I visited a newer bookstore earlier this month: Blue Apple Books in Madison, Alabama — it’s in the more historic part of town, with other shops with lots of extra character around. This is it, below:
A while ago, I looked for a good list of independent bookshops and couldn’t find a great one. I liked the idea of a map so I could see if I was close to something great, and wanted to filter out the ones that were, say, dedicated to trading paperbacks.
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Poppies, Frist Art Museum, Nashville TN from a visit last year
The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts has on exhibit through June 1, 2025 Zelda Fitzgerald’s Paper Dolls. Even if you’re a Zelda fan (like me) this is maybe not the exhibit you’re jumping for, but we get so little, we take what we get. The ones pictured at the MMFA were donated by Scottie.
The overview from the site:
Montgomery native Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was the wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald as well as a creative artist in her own right. Collections of paper dolls are a part of her artistic legacy, the earliest made for her daughter Scottie in the 1920s. Much later, in the early 1940s, she created a series of characters from fairy tales and a group drawn from the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. She approached a publisher in New York, saying she intended these for a publication to be used and enjoyed by children.
As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.
Affiliate links are sometimes used. That means that if you purchase something via one of the links, it costs you nothing extra, but may generate a commission, offsetting the cost of DFK… e.g. as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Also: remember that Bookshop is fab because they’re giving orders to indie booksellers. Grateful for your support. xoxo!
Yellow magnolias at Bellefontaine Cemetery in St Louis, from a visit earlier this year
Cafe Mado’s chef, Nico Russell, is preserving the flowers in sour honey. He plans to serve them in a dessert with buttermilk and local strawberries when the latter is in season around June. The restaurant’s bar team is working on a nonalcoholic cocktail that combines amazake, a Japanese fermented rice drink, with magnolia tea. Wong also provides the buds to Flynn McGarry, the chef at Gem Home in NoLIta and the forthcoming Hudson Square restaurant Cove (scheduled to open this fall). He’s been soaking the petals in vinegar and plans to serve them “like pickled ginger,” he says, with crudo at Cove. The Brooklyn-based chef Hannah Musante collected her own flowers from a friend’s backyard, then stuffed them with sourdough toast ice cream. She covered other buds in sugar to create a syrup, and used the leftover macerated flowers to fill a tart shell that she topped with crème fraîche and dried thyme flowers.
And if you’ve ever wondered why the gas station next door has been restored and not the Bryant store where the Emmett Till story begins, this was covered in the Fall 2017 Southern Cultures:
In July 2011, Annette Morgan and Harry Tribble won a Mississippi Civil Rights Historical Sites grant for the restoration of Ben Roy’s Service Station. Because Bryant’s Grocery was crumbling and because Ben Roy’s had a covered portico, the Tribbles reasoned, the gas station had become a default lecture site from which tourists could gaze at the grocery and learn their civil rights history. The application put its case for civil rights dollars like this: “It is very likely that the events that transpired at Bryant’s Grocery … were discussed underneath the front canopy of the adjacent service station.” And, with nothing more certain than the possibility that Till’s murder was discussed from the adjacent [End Page 55] building, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History gave $200,000, earmarked for civil rights, to the restoration of Ben Roy’s.
From a visit to Antoine’s in 2016
Someone paid over $2100 for the opportunity to have a party of four dine at Antoine’s during Super Bowl weekend. Now there’s a bill in the Louisiana legislature to stop that kind of thing.
George Jones Jr. carries on his great grandfather’s broommaking tradition on family land: growing and harvesting broomcorn, hunting sticks, hand tying, and winding brooms on 19th century equipment. Over three decades, George has evolved in his craft: blending conventional and new elements, realizing broommaking as an art, and relying on it in difficult times.
Create Birmingham & such great news: thanks to the Mellon Foundation, we are now working with Joe Minter and LaStarsha McGarity, Legacy Museum Conservator and Co-Director at Tuskegee University, to ensure its conservation.
The trailer for Lilly, the story of the Alabama lawsuit leading up to the US Supreme Court and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay act of 2009. The movie is in theaters as of May 9.
In a few cemeteries around the world, there are monuments (at least 35) etched with the usual name…date…but some include other elements.
Like a recipe. And Rosie Grant is working on a book about them.
In Logan, Utah, a granite headstone includes the recipe for Kay Andrews’ fudge. It starts with “2 squares chocolate” and ends with “pour into buttered pan.” Naomi Dawson’s monument includes her holiday sugar cookie recipe.
In Huntsville AL, there’s this monument in Maple Hill Cemetery I found with the recipe for Memaw’s No Bake Cookies:
“A grave shows what is important to you,” says Candi Cann, a religious studies professor at Baylor University who writes about the intersection of food and death traditions. According to Cann, recipes have come to serve as shorthand for love and nurturing. “If a recipe is a symbol of who you are, that means that you cared about having people over and feeding them and taking care of them.” In fact, Cann opens the anthology she edited, Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife, with a dedication to her late mother: “My recipe box is a shrine to you and to your memory.”
I make these cookies (my recipe here) — I grew up calling them boiled cookies — a few times a year since kids especially like these.
Photographer Chantal Larochelle has this photograph of the late Debra Ann Nelson’s Red Lantern restaurant cheese dip which appears on her monument in Iowa along with other cemetery recipes.
Lem Motlow and his brothers set up shop in Birmingham, culminating in 1904 with their own distillery — they were the nephews of Jack Daniel of Jack Daniel’s Distillery. Being that Tennessee enacted prohibition in 1910, it seemed a smart move to have operations elsewhere, and it wasn’t until 1915 that Alabama had its own statewide prohibition.
It turned out that due to the different water sources, the whiskey tasted different which wasn’t a good selling point, and more of the nation headed toward prohibition which really sealed the deal on this ill-fated outpost of a family distillery.
It was Lem Motlow who reopened the JD distillery in Lynchburg after prohibition.
This letter from Jesse B. Motlow to Felix Motlow was written in 1905, inviting Felix for a visit as there had been no yellow fever in Birmingham.
(from a visit to the Birmingham History Center Museum which is no longer extant, 2012)
Texas Monthly has a feature on 98-year-old David Adickes who’s the Texas sculptor behind the huge president heads and other enormous concrete pieces you may have seen, especially if you’ve spent time in Houston. Where will these wind up?
(most of my SculpturWorx pics taken on a 2012 visit. More here.)
Finally, finally made it to H.D. Gibbes Store in Learned, Mississippi for supper. We’d been there during the day before it becomes a restaurant and have been meaning to return for when it’s all steaks on paper plates. Even on their website, they say “what’d ya expect from an ol’ broke down store?”.
Following, pics from both visits:
No reservations, so we sat on the porch and waited our turn but did it the right way, getting there right at opening.
Salad? Salad.
I ordered the lamb chops which were pretty good – a lot of char though, along with potato and squash
and buttermilk pie, always. Someone said it was the best buttermilk pie on the planet and mmmmm not sure about that but was it good? yes.
Would come here again just for the ambiance and to support this kind of business and tradition. Thinking of others that remind me of this place — some country store-turned-restaurant, some just restaurant, like Taylor Grocery — a post of places in that genre for next week…xoxo!
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