Deep Fried Kudzu

In running through some older pics, I think we have a Carpenter Gothic barn — from a 2010 trip (not stopping long enough to really take a good pic here, obv) to Aberdeen, Mississippi

Red White & Blue Truck
Woodville AL, 2020.

PSA that we’re running out of tomato days so I’ve made what may be the last tomato pie of the season here and I’m thinking of all things ‘mater before it’s time to give them up til next season unless they’re canned or greenhouse. Here’s a mixtape:

Jesus and Tomatoes Coming Soon! in a window in Hattiesburg MS, 2015

tomato pie recipe

These tomato & pesto tarts are excellent and just right for lunch. Same for these ultra-similar tomato and mozarella shells, pictured above.

Arrow sign, Hartselle AL:

Aspic at The Colonnade in Atlanta:

Farm stand offerings, Cullman AL:

A fried green tomato and pimento cheese biscuit at The Loveless Cafe by the Trace:

Goshamighty the tomatoes at Potchke in Knoxville:

Tomato field on Straight Mountain in Oneonta, Alabama:

Fried green tomatoes at Arnold’s Country Kitchen (which…they’re back) in Nashville:

In Geneva, Georgia:

Mural at the entrance to Bad Idea in Nashville:

The Tomato Place, Vicksburg:

Eli’s Mater Shack in Ashville AL:

Godzilla Meets Fried Green Tomatoes at Jacques-Imo’s, New Orleans

Vicksburg tomato sandwiches from The BB Club:

FGTs at The Bright Star in Bessemer:

Masaka Onodera‘s A Box of Genetically Modified Tomatoes at the Mobile Museum of Art:

Aspic at Walnut Hills in Vicksburg:

Arrow sign in Trussville AL:

FGTs at Mrs B’s in Montgomery:

Chandler Mountain tomatoes:

On the Vine by Mike Handley:

FGTs at Walton’s in Huntsville:

The braconid wasp eggs on this hornworm who’d rather be enjoying a tomato plant (note chickens watching) in the yard

Pimiento and Tomato Salad:

Tomato aspic I made:

Tomato Table by Craig Nutt, at the Columbus Museum in Columbus, Georgia:

Barn
Lewisburg TN, 2020.

This old store (now a residence, I think) in Collbran, Alabama sports a Grapette sign

And I found this Grapette sign at Naaman’s Championship BBQ in Texarkana

Grapette was started by Benjamin Tyndle Fooks and founded in 1939 in Camden, Arkansas.

While the idea of a grape-flavored drink being named Grapette seems pretty straight-forward, it didn’t come about until Fooks hired someone to travel to DC to look through the US Patent Office trademark files for inspiration. Rube Goldstein owned the rights to “Grapette”, “Orangette”, and (dramatic pause) “Lemonette” though he’d never actually produced drinks using those names, and an agreement was made to transfer ownership for $500 total to Fooks’ company.

The Grapette story has a few twists and turns including immense popularity in South America and the Pacific Rim,  the company being sold and being part of Pepsi for some time, and going into obscurity for a time until Sam Walton utters the words “I want Grapette in my stores.”

Looking for Grapette in the US now, the manufacturer states it’s sold exclusively at Walmart as Sam’s Choice Grapette.

Eggleston’s 1970s film “Stranded in Canton” will appear again later this year, and there’s a new album for it coming from Fat Possum.

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The documentary Eudora and a companion book debuted earlier this month at the Mississippi Book Festival:

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¡Printing the Revolution! finishes its run at the Frist on September 29

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Lane cake in fridge, my home, 2010

Anne Byrn is interviewed at IndyWeek for her new book, Baking in the American South here at Amazon and here at Bookshop (which includes recipes like Georgia Gilmore’s pound cake, The Colonnade’s corn muffins, Gottlieb’s Chocolate Chewies). She says:

Those are also the types of recipes I have some fear about dying out. The Lane cake—and the smell of the whiskey on the counter that goes into the cake—is mentioned in To Kill a Mockingbird, but it’s only sort of just referred to. The Lane cake is also Jimmy Carter’s favorite cake. He’s about to turn 100, so anyone in their 30s may not know, may not really care, that that was Jimmy Carter’s favorite cake.

I’m going to make Huddy Horowitz Cohen’s Blackberry Jam Cake recipe for Rosh Hashanah.

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World’s Largest Office Chair, Miller’s, Anniston AL, from a visit in 2008

Amy Elliott, who I got to know a bit when she was working on her documentary “World’s Largest” is now working on a documentary on fans of Little House on the Prairie, called (yessssssss!!!) Girls Gone Wilder.

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Christie’s New York on October 3 will include in An Eye Towards the Real: Photographs from the Collection of Ambassador Trevor Traina includes William Eggleston’s ‘Greenwood, Mississippi (‘The Red Ceiling’) 1973 est at $200-300k; Diane Arbus’ Lady Bartender at Home with a Souvenir Dog, New Orleans LA 1964; Walker Evans’ Bedroom, Tengle Family House, Hale County, Alabama, 1936;

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King’s Tavern, from a 2007 visit

King’s Tavern (1790s) in Natchez is still on the market for two years now. Also available: the purple house on Saint Charles, Brandon Hall, this 1850 home on Rembert is a whole thing, and the 1890 Queene Anne with twin octagonal turrets with mansard roofs are the best.

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In love with this beyond-fab MCM house in Iuka designed by E. Fay Jones, a FLW apprentice who designed Thorncrown Chapel, one of the most architecturally important structres in the last century (4th on the AIA top ten list of 20th century buildings), and the Mildred B. Cooper Chapel). #Funfact: the Sam Walton home at 501 NE F Street in Bentonville was designed by E. Fay Jones as was daughter Alice’s home.

This home in Fayetteville by him known as the butterfly house is aaaaahhhhhh and I think at one time a Jewish congregation was considering buying it for their building (which I guess was Temple Shalom, in a different building now ) but it’s residential and the neighbors were concerned about traffic and parking. As a huge fan of MCM synagogue architecture — a post for another day — I volunteer to be president of the congregation if that ever happens and no matter what, a Sisterhood member whatevertheywant. L o v e the butterfly house.

And the late Bill Luckett’s home in Clarksdale designed by Jones is on the market. Those are the only two I know in Mississippi, and the only one in Alabama I know is in Fairhope, very understated for him, and sold earlier this year for $2.1M.

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Athens State, 2023.

The Shindig is back in the Shoals next month. And the Old Time Fiddlers Convention is on at Athens State next week.

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from a visit to the Metal Museum, 2012

at that 2012 visit, I viewed their Marlene True Jewelry exhibit

Bracelets, Bangles, and Cuffs: 1948-2024 closes November 17 at the Metal Museum in Memphis:

The exhibition highlights many works owned by exhibition organizer Helen Drutt, a renowned educator, gallery owner, author, patron of the arts, and advocate of modern and contemporary craft. Drawing on her many and diverse experiences in the art world, as well as her widely successful RINGS! exhibition with the Metal Museum in 2022, Drutt adds historic context and scholarly weight to the diverse assemblage of bracelets on display. This exhibition was researched by independent curator Ariana Bishop with assistance from Marina Kato-Hurwitz.

Art & Object did a piece with Helen Drutt English in July of this year.

Not related to Helen Drutt English (I’m almost sure, but) The New Orleans Museum of Art hosted the Ring Redux: The Susan Grant Lewin Collection exhibit that closed early February this year.

Excited to see Preston Jackson’s A Hidden Culture exhibit at The Metal Museum opening October 2.

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Carousel bar at the Hotel Monteleone, from a 2006 visit

Spin Through Seventy-Five Years of Carousel Bar History: Seven standout moments featuring famous Southern authors, legendary cocktails, and spontaneous joy at Garden & Gun

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At 64 Parishes, Poison Portraits: A toxic silhouette album provides an intimate look at early Louisianans and explanation of a physiognotrace:

William Bache arrived in New Orleans sometime in the fall of 1804. An itinerant portrait silhouette artist, Bache had emigrated from England to Philadelphia in 1793, and in 1803 embarked on a nine-year jaunt through seven East Coast states (Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia), Cuba, and the recently formed Territory of Orleans. He carried with him the tools of his trade: black vellum paper, sharp scissors, candles, and a physiognotrace—an instrument that uses two implements to trace facial outlines. One is controlled by the silhouette artist, allowing the artist to sketch the contours of a sitter’s head onto a candle-lit canvas. The other is a mechanical arm that mimics the artist’s sketch in miniature against a piece of black or blue paper or fabric. Once the outlines of the sitter’s profile appear on the paper, the silhouette artist removes it from the device’s frame and folds it over once or twice before cutting out multiples of a finely detailed silhouette. 

Bache made at least 672 portraits during his month in New Orleans.

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The oldest-known book in private hands, The Crosby-Schoyen Codex (~250-350CE), was sold this summer for £3,065,000, was discovered in the 1950s and was for a time owned by Ole Miss.

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xoxo! –Ginger

Lee Alexander McQueen & Ann Ray: Rendez-Vous opens at the Grand Rapids Art Museum October 5 — I had the good fortune of seeing it twice in the last year, first at the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina and then again this summer at the Frist in Nashville.

These images are from the Frist this summer:

And these, the same exhibit at the Columbia Museum of Art in SC where I actually much preferred (though I otherwise love the Frist) how it was displayed:

If I happen to be in Michigan this fall, I’d love to see it there too.

Hope you’ll be able to visit the downtown Birmingham Public Library between now and October 14 to see The Scottsboro Boys Museum Traveling Exhibit. On October 8:

This May as part of Leadership Birmingham, we visited Rickwood Field as it was being prepared for the big national game that was going to be on television. Because Rickwood is the oldest baseball park in the country with such an interesting story between the Negro Leagues and hosting important players (and more), having a high-profile game is a nice stepping-stone to making the park accessible to more people.

This summer’s game isn’t the first major league game Rickwood has hosted: in 1926, the NY Giants played the Chicago Cubs.

The park was built in 1910.

For years, my family would come to Rickwood to watch the minor league Birmingham Barons play here in its once/year game. They’d be themed for a certain decade and the players’ uniforms would reflect that era.

A pic of the outside from 2009:

a game in 2013:

In 2016, a friend involved with the park invited the boys to come up and change the numbers on the scoreboard — this is Shug having climbed up the ladder to get to work (a great experience!)

A rewind from July 2020:

In north Alabama around Hazel Green, there’s Butter-N-Egg Road (which at another part of the road is called Butter And Egg Rd on a different sign) and there’s also

Butter and Egg Grocery with the analog gas pumps

not too far from there, the Lickskillet Mini Storage in the community of…Lick Skillet.

BTW, there’s also a Butter and Egg Road in Troy, Alabama and the story is that it’s where farmers would sell their goods on the way into town and the name stuck.