Last Thursday night, at Scott’s Bar-B-Que in Hemingway, South Carolina, two giants of Southern barbecue met for the first time. As the sun went down, John Lewis, the lanky head cook at La Barbecue in Austin, stepped around the pits where whole-hog veteran Rodney Scott smokes more than a dozen pigs each week. The Texas pit master peppered the South Carolina pit master with questions: How much space do you keep between the hogs and the coals? How do you keep the temperature steady? Lewis helped Scott move a piece of furniture. They walked to the picnic tables across the street, sat down, and ate together.

The pairing of whiskey and country ham is one of the most timeless and reliably delicious in all of Southern cuisine. And at the 404 Kitchen in Nashville, Tennessee, chef Matt Bolus has devised a fresh way to bring the two staples together. He serves shaved country ham with biscuits, red-eye gravy, and dollops of whiskey jam, a spiced fruit butter with a base of raisins, apple cider, and corn liquor. It’s strong stuff, and pairs nicely with cured meats of all sorts, as well as cheese and, hell, just about anything else you might enjoy with a glass of brown water.

When Bittermilk nabbed the top spot in the drinks category of our 2013 Made in the South Awards last year, the Charleston, South Carolina, line of craft cocktail mixers consisted of three products: a smoked-honey whiskey sour mix, a hopped and elderflower-perfumed Tom Collins mix, and an outstanding burnt-sugar Old Fashioned mix, all carefully positioned at the intersection of bitter, sweet, and sour. Demand for the mixers soared, and founders Joe and MariElena Raya, buoyed by the company’s quick and early success, set to work on a fourth formulation. “Did the Made in the South Awards change our business? It launched our business, basically,” says Joe Raya, who also runs the Gin Joint, one of the Holy City’s best bars, with MariElena. “We were bottling by hand when we got into the magazine, and suddenly, I swear, I was working twenty-four hour stretches some days. But it was amazing, and really got us off the ground.” 

If you’ve kept even a wandering eye on the culinary world over the past year, you’ve probably heard something about the cronut, the flaky croissant-doughnut hybrid that made a minor celebrity of New York City pastry chef Dominique Ansel in 2013. The cronut has inspired plenty of imitators, but none have hit quite as close to home for us here at Garden & Gun as the latest, from fast-food chain Carl’s Jr.