Can you even call yourself a Southerner if you don’t spend at least a quarter of the year griping about the heat (and don’t forget the humidity)? But during a season when the forecast seems permanently set to “scorching,” you can still find pockets of delicious coolness—and we don’t mean the blast radius around your air-conditioning vent.

Checking in at Hotel Domestique in the foothills of South Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains is like arriving at a European country manor.

Born in Acadiana (Louisiana’s historically French region) in the sixties, a plate lunch is a working person’s meal. Portions are large so as to keep hunger at bay until nightfall.

Their primary job is to serve the most central of daily meals: lunch. They are early risers, okra choppers, roux stirrers, crowd herders. They are keepers of their family’s long-held recipes. They bear up under pressure. They are survivors.

Recently, after a particularly gloomy day of virtual school, my 11-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son were in tears. “I’m so sick of screens!” she said. “I’m sick of everything,” he said. It was all I needed to hear.

If you can’t visit these establishments, at least you can do the next best thing—re-create their signature drink or dish from the comfort of your home.

I stumbled onto Jekyll Island’s Driftwood Beach for the first time nearly a decade ago. This was, not coincidentally, the same week that a spider wrote me a note.