The elegy is a literary form dear to the human heart, for it’s the best reply we can summon to death’s speechlessness.     Janet is such a work, created by Bay Weekly contributing writer Al McKegg in honor of his wife, Janet.     With soaring highs and crashing lows, theirs was a love story made for literature. It was too cruel for real life.

During the Prohibition Era, drinking didn’t diminish; it became more chic. While gangsters and molls kicked their heels up at speakeasies in Chicago, the Bondurant brothers were taking advantage of a new cottage industry, cooking up mountain dew in homemade stills tucked away in the hills of Virginia.

The conditions were finally right. I was fishing along a tree-lined, rip-rapped shoreline that ran for hundreds of yards just outside the mouth of the Severn. Interrupted only by the occasional stone erosion jetty that eased out underwater every hundred yards or so, this area had proven a hot shallow-water rockfish hunting ground this time of year in the past, especially at first light.

Welcome to The Dish, a new Bay Weekly column dedicated to the food and restaurants of Chesapeake Country. In this exclusive, we go beyond traditional restaurant reviews to consider the flavors of the Bay along with the unique people, places, spirits and recipes that whet our appetites. Let’s start in season, celebrating the end of summer with a delicacy that will soon be tasted only in memory: heirloom tomatoes.