Purvis - Bourbon: A Savor the South Cookbook

Relax. Sit back. Put your feet up if you like.

Now, pick up a glassa stubby rocks glass, a rounded snifter, even a wine glass if thats all youve got. Pour in a splash of bourbon about as deep as the width of two fingers.

Take a gentle sip.

Taste that? Its wood and vanilla, smoke and caramel. Maybe even a hint, the slightest echo, of the sweet corn that started the journey leading to this brown liquid.

Add a drop or two of water, maybe a couple of cubes of ice. Notice how the bourbon opens up and tastes a little sweeter, how the flavors begin to fill your mouth.

Sip slowly, savor. And realize that what youre tasting is uniquely American and essentially southern. Its a creation that has splashed all over the map of America, but its origins are in the cornfields of Kentucky.

Bourbon has come into its own these days. Cult bourbons line liquor store shelves, and young chef/mixologists outdo themselves with ever-edgier bourbon concoctions. Its hard to believe there have been times when bourbon, Americas greatest distilled creation, fell from favor.

In the 1920s, Prohibition burned through the Souths great distilleries, emptying warehouses and putting hundreds of bourbon makers out of business. In 1919 alone, 52 Kentucky distilleries closed. Of 183 legal distilleries operating in that state at the beginning of Prohibition, fewer than half still existed to reopen after the repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933.

The whiskey world had a few decades to recover, and then came a second blow: the falling out of fashion of brown liquors like bourbon and Tennessee whiskey in the 1970s and 1980s. The vogue was to drink hipper alcohols, like vodkas with complicated names that no one could spell or pronounce and tequilas that came with bragging rights and mystique.

Bourbon? That was pass, something your dad or your granddad drank in a highball on a Saturday night.

Those days are certainly gone. In the 2010s, bourbon has made a triumphant return, a natural extension of the explosion of interest in locally grown foods and American craft creations. Roam the bar scenes in New York and L.A. today and youll be hard-pressed to find a bartender who cant discuss classic bourbon cocktails that had almost disappearedold-fashioneds and manhattans, juleps and sours. Chefs brag about their collections of rare bourbons that can run up to $60 for a single shot. Young hobbyists parse every detail of wheated bourbons versus rye.

With so many people enthused by bourbon, how did I get the job of capturing its story and its essence as an ingredient in the kitchen? Im certainly a cocktail hobbyist myself, with an extensive collection of vintage books and bar gear on display in my home. I can weigh in with my own opinions on perfect manhattans and exactly how to muddle the mint in my personalized silver julep cup.

I think what really qualifies me, though, is perspective.

When I got interested in the art of cocktails, bourbon was not quite back in favor. As a newspaper copy editor in the early 1980s, I usually worked until late at night and would come home when there was nothing on TV but old movies. I drank in Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story, and Marilyn Monroe leaning out of her train berth with a manhattan in hand in Some Like It Hot.

While watching these movies and their Prohibition-era drinking culture, I became captivated by the style and class of making a true cocktail. Putting together a cocktail was a craft, I realized, something that took time and effort to master. These werent drinks you tossed back as fast as you could to catch a buzz before closing time. They were about enjoying liquor and life in a civilized way, by taking the time to sip and savor.

Before long, my husband and I had gotten our first silver-plated cocktail shakerone of dozens that now grace our shelvesand we started digging into battered bar books pilfered from our fathers collections.

While we certainly shook up plenty of martinis (gin, please) and daiquiris (never frozen), we tended to be drawn to bourbon drinks. Maybe thats because were both southernGeorgia for me, North Florida for Wayneand the drinks of our parents were highballs, whiskey sodas, and the lovely old-fashioned, with its festive cherry and orange slice.

Once we started to fill a liquor cabinet with a regular lineup of bottles, I also began to notice the classic southern dishes that had a taste of bourbon, from Christmas bourbon balls to the notorious Lane cake made famous in To Kill a Mockingbird.

In researching this book, I learned even more about cooking with bourbonhow to keep its flavor from being overwhelmed by other flavors or dissipating from heat, how to play to its strengths as a glaze or as a match for sweet and savory ingredients.

My husband and I went to Kentucky to see where bourbon started, and we went back through our collection of classic and historic cocktails to choose the ones we thought every bourbon fanbeginner or established aficionadoought to try. We even came up with home-kitchen versions of a few of the edgier concoctions that todays mixologists are creating.

Along the way, we developed a new respect for that old brown liquor our dads knew. Bourbon isnt just something to drink. Its an artisan product that takes years to create. Its an American craft and a part of our history.

We should all raise a glass to that.

As you cross the Tennessee border into Kentucky and head north on I-75, the rocks rise up around you. Sheer, solid walls of rock, so high beside the road that it feels like youre driving past fortresses, ridged with natural striations and stained in colors from gray and dun to steel and rust, even soft sage green.

Even after you pass through the mountains and into the rolling green hills of Kentuckys horse country, from Lexington to Frankfort and west toward Louisville, the rocks never disappear completely. Ridges push up through the grassy meadows and out from the shoulder of any road. As my husband mused on one drive: This state wasnt built. It was carved.

If youre ever in Kentucky, take a good look at those rocks because theyre a key component of the story of bourbon.