Title: “Southern Living Bourbon & Bacon: The Ultimate Guide to the South’s Favorite Food Groups”
Author: Morgan Murphy
Publisher: Oxmoor House
Pages: 288
Price: $22.95 (Hardcover)
Bourbon and bacon are not a hard sell in the South, or anywhere for that matter, but Morgan Murphy has a good time evangelizing, however needlessly. The author of “Southern Living Off the Eaten Path,” Murphy combines 115 recipes, short taxonomies and histories of bourbon and bacon, a brief review of bourbon brands and bacon companies and some appropriate witticisms. For example: “I went on a bourbon diet for three days and lost a week,” and “bacon tastes better than skinny feels.” Physically, this hardcover book is unusually attractive. Food photography, as any viewer of TV ads for chain restaurants has surely noticed, is a highly developed art. The pictures of the drinks and dishes will send you to your bar cart or stove or both.
He begins with bourbon whiskey which can be made anywhere, not necessarily Kentucky, and is usually comprised of several different grains, including rye and wheat, but must be 51% corn.
The recipes for drinks run from the known—bourbon old fashioned, bourbon whiskey sour—to complicated concoctions requiring sometimes common ingredients like mint, lime or lemon juice, champagne, orange slice or lemon twist but also some seldom seen: Grand Quinquina, Berentzen apple schnapps, Underberg bitters, orange bitters, rhubarb bitters, ginger beer, Lillet Blanc, falernum, from the Caribbean, Herbsaint liqueur, cinnamon syrup, vanilla simple syrup, rhubarb simple syrup, cream of coconut, pomegranate juice, nutmeg.
Murphy advises going to the internet for the rarer ingredients.
For some drinks you can’t imagine making yourself, Murphy suggests a bar that serves them. It would be an interesting road trip, worthy of its own blog, to visit them all.
Whenever possible, Murphy likes to combine bacon and bourbon. He gives instructions for making bacon straws, baked wrapped around wooden spoon handles, to be used like celery in a Bloody Mary, and bacon-infused bourbon: one bottle bourbon and ¼ cup warm bacon grease mixed, strained and chilled 3-7 days before being combined with maple syrup and bitters. That one seems a rasher too far.
There are many recipes for bourbon jams and sauces and of course desserts—bourbon balls, cookies, brownies, puddings, tarts, pecan-sugared bacon, pralines, even frozen custard and bacon ice cream. There is an intriguing photo of bacon-apple pie with bacon strips as the lattice on top.
Bacon, called here The Wonder Meat, needs no boosting. Murphy notes that 51% of all American households report having bacon in the fridge. Bacon, like cashews and chocolate, approaches addictive, but Murphy suggests dozens of ways to get more bacon into your bloodstream: bacon added to fried corn, potato salad, green (previously healthy) salads, beans, soup, collards, brussels sprouts, mac and cheese, frittatas, quiche, waffles, grits, and wrapped around halibut filets or cooked with Thai curry mussels.
Most extravagantly, he suggests bacon baked with brown sugar as well as the ultimate combos: bourbon candied bacon, bacon-bourbon caramel popcorn and bacon baklava with bourbon honey syrup. As Murphy cheerfully admits, this is not a diet book.
As there was with bourbon, there is information about bacon here with an enlightening little section on why Canadian bacon isn’t. It comes from high up, the loin; real bacon is belly meat. Also, Murphy convincingly defends the extra expense of dry-cured premium bacon—because of course it’s better—but it also doesn’t shrink as much so “the cooked price is about the same.”
Murphy declares “if there’s no bacon in heaven, I don’t plan on going.”
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
