A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [215]
4. Add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk, beginning and ending with the dry and beating after each addition only enough to combine. Stir in the vanilla and the nuts. Pour the batter into the prepared pan, spreading to the edge.
5. Bake on the middle oven shelf for 1 hour and 20 to 25 minutes or until the cake begins to pull from the sides of the pan and the top springs back slowly when touched.
6. Cool the cake in the upright pan on a wire rack 15 minutes, then loosen around the edge and the central tube, and turn out on the wire rack. Cool completely before cutting.
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BOURBON
I’ve been drinking “bourbon and branch” ever since I reached the age of consent but I’m ashamed to admit how little I knew about it. I certainly had no idea that Abraham Lincoln had two ties to Kentucky’s best.
One: To earn money during farming’s off-season, Lincoln’s father worked in a bourbon distillery. Two: Throughout the Civil War, Lincoln’s top general, Ulysses S. Grant, had a ready supply of Kentucky bourbon. Reminds me of the old Bob Newhart routine in which Lincoln says something like, “Find out what brand Grant drinks and send a case to each of my other generals.”
The spirited story of bourbon begins shortly after the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 when, in an effort to restore calm, the young U.S. government offered sixty acres of land west of the Alleghenies (later Kentucky) to each settler who would build a permanent home there and raise corn.
Feisty Scotch-Irish distillers from western Pennsylvania to Georgia eagerly accepted, realizing that the corn they were required to grow could replace some of the rye in the whiskey they’d been making. Moreover, fermented and distilled corn would be easier to ship and sell than the grain itself. The result? A happy marriage of Old World tradition and New World corn. In barrels stamped BOURBON (to indicate Bourbon County’s various river ports), the new Kentucky distillers began shipping corn whiskey down the Ohio, then the Mississippi, to New Orleans.
Before long, bourbon was being prescribed for medicinal purposes, and to keep the quality of what he sold both high and consistent, Louisville druggist George G. Brown began selling standard-proof bourbon in sealed bottles. A milestone.
Soon there was another. In the mid nineteenth century, Scottish physician-chemist James C. Crow introduced the sour mash process, a method still used for all straight bourbons. Some of the fermented (sour) mash drained from one batch of bourbon is added to the next along with the yeast. It’s a way to check bacterial growth and produce bourbon of consistently high quality.
In 1964, the U.S. Congress declared bourbon “America’s Native Spirit” and decreed that only whiskey made in the United States that met certain requirements could be called bourbon. It must:
Be made from a mash of at least 51 percent corn (often more is used) mixed with barley and another grain (usually rye but occasionally wheat).
Be aged for at least two years in charred new oak barrels; if aged for less than four, the number of years must be stated on the bottle.
Never contain any additive that alters the bourbon’s flavor, color, or sweetness.
Never have a final distillate of more than 160 (U.S.) proof; this must be cut to 125 proof or less before bourbon can be barreled. It is bottled later at various proofs.
Bourbon can be made anywhere in the United States, but only Kentucky is allowed to print its name on the label as place of origin.
Although the mixture of grain, type of yeast, degree of char on the barrels, aging time, even barrel location in the warehouse vary from brand to brand and account for differences in color, taste, proof, and finesse, one ingredient remains constant among Kentucky distillers: the state’s natural limestone-rich water.
And this, most would agree, is what makes Kentucky bourbon America’s best.
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KENTUCKY