And as you know, it's all about the whiskey.

Thank you for watching Uniquely Glouable, and we'll see you next time.

Hi, I'm Stacey.

Welcome to the kitchen of Mile Kentucky Home.

Today on Bourbon of Biscuits, we're going to be making a salad that's recipe dates back multiple generations of Kentuckians.

And we'll be using a lettuce variety that is native to the bluegrass.

We'll be pairing this with a bourbon shrub.

Let's get started.

For our wilted lettuce salad, we'll need a head of bib lettuce, a pinch of salt and pepper, a tablespoon of sugar, a tablespoon and a half of bacon grease, and two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar.

So today's recipe is really easy, but it's got a lot of history involved with it.

We're simply gonna tear up some lettuce greens and make a very simple dressing that goes back over 200 years in Kentucky, swapping bacon grease for your standard olive oil and like a vinaigrette.

I want to tell you a little about the history of this great variety of lettuce that is actually a variety called bib lettuce.

A judge by the name of Jack Bibb had a hobby greenhouse in Frankfurt, Kentucky, about 45 minutes away from Louisville, and through much cultivation, he propagated this proprietary variety of lettuce.

And it's known for its tight leaves, almost shrub like really, and it's very tender and sweet, and it's great paired with this wilted hot bacon dressing.

If you're preparing this for your family, you can do the lettuce preparation way in advance.

But you're really gonna want to serve the dressing table side to make sure it's hot.

In fact, some people call this a hot dressing, or some people call it wilted lettuce.

And I've even seen in really old cookbooks that it was called killed or kilt lettuce as well.

So we're simply gonna take some of our ingredients now.

We're gonna take that bacon grease.

Now you can fry up six pieces of bacon and you'll get about a tablespoon to two tablespoons of bacon grease, or you can go to your if you're a good southerner, good Kentuckian, you will have bacon grease always in the refrigerator to use, and that's what I did a little of both today.

So we've got about a tablespoon and a half of the bacon grease.

We're gonna add a pinch of the black pepper, this was fresh ground, pinch of some salt, and then we've got about a tablespoon of sugar.

We're just gonna mix this up, take it to the stove, bring it to just under a boil, and add our apple cider vinegar, and then we're gonna bring that to the back to the table and pour it over our greens, and we'll have a wilted salad with Kentucky bib lettuce.

Right at my hot bacon dressing right off the stove.

It was just sizzling, and when you serve this, you're gonna want to plate it up in advance your bib lettuce, you know, one at a time.

Uh, and simply we're just going to drizzle this hot dressing all over it.

Now, in my family, this is simply where we left it.

Sometimes my grandmothers would add green onions to this.

Sometimes we would have bacon, like I said, if we weren't frying the bacon that night, we would just use a the bacon grease from the refrigerator so we wouldn't have it on hand, so sometimes we would add that.

I've seen a lot of recipes in the older cookbooks where radishes were a common ingredient as well as chopped egg.

So I might add some bacon to this while we go watch Jessica make us a bourbon shrub.

Today we're gonna make a blackberry thyme shrub cocktail.

So what we're gonna use is our blackberry and thyme shrub syrup, Kentucky bourbon, and sparkling water.

So I actually already made the shrub syrup, and this is kind of a classic recipe, and you can do a lot of different variations of it.

You're always gonna use fruit, sugar, and vinegar.

And what I did to make this one was I used two cups of blackberries, two cups of white granulated sugar, and two cups of water, brought that all to a boil on the stove and let that cook for about five to ten minutes until the fruit starts breaking down.

And then once that happens, you take your fruit mixture, like the fruit simple syrup mixture off the stove, and you can add in your aromatics.

And I wanted to do thyme with the blackberries, and then you add in two cups of vinegar also.

And uh this might sound a little kind of like intense, but the vinegar cocktail concoction is actually a colonial era recipe because the vinegar will preserve the fresh fruit.

So once you have made this syrup, you can leave it in your fridge.

As far as I can tell, basically indefinitely, and then keep using it for cocktails or mocktails from there.

Alright, so for this version, we're gonna use one and a half ounces of this syrup that I made.

And I'm using Buffalo Trace bourbon, kind of in honor of the bib lettuce, since it was born in Frankfurt, Kentucky, and so is this whiskey.

And we're gonna shake this in our cocktail shaker.

This already has ice in it.

Like I said before, you're gonna typically use the shaker when you've got anything with fruit juice in it.

Okay.

Strain this into our glass.

And then lastly, I'm just gonna top it with a little bit of sparkling water.

And like I kind of mentioned before, if you wanted to just do a mocktail, the syrup and sparkling water is great on its own, too.

So there you've got it.

It is a blackberry thyme shrub.

Well, Stacey, I love it that we ended up both making kind of like centuries old recipes today.

I do love it when we do that.

And I think yours though, as um with the ingredients is so relevant for today's drinking.

Yeah, with kind of like the prebiotics of the vinegar, and you can make this really seasonal because you can swap out any fruit, herb, and sweetener you want as long as you have those components with the vinegar.

So you can do like kind of a farm to table cocktail.

So this this lawyer, turn judge, um, is just a hobbyist and and cultivated this variety of basically a butter lettuce in his greenhouse, and it was so popular, he just started sharing it with his friends in around the 1870s.

And they're very Kentucky Kentucky, and they never he never called it bib lettuce.