Cooking With Fire: Rum

Bourbon may be the United States' official native spirit, but you could make a good argument that rum deserves that title instead. Rum was distilled in the U.S. hundreds of years before bourbon ever was, and it has a rich history from the mainland through to the Caribbean. But rum starts with sugarcane, and the story of sugarcane does not start anywhere near the Caribbean islands. Instead, sugarcane was brought west, possibly from China or India to the Middle East, where it was first refined