by Amy Stewart
GRAINS OF PARADISE
Aframomum melegueta
zingiberaceae (ginger family)
The small black seeds of this West African plant deliver a peppery heat, along with a richer, spicier note similar to cardamom and its other relatives in the ginger family. It made its way to Europe through early spice trade routes and became a flavoring not just for food but for beer, whiskey, and brandy as well, sometimes to disguise the flavor of poor-quality or diluted spirits. Today it is still found in some beers (Samuel Adams Summer Ale is a popular example) and remains an important ingredient in aquavit, herbal liqueurs, and gin, including Bombay Sapphire.
Like other plants in the ginger family, it doesn’t look like much: the thin, reedy stalks reach just a few feet in height and produce a spray of long, narrow leaves. The purple, trumpet-shaped blooms give way to reddish oblong fruits that each contain sixty to one hundred of the small brown seeds.
The medicinal properties of grains of paradise have helped solve a long-standing problem at zoos. Captive western lowland gorillas often suffer from heart disease; in fact, it is the cause of death for forty percent of them. In the wild, grains of paradise make up 80 to 90 percent of their diet, suggesting that the anti-inflammatory properties of the plant were keeping them healthy. A gorilla health project is under way now to improve the well-being of captive gorillas, with actual grains of paradise—not gin—under consideration as a prescription for better living.
JUNIPER
Juniperus communis
cupressaceae (cypress family)
Cocktail historians are on a race to discover the earliest precursor to gin in medical literature. Franciscus de le Boë Sylvius, a Dutch physician working in the seventeenth century, had the lead for a while, as he was making use of juniper extracts in medicinal potions. Now the winner seems to be Belgian theologian Thomas van Cantimpré, whose thirteenth-century Liber de Natura Rerum was translated to Dutch by a contemporary, Jacob van Maerlant, in his 1266 work Der Naturen Bloeme. The text recommended boiling juniper berries in rainwater or wine to treat stomach pain. That’s not gin, but anything that combines juniper and alcohol is a step in the right direction.
Which is not to say that the Dutch invented the use of juniper as medicine. The Greek physician Galen, writing in the second century AD, said that juniper berries “cleanse the liver and kidneys, and they evidently thin any thick and viscous juices, and for this reason they are mixed in health medicines.” This certainly suggests a mixture of juniper berries and alcohol, although that, too, would have tasted nothing like the superb gins we drink today.
Junipers are members of the ancient cypress family. They made their earliest appearance during the Triassic period, 250 million years ago. This puts them on the earth at a time when most of the land masses were grouped together in a single continent called Pangaea—and explains why a single species, Juniperus communis, can be native to Europe, Asia, and North America.
Because junipers have been around so long, several subspecies have evolved. The juniper used most widely in gin is J. communis communis, a small tree or shrub that can live for up to two hundred years. They are dioecious, meaning that each tree is either male or female. The pollen from a male shrub can travel on the wind over a hundred miles to reach a female. Once pollinated, the berries—which are actually cones whose scales are so fleshy that they resemble the skin of a fruit—take two to three years to mature. Harvesting them is not easy: a single plant will hold berries in every stage of ripeness, so they have to be picked a few times a year.
Gin distillers prefer juniper berries from Tuscany, Morocco, and eastern Europe. Much of it is still wild-harvested: for example, Albania, Bosnia, and Herzegovina together produce over seven hundred tons of juniper berries per year, much of it gathered in the wild by individual pickers who sell their harvest to a large spice company. The decidedly low-tech method is time consuming: pickers will place a basket or a tarp under a branch, whack it with a stick, and try to dislodge only the ripe, dark blue berries while leaving younger, green fruit alone. Once picked, they are spread out in a cool, dark place to dry. Too much sun or heat would cause them to lose their flavorful essential oils, and a damp environment could invite mold.
The berries contain α-pinene, which imparts a pine or rosemary flavor, as well as myrcene, which is found in cannabis, hops, and wild thyme. Limonene, the lively citrus flavor common in many herbs and spices, is present as well. It is no wonder that juniper is combined with coriander, lemon peel, and other spices to make gin—the same flavor compounds are found in many of those plants, just in different combinations.
The Dutch were already distilling gin for something other than medicinal use by the time they revolted against Spain, a conflict that began in 1566 and lasted, in one form or another, until 1648. When British soldiers came to the aid of the Dutch, they learned to enjoy a little gin on the battlefield, calling it Dutch courage for the strength it gave the troops. Edmund Waller memorialized it in a 1666 poem called “Instructions to a Painter”: “The Dutch their wine, and all their brandy lose / Disarm’d of that from which their courage grows.”
Once the English got hold of gin, there was no stopping them. Juniper berries appeared as ingredients in English distillers’ recipes in 1639. By the 1700s, unlicensed gin manufacture was legal in England, and crude and quite toxic gin replaced beer as the tipple of choice. A series of reforms led to more licensing and taxation of gin distilleries, and by the nineteenth century England began producing early versions of the excellent crisp, dry gins it is known for today.
Gin is really nothing more than a flavored vodka whose predominant flavor is juniper, so gin drinkers who say they won’t drink vodka misunderstand the nature of their addiction. The base spirit itself is generally a mixture of barley, rye, and perhaps wheat or corn. The juniper and other flavorings can be macerated in the alcohol and redistilled, suspended in “botanical trays” in the still or extracted separately and mixed with the finished spirit. Each process extracts different oils from the plants and yields a different result.
Juniper spirit, made by fermenting juniper berries and water to create a juniper “wine” that is then distilled, is sometimes sold as juniper brandy in eastern Europe. St. Nicolaus distillery in Slovakia, for example, sells a juniper brandy as well as a spirit called Jubilejná Borovi ka that is bottled with a sprig of juniper. It is described as conveying the dubious “pleasure of drinking juniper twig.”
Some American distillers are experimenting with local junipers instead of turning to the traditional European sources. Bendistillery in Oregon harvests wild juniper berries for its gin; in fact, the owner says that the reason he started making gin was to put the Pacific Northwest juniper crop to use. Washington Island in Wisconsin is also home to a fine juniper crop; tourists can join juniper picking excursions for Death’s Door, a popular local gin distillery. However, not all junipers are suitable for harvest. The savin juniper (J. sabina), the ashe juniper (J. ashei), and the redberry juniper (J. pinchotii) are just three examples of toxic species; many others have simply not been studied for their potential toxicity. Anyone wishing to experiment with juniper infusions would be well advised to get J. communis communis from a reputable source.
Juniper berries are in short supply in England today owing to the loss of wild habitat and a failure to replant older stands. The conservation charity Plantlife UK has launched a campaign to save England’s junipers, appealing to the British fondness for gin and tonics as a way to draw attention to their cause and encourage conservation and habitat restoration.
KNOW YOUR GINS
Distilled gin: Alcohol that has been redistilled with juniper and other botanicals, with added flavorings.
Genever: A Dutch style of gin distilled from a malted mash similar to that used for whiskey. Oude is an older style that is darker in color and has a stronger malt flavor. Jonge is a newer style that is lighter in flavor and color, usually owing to more refined distillation techniques. Either may be ba
rrel aged or unaged.
Gin: A high-proof, vodkalike alcohol flavored with juniper and other natural or “nature identical” flavorings.
London gin or London dry gin: Alcohol that has been redistilled with juniper and other botanicals, with no additional ingredients beyond water or ethyl alcohol.
Mahon: A wine-distilled gin made only on the island of Menorca, off the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
Old Tom gin: An old British style of sweetened gin that is making a comeback among classic cocktail aficionados. It was once dispensed in gin palaces, vending-machine-style, from a stylized cat, described this way by British journalist James Greenwood in 1875: “Old Tom was merely the cognomen of an animal, which on account of its fiery nature and the sharp and lasting effects of its teeth and claws on all who dared to venture on a bout with it, had been selected as being aptly emblematic of the potent liquid called gin.”
Plymouth gin: A type of gin, similar to the London dry style, that can only be made in Plymouth, England.
Sloe gin: A liqueur produced by macerating sloe berries in gin, bottled at 25 percent ABV or higher.
COMMON GIN INGREDIENTS
Angelica root
Bay leaf
Cardamom
Citrus peel
Coriander
Cubeb
Fennel
Ginger
Grains of paradise
Juniper berry
Lavender
Orris root
THE CLASSIC MARTINI
The old joke that a martini should be mixed with nothing more than a rumor about vermouth is best ignored. Bartenders who put a splash of vermouth in a glass, swirl it around, and toss it out before filling the glass with gin are not mixing a drink; they’re simply selling you a glass of gin. Vermouth is a type of wine, and as long as it is fresh, recently opened, and refrigerated, it is an excellent mixer. A dusty bottle of vermouth opened months ago should be tossed out.
A martini should be a small drink served cold in a small glass. Some bars pour as much as four or five ounces of straight gin in an enormous cocktail glass, leaving drinkers to contend with warm, undiluted gin, which is not a cocktail.
1½ ounces gin
½ ounce dry white vermouth
Olive or lemon peel
Shake the gin and vermouth vigorously over ice. Strain and pour into a cocktail glass. Garnish with the olive.
LEMON BALM
Melissa officinalis
lamiaceae (mint family)
While this mint relative does smell strongly of lemon, the most common variety has a citronella note more reminiscent of lemon floor cleaner than anything that might taste good in a cocktail. The cultivar Melissa officinalis ‘Quedlinburger Niederliegende’ has the higher essential oil content that distillers prefer. Those oils include citral and citronellal, linalool, and geraniol, which gives it a slight rose geranium fragrance. The upper leaves and flowers are steam-distilled to extract this potent flavor, which goes into absinthe, vermouth, and herbal liqueurs. It is suspected to be one of the secret ingredients in both Chartreuse and Benedictine.
The genus name Melissa comes from the Greek word for “honeybee”; it gets this name because the tiny flowers are so attractive to bees.
LEMON VERBENA
Aloysia triphylla
verbenaceae (verbena family)
This wildly fragrant but otherwise unassuming shrub has a dramatic history. It arrived in Europe from its native Argentina in the 1700s but was never properly described in the botanical literature. A botanist named Joseph Dombey collected it again during an ill-fated expedition to Latin America in 1778 but ran into trouble in 1780 when he found himself in the middle of a Peruvian civil war. After surviving the war, a cholera outbreak, and a shipwreck, he made it to Spain in 1785, only to have his collection of rare plant specimens, representing years of work, detained in a customs warehouse until they rotted and died. One of the few plants that survived was lemon verbena. This time, his colleagues took note and the plant was at last properly identified and described.
Unfortunately, Dombey’s troubles weren’t over. The French government sent him on another expedition to North America, but this time he got as far as the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe before being arrested by the governor, who was still loyal to the monarchy and suspicious of the newly formed French republic that had organized Dombey’s expedition. The explorer was able to clear his name, but he was ordered off the island, which suited his purposes anyway. However, his ship was almost immediately captured, probably by privateers working for the British government, and he was again thrown into prison on the nearby island of Montserrat, where he died in 1796.
A shot of verbena liqueur probably wouldn’t have offered much consolation to Mr. Dombey, but the herbaceous perennial he helped introduce now lends a sweet, bright lemon flavor to many of the traditional green and yellow liqueurs of southern France and Italy, most notably Verveine du Velay, made by Pagès Védrenne in Le Puy-en-Velay in south-central France. It is also an ingredient in some Italian amaros. On liquor bottles it might be identified as verveine in France and cedrina in Italy.
DOMBEY’S LAST WORD
In honor of Joseph Dombey, a twist on the classic cocktail the Last Word. This version replaces Chartreuse with a more overtly lemon verbena-flavored liqueur and substitutes the lime for lemon. Given the political turmoil that he found himself in, it seems only fitting that this cocktail combines ingredients from three countries that were also in constant upheaval: England, France, and Italy.
½ ounce gin (Plymouth or another London dry gin)
½ ounce Verveine du Velay
½ ounce Luxardo maraschino liqueur
½ ounce fresh-squeezed lemon juice
1 sprig fresh lemon verbena
Shake all the ingredients except the lemon verbena sprig with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Rub a lemon verbena leaf around the rim of the glass and garnish with another leaf. If you can’t find Verveine du Velay, green Chartreuse is a fine substitute.
LEMON VERBENA
Fresh lemon verbena is not the sort of herb generally sold in grocery stores, so it’s worth growing yourself if your climate allows it. It is sensitive to cold and dies back to the ground at the first frost. If covered with straw, it can survive temperatures down to about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Just leave the branches on the plant through the winter, cutting them back in spring when new leaves emerge. Some cold-climate gardeners take a cutting in fall and nurse it through the winter, planting it outside in spring.
Apart from protection from cold, lemon verbena needs very little care. No special fertilizer is required; like many herbs, it actually prefers poor, well-drained soil on the dry side. Plant it in full sun; if it gets any shade at all, it won’t be as flavorful. The flavor is extracted from the leaves, which reach peak essential oil content in the fall. It grows to the size of a small tree in frost-free climates; otherwise it reaches eight to ten feet tall in a season and produces flowering stalks covered in tiny white blossoms.
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full sun
low water
hardy to 15f/-9c
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LICORICE-FLAVORED HERBS: A PASTICHE OF PASTIS
Licorice: The dried root of a european leguminous plant with pinnate leaves and spikes of blue flowers; an extract of the root used in medicines, liquors, and confections; a candy flavored with licorice or a substitute such as anise. Also applied to various plants used as substitutes for true licorice.
LICORICE: AND NOW FOR A CHEMISTRY LESSON
The licorice flavor in pastis and other such spirits can actually come from several different, and surprisingly unrelated, plants. What each of them have in common is anethole, a licorice-flavor molecule with some unique characteristics. It is soluble in alcohol but not in water, so licorice-flavored drinks are generally higher in alcohol content to keep the anethole molecules from breaking out of solution. But when more water is added—particularly cold water, as is the custom for drin
king pastis and absinthe—the anethole separates from the alcohol and forms a milky white or pale green cloud in the drink, called the louche in the case of absinthe.
The reason the anethole doesn’t simply float to the top in an oily blob when water is added (as, say, olive oil or butter might float to the top of a bowl of soup) is that anethole has what chemists refer to as a low interfacial tension. Imagine two drops of water next to each other. If they get very close together, they will easy merge and become one drop of water. Water drops have a higher level of surface tension and tend to merge readily. On the other hand, picture two soap bubbles. They might stick to each other but will not necessarily merge together to form one larger bubble. That’s because they have a lower surface tension. The low surface tension of anethole slows down the speed at which those droplets come together to form one oily mass. That means that pastis or absinthe will stay uniformly cloudy when water is added to the glass, as the anethole breaks loose but resists clumping together.
Some distillers use chill filtration to remove any of these large, unstable molecules that would otherwise cloud the drink in the presence of water or even cold temperatures, which is why some licorice-flavored drinks don’t get cloudy. And some oily, plant-based flavor molecules happen to be transparent, which means when they break out of suspension they don’t cloud a drink the way anethole does.
ANISE
Pimpinella anisum
apiaceae (carrot family)
This small, airy herb, native to the Mediterranean and southwest Asia, looks very similar to its close relatives fennel, parsley, and Queen Anne’s lace. The tiny fruits it produces, commonly called aniseed, contain high levels of anethole and are widely used in liqueurs, vermouths, and the yellow Italian aperitif Galliano. Anise is sometimes called burnet saxifrage, although it is neither a burnet (a small plant in the rose family) nor a saxifrage (a low-growing alpine plant that thrives in rocky soil).
