The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

by Amy Stewart

  Filé, or ground sassafras leaves, became a key ingredient in gumbo. The root bark was used in tea and in early sarsaparilla and root beer, which would have had a very low alcohol content or none at all. It was a classic American spice. However, in 1960, the FDA banned the ingredient because a major constituent of the plant, safrole, was found to be carcinogenic and toxic to the liver. Today it can only be used as a food additive if the safrole is extracted first. Fortunately, the leaves contain much lower levels of safrole, so filé remains available to Cajun cooks.

  A Pennsylvania company called Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction has resurrected the traditional recipe for sassafras-based brews in the form of Root liqueur, a rich root-beer-flavored spirit that contains birch bark, black tea, and spices—but no sassafras. Instead, a mixture of citrus, spearmint, and wintergreen has been substituted, but the flavor is overwhelmingly true to the sassafras tree.

  SUNDEW

  Drosera rotundifolia

  droseraceae (sundew family)

  Carnivorous plants don’t often find their way into cocktails—or at least, they haven’t so far. If bourbon can be infused with bacon and stinging nettles can flavor simple syrup, perhaps insect-eating bog plants are poised for a comeback on drink menus.

  A tiny carnivore called a sundew was once used in cordials. It is native to Europe, the Americas, and parts of Russia and Asia, where it thrives in swamps during the summer and curls up to wait out the long, cold winter. The sundew, a tiny rosette of narrow red leaves, earns its living by luring insects with a sweet, sticky nectar, then using digestive enzymes to suck nutrients from its victims.

  The cordial made from the plant was called rosolio, a term that is now used to refer to any liqueur consisting of fruit and spices steeped in a spirit, sometimes mixed with wine. Scholars disagree over the origin of the word rosolio (some believe it actually refers to an infusion of rose petals in alcohol), but it might have come from an early word for sundew, rosa-solis. Sir Hugh Plat, writing in 1600, offered a recipe for rosolio that clearly referred to the carnivorous plant, as he even recommended picking out the bugs before infusing it, a step modern bartenders would be well advised to follow: “Take of the hearbe Rosa-Solis, gathered in Julie one gallon, pick out all the black motes from the leaves, dates halfe a pound, Cinnamon, Ginger, Cloves of each one ounce, grains halfe an ounce, fine sugar a pound and a halfe, red rose leaves, greene or dried foure handfuls, steepe all these in a gallon of good Aqua Composita in a glasse close stopped with wax, during twenty dayes, shake it well together once everie two dayes.” Although sundew rarely makes an appearance behind the bar today, there is a German liqueur, Sonnentau Likör, that claims it as an ingredient. Collecting a sufficient quantity of sundew from marshes, and picking the bugs from it, might be more effort than the average cocktailian wishes to undertake, but it’s probably a safe enterprise. Sundew has no known toxicity and has even shown limited promise as a cough treatment and anti-inflammatory—demonstrating, once again, that those medieval herbalists might have known what they were doing.

  SWEET WOODRUFF

  Galium odoratum

  rubiaceae (madder family)

  This low-growing perennial puts out beautiful star-shaped leaves and, in spring, even smaller white, star-shaped flowers. Although it could easily be overlooked as an insignificant, shade-loving woodland groundcover, it gives off a sweet, grassy fragrance, which is an indicator that it contains high levels of potentially toxic coumarin. For this reason, the plant is not considered a safe food additive in the United States—except as a flavoring in alcoholic beverages.

  Sweet woodruff is a traditional ingredient in May wine (or Maiwein), a German aromatized wine made by infusing the wine with sprigs of woodruff in early spring, before the coumarin levels in the plant have risen to a dangerous level. It is often served with fruit at May Day festivals.

  TOBACCO

  Nicotiana tabacum

  solanaceae (nightshade family)

  Smokers may insist that nothing goes better with a drink than a cigarette—but combining them in the bottle? Tobacco liqueur is a strange concoction that could only have been invented in the Americas. In anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 1973 book From Honey to Ashes, he described the practice of soaking tobacco in honey in Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. Because fermented honey drinks were also known in South America, it is not inconceivable that people were drinking tobacco in a fermented form.

  Native Americans have been cultivating and smoking tobacco leaves for over two thousand years, but Europeans had never heard of the plant—and, in fact, had not smoked much of anything—until explorers brought it back from the New World. It didn’t take long for the plant to spread to India, Asia, and the Middle East. At first it was embraced as a kind of medicine: people thought it would treat migraines, ward off the plague, subdue coughs, and cure cancer.

  The plant’s active ingredient, a neurotoxin called nicotine, is meant to kill insects, but it also happens to kill humans as well. Something called tobacco liquor was widely recommended as a bug spray in the nineteenth century—but it had little to do with the tobacco liqueurs that have been introduced recently.

  The best known of these liqueurs is Perique Liqueur de Tabac, distilled at the Combier facility in France through a process that, according to the distillers, leaves no detectable trace of nicotine in the bottle. (Nicotine has such a high boiling point—475 degrees Fahrenheit—that it might not rise through the still at all.) Made with a grape eau-de-vie spirit and aged in oak for over a year, this liqueur is sweet, aromatic, and decidedly different. It comes from a particularly strong and flavorful tobacco strain that is only found in St. James Parish, Louisiana.

  Perique tobacco was probably grown by native people for at least a thousand years in that region; settlers have been cultivating and processing it for just two hundred years. The leaves themselves are processed in a way that any distiller would appreciate: they are slightly dried, bundled, then packed into whiskey barrels, where the remaining juice slowly ferments. This adds earthy, woodsy, and fruity flavors to the finished tobacco. In fact, one study identified 330 flavor compounds, 48 of which were previously unknown in tobacco. The tobacco has experienced a resurgence as the interest in artisanal and heirloom ingredients extends to smoking; it is sold in high-end blended pipe tobaccos.

  The Perique liqueur does not have the strong, toasted tobacco flavor that a good Scotch has. The best way to describe it is to say that it tastes the way sweet, damp pipe tobacco smells. It is the only widely available liqueur of its kind. Historias y Sabores, a distillery in Mendoza, Argentina, makes a tobacco liqueur; apart from that, the most common use of tobacco in cocktails comes from house-made cigar bitters, an infusion of tobacco and spices in a high-proof spirit that appears on upscale bar menus. Such experiments can be dangerous for bartenders to undertake, however. Without scientific monitoring of the sort not normally practiced in bars, an inadvertently high dose of nicotine in a drink could be delivered to customers.

  TONKA BEAN

  Dipteryx odorata

  fabaceae (bean family)

  This tropical tree, native to damp soils along the Orinoco River in Venezuela, produces a sweet and warmly spicy bean. European plant explorers saw the potential in the bean and brought it back to London’s Kew Gardens to be cultivated in tropical hothouses. With notes of vanilla, cinnamon, and almond, it was useful as a perfume ingredient and a baking spice. It was also used to cover the nasty odor of iodoform, an early antiseptic, and until quite recently, it was added to tobacco. Chewing tobacco in particular would be sprayed with a solution made from soaking the beans in alcohol.

  It was inevitable that such a tasty bean would turn up in bitters and liqueurs. One brand, Abbott’s Bitters, may have derived some of its flavor from tonka beans, according to chemical analysis of old bottles. It is also rumored to be an ingredient in Rumona, a Jamaican rum-based liqueur. But in 1954, the FDA banned tonka as a food ingredient because it contains high levels o
f coumarin. Liquor containing tonka bean disappeared, but it took a few more decades for tonka to be eliminated from tobacco products, owing in part to the fact that tobacco companies were not required to disclose their ingredients. It is still found as an adulterant in imitation Mexican vanilla, which is why the FDA advises tourists not to bring the product home from vacation.

  Tonka bean has made a comeback of sorts. Europeans can find it in the Dutch Van Wees Tonka Bean Spirit, the German liqueur Michelberger 35%, and the French pastis Henri Bardouin. It’s used, sometimes on the sly, by chefs and bartenders who believe that the minute dose of coumarin delivered by a fine grating of the spice over a drink or dessert could not possibly be harmful—and in fact, they argue, cassia cinnamon also contains high levels of coumarin and faces no such restrictions. The flat, wrinkled black beans, resembling large raisins, have become a kind of culinary and cocktail contraband.

  VANILLA

  Vanilla planifolia

  orchidaceae (orchid family)

  When Spanish explorers first tasted vanilla, they might not have realized what a rare spice they’d encountered. The vanilla bean is the fruit of a species of orchid native to southeastern Mexico, and it is unusually difficult to cultivate. Like most orchids, it is an epiphyte, meaning that its roots need to be exposed to air, not soil. It climbs the trunks of trees, thriving in limbs a hundred feet aboveground, and unfurls just one flower per day over a two-month period, awaiting pollination by a single species of tiny stingless bee, Melipona beecheii. If the flower is pollinated, a pod develops over the next six to eight months. And although the pods contain thousands of tiny seeds, they are incapable of germinating unless they are in the presence of a particular mycorrhizal fungus.

  If that isn’t complicated enough, the pods themselves don’t taste like much of anything when they are picked. They must first be fermented to activate enzymes that release the vanillin flavor. The traditional way to accomplish this was to dip the pods in water, then spread them in the sun and roll them up in cloth to “sweat” at night. The results were worth the effort: hot chocolate drinks flavored with vanilla were one of the Spaniards’ most exciting discoveries.

  It is no wonder that the first attempts to transport vanilla orchids back to Europe and grow them in hothouses failed. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, no one knew how to pollinate the plants. Finally a method was developed using a tiny bamboo pick, but even that wasn’t easy: as each flower opens for only one day, someone has to be standing by, ready to do the work of the bee. Even today, with most vanilla coming from Madagascar, the flowers must be artificially pollinated because the native bee simply cannot be exported. No wonder it competes with saffron for the title of world’s most expensive spice.

  Over a hundred volatile compounds have been detected in vanilla, which explains why the flavor of pure extract can be so complex: notes of wood, balsamic, leather, dried fruit, herbs, and spices round out the sweetness of vanillin. This makes it an extraordinarily versatile flavor, useful in perfumes, cooking, and in beverages of all sorts. When Coca-Cola made its ill-fated switch to New Coke, the Wall Street Journal reported that the economy of Madagascar nearly collapsed because of the sudden drop in demand for vanilla. The company refused, as always, to comment on its secret formula, but the inference was that the original Coke recipe called for vanilla and the new version did not.

  Today the highest-quality vanilla comes from Madagascar and Mexico, although some people prefer the fruitier flavor of Tahitian vanilla. The spice can be found in an impossibly wide range of liqueurs, from spiced citrus spirits to coffee and nut liqueurs to sweet cream and chocolate drinks. Kahlúa, Galliano, and Benedictine are just three examples of products strongly dominated by vanilla flavors.

  WORMWOOD

  Artemisia absinthium

  asteraceae (aster family)

  Anyone who has never tried absinthe will be surprised to find out that it does not taste at all like Artemisia absinthium. Wormwood, a pungent, silvery Mediterranean herb, produces volatile oils and bitter compounds that add a kind of mentholated bitterness to aromatized wines and liqueurs, but it isn’t usually the primary flavor. In fact, absinthe tastes more like licorice, thanks to another main ingredient, anise. But wormwood gives it its reputation.

  Carl Linnaeus, father of modern taxonomy, gave the plant its Latin name when he published Species Plantarum in 1753. The word absinthe was already in use to describe the plant, so when Linnaeus named it, he was simply formalizing the traditional name. The drink known as absinthe would start to appear in liquor advertisements just a few decades later. In addition to wormwood and anise, it traditionally contained fennel and perhaps a few other ingredients according to the distiller’s preferences: coriander, angelica, juniper, and star anise, for example.

  The use of wormwood in wine and spirits dates at least to Egyptian times. It was mentioned in the Ebers Papyrus, an ancient medical text from 1500 BC that might actually be a copy of earlier works dating back several more centuries, where it was recommended to kill roundworms and treat digestive problems. At the same time, in China, medicinal wines were made with wormwood; this has been confirmed through chemical analysis of drinking vessels found at archaeological sites.

  People eventually realized that adding wormwood to wine and other distilled spirits actually improved the flavor or at least helped disguise the stench of crude, poorly made alcohol.

  Like many medicinal tonics, wormwood wine eventually became a recreational drink: vermouth. Wormwood also added a bitter—and antimicrobial—element to beer before the use of hops. And it was put to use in a wide range of Italian and French liqueurs.

  Although A. absinthium is the best-known species, several other species native to the Alps and collectively referred to as génépi are also used in liqueurs, including a liqueur called génépi that perhaps best captures the actual flavor of the herb. These tend to be small, rugged plants, some only a few inches tall, that thrive in tough, rocky conditions. The wild species are protected and can only be harvested under very limited conditions.

  Rumors of wormwood’s dangers are greatly exaggerated: while the plant does contain a compound called thujone that could cause seizures and death at very high doses, the actual amount of thujone that remains in absinthe and liqueurs is actually quite low. The stories of absinthe causing hallucinations and wild behavior among France’s bohemian set in the late nineteenth century are mostly false; perhaps this was caused by the extraordinarily high alcohol content of absinthe. It was traditionally bottled at 70 to 80 percent ABV, making it twice as alcoholic as gin or vodka.

  Absinthe is legal today in Europe, the United States, and many places around the world. Some governments regulate the amount of thujone that may be present in the finished product—this in spite of the fact that many other culinary plants, including sage, are even higher in thujone and aren’t regulated at all.

  DANCING WITH THE GREEN FAIRY

  Forget about lighting absinthe-soaked sugar cubes on fire. The traditional method for drinking absinthe involves only cold water, with a sugar cube if you like your drinks sweeter. (Modern, artisanal distillers disapprove of adding sugar.)

  The addition of water causes a chemical reaction that releases flavor and changes the color; this phenomenon is known as the louche, although you might think of it as the arrival of the green fairy.

  1 ounce absinthe

  1 sugar cube (optional)

  4 ounces ice-cold water mixed with ice cubes

  Pour the absinthe into a clear, fluted glass. Rest a spoon across the top of the glass. (If possible, use a metal slotted spoon or a traditional absinthe spoon). Place the sugar cube, if desired, on the spoon. (Try half a sugar cube for less sweetness, or none at all.)

  Now drip the ice water very slowly over the sugar cube, a few drops at a time, allowing the cube to slowly dissolve and drip sugary water into the glass. If you’re skipping the sugar entirely, simply drip ice water, one drop at a time, into the glass.

&nbs
p; The essential oils from the plants are very unstable in the alcohol solution, so adding cold water breaks the chemical bonds and releases the oils. You’ll see the absinthe change to a pale, milky green as those oils are released—that’s the louche. Because different flavor molecules are released at slightly different rates of dilution, going slowly allows the flavors to emerge one at a time.

  Continue dripping the water in, as slowly as you can, until you’ve mixed one part absinthe to three to four parts ice water. Then drink it at the same leisurely pace, without going to any extra lengths to keep it cold. As the drink warms, the flavors continue to emerge.

  WORMWOOD

  Anyone who finds absinthe intriguing should try growing a little wormwood—not to drink, as making any sort of decent absinthe requires a still—but simply because it’s a beautiful and interesting plant.

  Many species are available at garden centers or from mail-order nurseries specializing in herbs. All of them sport exquisite, finely cut leaves. The one you’re looking for is rarely labeled wormwood; ask for it by its Latin name instead. The plant can survive winter temperatures as low as –20 degrees Fahrenheit, but prefers a warm Mediterranean climate. Plant it in full sun, but don’t worry about giving it rich soil: poor, well-drained, dry soil is all it wants. The plant will eventually reach two to three feet in height and width, but it can get leggy if it isn’t pruned. To maintain a well-behaved mound, shear back half the foliage in June.

  * * *

  full sun

  low water

  hardy to -20f/-29c

  * * *

  Wormwood isn’t recommended as a cocktail mixer because the flavors are harsh and difficult to manage in a drink. Still, if you’re planning on inviting some poets and painters over for an evening of absinthe, cut a few branches and bring them indoors to invoke the spirit of the green fairy.