The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (51 page)

The possibility of replacing slave labor with child labor was not the only reason early Americans were excited about maple sugar. It was seen as a rich and healthy sweetener—and in fact, maple syrup contains iron, manganese, zinc and calcium, along with antioxidants and a wide range of volatile organic flavors, giving it notes of butter, vanilla, and a warm, woodsy spiciness that is also found in spirits aged in oak. Although Dr. Rush, who also advocated temperance, would not have approved of it, maple syrup made a fine brew. A few people reported that they saw Iroquois people making a lightly fermented drink from the sap, although that would have been unusual for a northern tribe, where alcohol was uncommon before European contact. But settlers certainly got down to business: an 1838 recipe involved boiling down maple sap, mixing it with wheat
or rye when barley was not available, adding hops, and aging it in casks after fermentation.

The sugar maple
Acer saccharum
is native to North America and one of about 120 species known around the world. Most maples are actually native to Asia (such as
A. palmatum,
the popular red-leaved Japanese maple), and while there are many European species, none yielded such a remarkably sweet sap. It wasn't until settlers saw Iroquois tapping maple trees for sugar that they saw the potential.

The sugar maple tree is unique in that its sapwood—the outer part of the trunk that is still growing—contains hollow cells that fill with carbon dioxide during the day. On a cold night, the carbon dioxide shrinks, creating a vacuum that pulls sap up the tree. If the weather is warm the next day, the sap flows down again—and this is when maple farmers know to tap the tree. The sap is boiled to make syrup, and it can be further heated to turn it into granulated sugar.

Quebec is known for its maple tradition. A popular winter drink called the Caribou is made from wine, whiskey, and maple syrup. Maple-infused whiskey liqueurs and eaux-de-vie from the region are well worth sampling, as are maple wines and beers. Vermont turns out good maple spirits, too, including a fine maple vodka from the endlessly inventive Vermont Spirits, a distillery that has also helped keep Vermont dairies in business with its Vermont White, a vodka distilled from milk sugars.

APRICOT

Prunus armeniaca

rosaceae (rose family)

P
our yourself a glass of amaretto and you'll recognize the flavor immediately: almonds. Right? Not necessarily. The world's most popular amaretto, Amaretto di Saronno, gets its almond flavor from the pits of apricots.

Just as almonds may be sweet or bitter—the bitter varieties containing high levels of amygdalin, which turns into cyanide in the gut—apricot pits are also classified as sweet or bitter. Most varieties grown in the United States are cultivated for their fruit, and their pits are the bitter variety. But in the Mediterranean, it is easier to find so-called sweet pit or sweet kernel varieties. Split open the hard pit of a sweet variety and the kernel inside—the seed—looks and tastes much like the closely related sweet almond.

The apricot was cultivated in China around 4000 BC; by 400 BC, farmers were selecting specific varieties. It arrived in Europe over two thousand years ago. There are hundreds of varieties now, many of them uniquely adapted to a specific region. One of the oldest sweet kernel cultivars is Moor Park; it dates to at least 1760 in England. The most popular cultivar before Moor Park was called Roman. It was actually developed in ancient Rome.

The tradition of flavoring alcohol with apricots seems to have begun about ten minutes after the introduction of the apricots themselves. Some of the earliest recipes for ratafia call for soaking apricot kernels in brandy with mace, cinnamon, and sugar. The invention of amaretto was not far behind; many of them are still made with apricot kernels rather than almonds. In France, the word
noyau
(or the plural,
noyaux
) refers to the pit of a stone fruit, and in practice a liqueur of that name is typically made with apricot pits. Crème de noyaux turns up in old cocktail recipes but is nearly impossible to find in the United States. The French distiller Noyau de Poissy makes two versions, but a trip to France may be required to secure a bottle.

The fruit itself is, of course, also used to make brandy, eau-de-vie, and liqueurs; in Switzerland, apricot spirits are called
abricotine.
Under the modern usage of the word brandy, a spirit called apricot
brandy
would be distilled from the apricots themselves. But in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, apricot brandies and peach brandies were made from grape-based brandy with fruit juice added. In fact, a 1910 case involving adulterated apricot brandy made with imitation ingredients was one of the early enforcement actions taken under the U.S. Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. This historical detail is of some importance to cocktail enthusiasts attempting to re-create Prohibition-era drinks: a recipe calling for apricot brandy (or peach brandy, for that matter) might actually refer to something more like a sweet liqueur than a dry, higher-proof brandy.

BLACK CURRANT

Ribes nigrum

grossulariaceae (syn. saxifragaceae) (gooseberry family)

W
riting in the twelfth century, St. Hildegard recommended the leaves of the cassis plant as a cure for arthritis. “If one suffers from the gout,” the abbess, botanist, and philosopher wrote, “take in equal part cassis leaves and comfrey, crush them in a mortar, and add the grease of wolf.” While mixing the plant with wolf grease was one way to cure one's ills, mixing it with alcohol proved far more popular. Black currants—called cassis in France—are the sole flavoring in the dark red, syrupy sweet liqueur known as crème de cassis.

The European black currant is not native to Dijon, France—it comes from colder northern European countries and parts of northern and central Asia—but farmers in Dijon perfected the art of coaxing the plants into producing smaller fruit with a deeper, richer color and a more intense flavor.