The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (53 page)

A more elegant and modern use of cacao in spirits comes from New Deal Distillery in Portland, whose Mud Puddle is an unsweetened infusion of roasted cacao nibs in vodka, resulting in a pure chocolate flavor without a trace of cloying sweetness.

FIG

Ficus carica

moraceae (mulberry family)

T
he fig tree is a strange and ancient creature. What most of us would call the fruit of a fig is not a fruit at all, but a syconium—a teardrop-shaped bit of plant flesh that contains inside it clusters of tiny flowers. The only way that we could see the flowers would be to split it open, but diminutive fig wasps know how to crawl in through tiny openings and pollinate the flowers. The fruit produced by these flowers are actually the fleshy, stringy tissue that we see when we bite into that thing we call a fig.

Confused? That's not all. Some figs must be pollinated by a wasp in order to set seed and reproduce, but the wasp lays her eggs inside that fruitlike structure and often dies inside. That means that the fig contains bits of wasp corpses—which is not very appealing. But around 11,000 BC, someone noticed that some fig trees could bear fruit without any pollination at all. Of course, the lack of pollination meant they couldn't reproduce, so people had to take cuttings to help them survive—and they did, for thousands of years.

Thanks to the efforts of our Middle Eastern Stone Age ancestors, we don't have to eat figs filled with the body parts of wasps, nor do we have to pick them out of our distillation equipment. Today's figs are either not pollinated at all, or they produce longer flowers that allow the wasps to do their work without actually crawling inside.

Figs came to Mexico in 1560 and have been planted in warmer climates all over the world, with hundreds of varieties in cultivation. Dried figs have always been useful as a source of portable, long-lasting nutrition: they contain a respectable amount of protein as well as essential vitamins and minerals.

Like almost any fruit, figs are distilled. A fig brandy called
boukha
comes from Tunisia, and in Turkey, a clear anise-flavored spirit called raki can be made from figs. A 1737 recipe for fig liqueur involved steeping figs in brandy along with nutmeg, cinnamon, mace, saffron, and licorice, “'till the whole virtue be extracted from them.” An even stranger recipe from that era called for boiling snails with milk, brandy, figs, and spices, and offering it to people with consumption. Even if it didn't treat their illness, it would certainly give them something else to worry about.

Fortunately, modern fig liqueurs are much improved: look for French
crème de figue,
fig arak, and black fig-infused vodka, as well as local eaux-de-vie made anywhere figs are grown.

MARASCA CHERRY

Prunus cerasus
var.
marasca

rosaceae (rose family)

I
n the distant, boozy past, a maraschino cherry was not an artificially dyed and overly sweetened atrocity. It was a dense, dark, sour cherry called the marasca that grew particularly well in Croatia, around the town of Zadar. That region was known for the practice of fermenting marasca cherries with a little added sugar to produce a clear spirit called maraschino liqueur. Cherries could then be soaked in that liqueur to preserve them—and that is a proper maraschino cherry.

To understand why we associate maraschino cherries with Italy requires a brief history lesson. Given Zadar's advantageous location as a port city on the Adriatic Sea, it
found itself under near-constant attack and was under the control of almost every nearby country at one time or another. The Luxardo company, the best-known maker of maraschino liqueur, has a history that mirrors that of the region: founded in Zadar in 1821, the distillery was at the center of nonstop political upheaval until World War I, when Italy took control. Many Croatian farmers, finding themselves Italian citizens, did the only sensible thing and decamped for Italy, taking cuttings from their cherry trees—and their recipes—with them.

After repeated bombings during World War II, the Luxardo distillery was decimated. Only one Luxardo family member survived; he, too, went to Italy to rebuild the business. Now many Italian distilleries make a version of maraschino liqueur, owing in part to Croatia's war-torn history.

In 1912, an early version of the FDA called the Board of Food and Drug Inspection issued a ruling that only marasca cherries preserved in maraschino could be labeled “Maraschino cherries.” American growers favored large sweet cherries (a different species,
Prunus avium
), and they had developed a brining process that involved bleaching them in sulfur dioxide, which removed all the color but could also turn them to mush. To solve that problem, they added calcium carbonate (widely available at plaster and paint stores in those days) to harden them. What was left was described in one American agricultural report as nothing but bleached cellulose “in the shape of a cherry” that was then dyed red with coal tar, flavored with a chemical extract of stone fruit called benzaldehyde, and packed in sugar syrup. This product, whatever it was, could not be called a maraschino cherry.

But that changed, thanks in part to Prohibition. The temperance movement, working with soda manufacturers, campaigned against the evils of European cherries soaked in liquor. They championed the chemically treated, alcohol-free “American cherry, without foreign savor and without entangling alliances” over a “distillate of some foreign province, from fruit gathered by underpaid peasants, and handled and sold under conditions which would disgust the purveyors and purchasers of such products.” Thanks to their efforts, real marasca cherries in pure liquor become disgusting in the minds of Americans, and bleached and dyed cherries became wholesome. In 1940, the FDA gave up the fight and agreed that any chemically treated, artificially dyed batch of cherry-shaped cellulose in a jar could be sold as maraschino cherries. (To add insult to injury, the FDA allows up to 5 percent of the cherries in a jar to contain maggots, calling that an “unavoidable defect.”) Fortunately, authentic maraschino cherries, made by Luxardo and other companies, are available from specialty food shops today as an alternative—and they are easy to make at home.

Sweet cherries are native to either Asia or central Europe; early archeological evidence points to both locations. By Roman times, at least ten varieties were in cultivation. Sour cherries have also been cultivated in Europe for at least two thousand years.

Although cherries have been grown across the United States, they found their most advantageous climate in Oregon. One early pioneer in the Oregon cherry business was Seth Lewelling, who came from Indiana with his family in 1850. Lewelling was an abolitionist who helped organize a local chapter of a new anti-slavery political party called the Republican party. For his opposition to slavery, he was labeled a “black Republican.” He told his critics that he would make them relish that term, and he did it by naming a new variety of cherry Black Republican so that they would have no choice but to eat their words. The Black Republican was once the most popular cherry for canning and preserving, but now Royal Ann and Rainier are more common.