The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (60 page)

T
here is drawne out of sweet Almonds, with liquor added, a white juice like milke.” So said John Gerard, English barber-surgeon and herbalist who in 1597 published
The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes,
a vivid but fanciful compendium of botanical knowledge and half-truths. He claimed that chestnuts could keep horses from coughing and that the juice of basil leaves could treat snakebite—but he did get a few things right. Sweet almonds? Liquor? Gerard was on to something.

Almonds are quite closely related to apricots and peaches and probably share an Asian heritage. The trees were cultivated in China twelve thousand years ago and made their way to Greece by the fifth century BC. They prefer a Mediterranean climate, with mild winters and long, dry summers, which helped them to spread successfully across Asia and into southern Europe, northern Africa, and the west coast of the United States. They are so abundant in California that hives of European honeybees are carried from orchard to orchard to pollinate the crop.

The nuts weren't always so delightful to eat. Bitter almonds,
Prunus dulcis
var.
amara,
contain enough cyanide to be deadly at a dose of fifty to seventy nuts. Fortunately, people are unlikely to eat a bitter almond by mistake; they are not sold in stores and are grown primarily for pressing into almond oil, using a process that removes the poisons.

It is the sweet almond,
Prunus dulcis
var.
dulcis,
that lends its unmistakable honeyed nuttiness to liqueurs. The poisons have been bred out of this variety through centuries of selection, with orchardists choosing trees that happened to produce sweeter, less toxic almonds.

Almond liqueurs have been popular since the Renaissance, an era of great discovery that included the realization that any number of wonderful things happen when fruit, spices, and nuts are soaked in brandy. The goal could have been to create a medicine, or simply to soften the edges of a crudely distilled spirit. The Italian amaretto is the best-known example, although the brand most widely sold around the world, Amaretto di Saronno, contains no almonds at all but instead gets its nuttiness from the kernels of a close botanical relative, the apricot. Still, it is fairly easy to find an amaretto made with actual almonds: try Luxardo Amaretto di Saschira Liqueur.

Although the liqueur is perfect on its own, it is also used to flavor biscotti. There are few better ways to end a meal than with amaretto-laced coffee and biscotti.

An
almond
is not technically a nut. From a botanical perspective, a nut is a fruit with a dry, hard shell. An almond is a drupe, or a stone fruit whose pit surrounds a fleshy seed. Unlike peaches, apricots, and other drupes, however, the almond's “fruit” is nothing more than an unappetizing leathery outer membrane.

COFFEE

Coffea arabica

rubiaceae (madder family)

W
hat we refer to as a coffee bean is actually a pair of seeds found inside a small, red fruit: the coffee “cherry.” The fruit grows on an Ethiopian shrub that claims both quinine and gentian as relatives. (All are in the taxonomic order Gentianales.) It produces a remarkable poison that will paralyze or kill an insect attempting to feed on it. That poison, caffeine, is exactly what drew us to the plant seven hundred years ago. Humans are not immune to the poison, but it would take over fifty cups of coffee, downed in rapid succession, to deliver a fatal dose.

Arab traders first brought coffee from its native Africa to Europe sometime before 1500. It took over a century for it to catch on, but by the mid-1600s, coffee houses were well established in England and throughout Europe. A charming story circulated about an Ethiopian goatherd whose goats ate the fruit of a coffee shrub and were so energized that they jumped and frolicked for the rest of the day and didn't sleep that night. Although this was probably nothing but a tall tale recited by merchants, it persisted well into the nineteenth century. The fact that a plant could allow people to go without sleep was considered a major scientific breakthrough.

In the early 1700s, Dutch and French traders took just a few varieties of coffee to plantations in the Americas, inadvertently creating a sort of genetic bottleneck. A surprising lack of diversity among coffee plants continues today. Although there are over a hundred known species, almost all coffee grown around the world comes from clones of
Coffea arabica,
with
C. canephora
(sometimes called
C. robusta
) in second place. Insect and pest problems among this monocrop have sent botanists in search of other species, some
of which are near extinction in their native habitat. Plant explorers from Kew Gardens have discovered thirty previously unknown species of coffee in the last decade, each with their own remarkable characteristics: some contain almost no caffeine, others produce seeds twice the size of anything seen before, and some, it is hoped, will be better able to resist pests and disease.

There is no easy way to harvest coffee. It has to be handpicked because the fruit does not all ripen at the same time. The green seeds must be separated from the fruit, which can be accomplished through a “wet” process, in which the seeds are picked out of the fruit and fermented in water to remove pulpy residue, or a “dry” process in which the fruit is dried so that it can be more easily separated from the seeds. (The wet process is believed to produce a better-tasting bean and commands a higher price.) Once the green seeds are clean, they're ready to be roasted.

Coffee is now grown in fifty countries and has surpassed tea as the global drink of choice: we produce three times more coffee than we do tea. But learning to grind it and boil it in water was only the first step. By the early 1800s, coffee was being made into liqueur as well. Most early recipes called for nothing more than roasted coffee beans, sugar, and some sort of spirit. Such a product was produced commercially by 1862, when it was shown at the International Exhibition in London. Early twentieth-century recipes added cinnamon, cloves, mace, and vanilla.

By the 1950s, the rum-based Mexican liqueur Kahlúa was gaining popularity. Unlike many liqueur companies, this one does not keep the recipe a secret: the sugarcane spirit is barrel-aged for seven years, then combined with coffee extract, vanilla, and caramel. Dozens of coffee liqueurs are now sold around the world, based on spirits ranging from rum to Cognac to tequila. Craft distillers are partnering with specialty roasters to create high-end coffee spirits. Firefly in Santa Cruz, California, is one such example. They blend wet-processed Costa Rican beans with a brandy made from Syrah and Zinfandel grapes. Bartenders are also doing their own coffee infusions behind the bar, muddling beans into cocktails, and using coffee bitters in spicy drinks.

But perhaps the best-known combination of coffee beans and alcohol is Irish coffee. As with most famous drinks, its history is hotly debated, but one version of the story credits a bartender in Ireland's Shannon Airport as the inventor. A travel writer returning from Ireland asked a bartender at the Buena Vista restaurant in San Francisco to re-create it, and after much experimenting, the perfect combination of coffee, whiskey, sugar, and cream came together in the glass.

HAZELNUT

Corylus avellana

betulaceae (birch family)

T
he hazel tree traces its origins to Asia and parts of Europe, where it has been actively cultivated for over two thousand years. The French gave the nut the name filbert, presumably after seventh-century abbot St. Philibert, whose feast day is August 20, precisely when the nuts are ripe. But the English called it a hazelnut. Over time, botanists settled the disagreement by assigning the word
filbert
to one species,
Corylus maxima,
and hazelnut to another,
C. avellana.
In the United States, the two words are used interchangeably, much to everyone's confusion, even though most farmers grow
C. avellana.
There are native American species, but they're not as productive as the European trees.

Although hazel trees can reach fifty feet in height, they tend to be short and shrubby, and farmers encourage that behavior. They lend themselves to coppicing, a practice of cutting down the main trunk of a tree to encourage twiggy growth from the roots. This keeps them productive and makes the harvest easier to manage.

Roasted hazelnuts in particular have a sweet, caramelized flavor that comes from at least seventy-nine different flavor compounds. Raw nuts have fewer than half that number, so the roasting process is vital to bringing out their complex taste.

Hazelnut liqueurs like Frangelico and Fratello are sweet blends of hazelnut and other spices like vanilla and chocolate. The Frangelico distillery crushes its toasted hazelnuts and then extracts the flavors in a mixture of water and alcohol. Some of this infusion is distilled, so that the final version contains both the distillate and the infusion. Also added are vanilla, cocoa, and other extracts.