One of the fond memories of my drinking career came at a Greek Easter celebration in Benton Harbor, Mich. I can still smell the young lamb roasting over the spit and hear the deep, male chants in the nearby Greek Orthodox church as they celebrated the risen Christ.
The collection of Greek-American men at the feast quite naturally figured I should share a traditional drink with them. The spirit flowed out water-clear and viscous; but then, to my amazement, it became a milky white when they added water. I inhaled its curious licoricelike aroma, tasted it and spent the rest of the day drinking this ouzo stuff and eating the best lamb and vegetables I have had to this day.
Ouzo, the national drink of Greece, is just one of the many similarly flavored drinks. France’s anis, anisette and pastis; the Middle East’s raki and arrack; and Spain’s ojen are others. All of them are more or less alcoholic, sweet and pungent and are usually taken with water or mixed with something else as an aperitif or digestif. And with all of them, as they are magnificently aromatic, pungent and lingering, a little goes a long way.
Aniseed consumption is not new. The Greeks, Homer and Hippocrates, are said to have drunk anisum–probably a tealike drink–to relax their minds and to settle their stomachs. Mixed with other herbs and plants, like hyssop and fennel, it was used in cooking, especially in stews or for sauces.
The flavoring really took off in the late 18th Century when a Frenchman with Royalist sympathies, Pierre Ordinaire, decided he would rather flee revolutionary France than lose his head. He settled in Switzerland and began combing the Jura mountainside for indigenous plants with which to make a drink. He chose aniseed as one of his 15 ingredients but used something called wormwood as the predominant one. His recipe devolved into Pernod, a national French favorite.
Wormwood is a plant (Artemisia absinthium) whose leaves yield a green, bitter and delicately aromatic oily substance that can be purified and concentrated by distilling (the name wormwood, which the Germans call vermut, also gives rise to the word vermouth). In the old days it was used to treat tapeworms. It also contains a substance called thujone, a chemical that some sources say is toxic while others maintain it simply has a curious effect upon the nervous system. These latter suggest that it acts upon that part of the brain that is affected by the active ingredient in marijuana.
And, yep, the government got involved there, too. Claiming it made people crazy, most Western governments banned the use of wormwood in drinks at the beginning of this century. (I say most because Spain and Portugal, among other Western countries, reportedly have begun to reintroduce it commercially). In response, Pernod and the others altered their recipes to be wormwood-free and began using either more anise, more licorice or elderbush.
Those who use primarily anise as the base have three options to choose from: the European anise, the fennel or green anise and the anise of choice by Pernod and others: the Chinese star anise. This comes from a tree, related to the mahogany, which grows only in the Far East–China and Vietnam. The seeds are processed there and the oil is shipped west for distillation and further blending and treatment. As the plants naturally contain chlorophyll, you will see a green tinge to these drinks.
Those who depend upon licorice as the base (those French drinks called pastis, among others) obtain it in a yellow-powdered form; hence, they will show a yellowish cast.
The dry ones, usually taken as aperitifs with water (5 parts H20 to 1 part spirit) or ice, are often simply referred to as anis(e) drinks, while the sweeter, richer ones are called, by the French, anisettes. These are very sweet (up to 40 percent sugar) and less alcoholic (50 proof versus 80 to 100). They are often used in coffees and teas.
The most commonly seen drier types on the market are the heavily aniseed-influenced aperitifs like ouzo or Pernod (France) and Herbsaint (U.S.), including the Middle Eastern arracks (Lebanon and Israel) and rakis (Turkey). Others based on a greater proportion of licorice, like Ricard Pastis, and those, like Italy’s Sambuca, that are based upon the elderbush plant, taste more like licorice.
Classic drinks based on these spirits include the tomate, which is pastis or dry anise-based spirit with grenadine; the perroquet, with creme de menthe; or the mauresque with orgeat syrup.
Expect to pay between $10 and $20 for a bottle.
Oh, yeah: the cloudy aspect. It seems that the very oily components in these drinks stay in suspension–and the drink remains clear–as long as the alcohol content stays at bottle strength. When you add water, this disrupts the balance and the oils precipitate into that magical milky scene.
