The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (22 page)

JACKFRUIT

Artocarpus heterophyllus

moraceae (mulberry family)

T
he jackfruit may be the largest fruit from which an alcoholic beverage is made. It grows to three feet in length and can weigh as much as a hundred pounds. The fruit's strange, rubbery exterior is covered in spiky, conelike structures, each of which represents a spent flower. Inside, there is a seed for every flower that once bloomed on its surface: as many as five hundred seeds can come from a single jackfruit. When ripe, the fruit emits a foul odor from the rind, but the flesh is mild and sweet. It flavors desserts, curries, and chutneys.

The tree, a close relative of breadfruit, grows throughout India, as well as parts of Asia, Africa, and Australia. In India, wine is made by soaking the pulp in water, sometimes with extra sugar, and allowing it to ferment naturally for up to a week, at which point the alcohol content reaches 7 to 8 percent and the drink becomes mildly acidic, but still light and fruity.

MARULA

Sclerocarya birrea
subsp.
caffra

anacardiaceae (cashew family)

T
he marula tree, a close relative of mango, cashew, poison ivy, and poison oak, is native to Africa. Its yellowish white fruit, about the size of a plum, has a flavor similar to lychee or guava. Because it is unusually high in vitamin C, the fruit is an important part of the traditional diet in southern and western African nations. It can be made into wine, also called marula beer, by soaking the fruit in water and allowing it to ferment. It is also distilled and blended with cream to make Amarula Cream, a dessert drink that tastes very much like an Irish cream liqueur.

Because the tree has, since at least 10,000 BC, served so many purposes in traditional African culture—for food, medicine, rope fiber, wood, cattle feed, oil, and resin—efforts are under way to protect and conserve the marula. South Africa's spirits manufacturer Distell purchases the fruit from local pickers, providing them a source of income and donating money to community projects. Development experts believe that, with good oversight, the global trade in Amarula Cream can provide an economic incentive to preserve the trees while helping impoverished families.

The elephant on the bottle of Amarula Cream reminds drinkers of a popular, but widely discredited, story about the marula: that elephants can get drunk by slurping up overripe, fermenting fruit that has fallen from the tree. Drunken elephant stories started circulating around 1839 and continue today, with Internet videos purporting to show intoxicated elephants stumbling around.

But scientists have proven otherwise. Elephants do not pick rotten fruit off the ground; instead, they very deliberately select ripe fruit from the tree. There is also the sheer difficulty in getting an elephant drunk. It would take about a half gallon of pure alcohol, which would require the elephant to rapidly consume some fourteen hundred rotten marula fruits—something no elephant has ever been interested in attempting.

MONKEY PUZZLE

Araucaria araucana

araucariaceae (araucaria family)

T
he poet Marianne Moore called it “a conifer contrived in imitation of the glyptic work of jade / and hard-stone cutters, / a true curio in this bypath of curio-collecting.” And in fact, the monkey puzzle tree is a curio, an oddity of the sort prized by Victorian plant collectors. It is also quite likely the oldest plant in the world from which an alcoholic beverage is made.

Monkey puzzle trees originate in Chile and Argentina. Their ancestry goes back at least 180 million years, placing them squarely in the middle of the Jurassic period. The trees themselves are vaguely reptilian: the tough, diamond-shaped leaves arranged in tight geometric whorls bring to mind the scales of a lizard. Stand back for a better view and the tree cuts an odd figure in the landscape. From a single trunk emerge wildly curving branches that give it the madcap appearance of a tree from a Dr. Seuss drawing.

A Scottish surgeon and naturalist named Archibald Menzies traveled the world as a ship's doctor in the late eighteenth century; on one of these voyages, he was served the nuts of the monkey puzzle tree. He managed to save a few seeds and got them to grow, setting off a monkey puzzle craze in the United Kingdom. One of them lived at Kew Gardens for almost a century. There are no monkeys in the tree's homeland; the name was given to it by the English, who thought that even their so-called poor relations—monkeys—would have a difficult time climbing it.

The tree reaches over 150 feet in height and can live to be a thousand years old. A monkey puzzle takes twenty years to reach sexual maturity and is dioecious. The pollen travels from males to females on the wind, and once pollinated, the seed cones take two years to mature. By the time they do fall off the tree, they are the size of coconuts and contain about two hundred seeds, each larger than an almond.

In the wild, rats and parakeets pick up the seeds and disperse them from the mother plant. But if there are people around—particularly the Pehuenche people who inhabit the tree's native range in the Andes—the seeds will quickly be gathered up. They can be eaten raw or roasted, pounded into flour to make bread, or brewed into a mildly alcoholic ceremonial drink called
mudai.
To make
mudai,
the seeds are boiled and allowed to ferment naturally for a few days; to speed things up, they can be chewed and spit back into the mixture, which adds enzymes from the saliva to break down the starches. Once the mixture has stopped bubbling, it is poured into special wooden bowls or jars for the festivities.

The Chilean government has declared the monkey puzzle tree a national monument, making
mudai
quite possibly the world's only alcoholic beverage derived from a national monument.

PARSNIP