The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (23 page)

Pastinaca sativa

apiaceae (carrot family)

If barley be wanting to make into malt,

We must be content and think it no fault,

For we can make liquor to sweeten our lips,

Of pumpkins, and parsnips, and walnut tree chips.

—Edward Johnson, 1630

T
his historic ditty shows that colonists arriving in the New World were willing to try anything to get their hands on a drink—even if that meant turning parsnips into wine. Parsnips are a carrot relative native to the Mediterranean; they've been a staple food since at least Roman times. Before potatoes, a New World crop, were introduced to Europe, parsnips were the starchy, nutritious, winter root vegetable people turned to for a satisfying meal. It's no wonder colonists made it a priority to plant parsnips when they arrived in New England.

And surely the colonists were thinking not just of mashed parsnips and butter for their winter meal. They were also thinking of parsnip wine, a fine old English tradition. This is one of many “country wines” that were popular in rural England and throughout Europe. Anything with a little sugar or starch—from gooseberries to rhubarb to parsnips—was fair game for a home brew.

Traditional parsnip wine was made by boiling parsnips to soften them and then combining them with sugar and water. Wild yeast would start the fermentation. The wine was then stored for six months to a year before drinking. It was light, sweet, and clear, although the best
Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery
could say about it in 1883 was that it was “highly spoken of by those who are accustomed to home-made wines.”

PRICKLY PEAR CACTUS

Opuntia
spp.

cactaceae (cactus family)

The fruit of the prickly pear cactus, called the
tuna
in Mexico, is not easy to eat. The sharp prickles, or glochids, have to be scraped, burned, or boiled away. The flesh is then either scooped out of the peel and eaten fresh, or pressed into juice. All this effort is entirely worthwhile: the fruit has been an important source of vitamins and antioxidants for centuries. It has also been fermented into wine. The Chichimeca people of central Mexico, for example, traveled to follow the bloom cycle of the cactus and make their seasonal brew.

Spanish explorers and missionaries realized that the prickly pear cactus was an important food source in the desert, and not just because of its fruit. The fleshy green pads could also be peeled, cut into strips, and eaten as a vegetable, called nopales. Soon the cacti were planted around missions and transported back to Spain, and from there they went around the world.

The prickly pear cactus was once grouped together with the cholla, but botanists have recently separated them, putting prickly pears in their own genus. About twenty-five species of
Opuntia
have been identified, and some species, such as
Opuntia humifusa,
grow not just in the desert but throughout most of the eastern United States.

Prickly pear juice, syrup, and jam are now widely available, and prickly pear mojitos and margaritas show up on cocktail menus throughout the Southwest. Distillers are working with it as well: a prickly pear liqueur called Bajtra is made in Malta; a distiller on St. Helena distills it into a spirit called Tungi; a prickly pear vodka comes from Arizona; and Voodoo Tiki sells a prickly-pear-infused tequila.

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Dactylopius coccus
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The prickly pear cactus made another important contribution to the world of spirits and liqueurs: carmine dye. The white fuzzy pest found on
Opuntia
cacti is actually a scale called cochineal. Scale are sucking insects that latch onto a plant and feed off its sap, hiding under a waxy cover that makes them resemble a tick. The cochineal scale are particularly easy to spot because they cover themselves in a fuzzy white material to hide their offspring and protect them from drying out. Underneath that white fluff, the insects secrete carminic acid, a defensive chemical that deters ants and other predators and also happens to be bright red.

In Mexico, Spanish explorers wondered about the vivid red dyes that native people used on blankets and other textiles. At first they thought the color came from the red prickly pear fruit itself. Fernández de Oviedo, writing in 1526, claimed that eating the fruit turned his urine bright red (which was either a complete falsehood or a sign of a much more serious medical problem). They soon learned that the dye came from cochineal. To make it, the scale would be scraped off the cactus, dried, and then mixed with water and alum, a kind of natural fixative. The Spanish had some experience with the use of bugs as dye—they'd been using another scale,
Kermes,
for a similar purpose—but cochineal produced a much more vivid red.

Since the 1500s, cochineal-based carmine dye has been used as a coloring for confections, cosmetics, textiles, and liqueurs. It gave Campari its rich red color until 2006, when company officials say it was removed owing to supply problems. Reports of people with allergies going into anaphylactic shock, as well as a general squeamishness about insect ingredients in food, have led to new labeling requirements in the United States and the European Union. In the EU, any product colored with cochineal must state it on the label.

It may be called E120, Natural Red 4, or carmine or cochineal. (The color once came from Polish scale,
Porphyrophora polonica,
as well, but it is severely endangered and no longer used.) In the United States, labels must read “cochineal extract” or “carmine.”

 

SAVANNA BAMBOO