The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (38 page)

I
magine the situation that European colonists found themselves in when they arrived in North America. They brought what food and medicine they could, but much of it was already consumed, or spoiled, by the time they came ashore. They encountered plants and animals they'd never seen before and had no choice but to undertake a dangerous game of trial and error to find out what they could eat or drink. Any berry, leaf, or root could either save them or kill them.

One such plant was sassafras, a small and highly aromatic tree native to the East Coast. The leaves and root bark were put to use as a medical remedy right away: in 1773, sassafras was described in an early history of the colonies as being used “to promote perspiration, to attenuate thick and viscous humours, to remove obstructions, to cure the gout and the palsy.” Godfrey's Cordial, a popular nineteenth-century cure-all, included molasses, sassafras oil, and laudanum, a tincture of opium.

Filé, or ground sassafras leaves, became a key ingredient in gumbo. The root bark was used in tea and in early sarsaparilla and root beer, which would have had a very low alcohol content or none at all. It was a classic American spice. However, in 1960, the FDA banned the ingredient because a major constituent of the plant, safrole, was found to be carcinogenic and toxic to the liver. Today it can only be used as a food additive if the safrole is extracted first. Fortunately, the leaves contain much lower levels of safrole, so filé remains available to Cajun cooks.

A Pennsylvania company called Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction has resurrected the traditional recipe for sassafras-based brews in the form of Root liqueur, a rich root-beer-flavored spirit that contains birch bark, black tea, and spices—but no sassafras. Instead, a mixture of citrus, spearmint, and wintergreen has been substituted, but the flavor is overwhelmingly true to the sassafras tree.

SUNDEW

Drosera rotundifolia

droseraceae (sundew family)

C
arnivorous plants don't often find their way into cocktails—or at least, they haven't so far. If bourbon can be infused with bacon and stinging nettles can flavor simple syrup, perhaps insect-eating bog plants are poised for a comeback on drink menus.

A tiny carnivore called a sundew was once used in cordials. It is native to Europe, the Americas, and parts of Russia and Asia, where it thrives in swamps during the summer and curls up to wait out the long, cold winter. The sundew, a tiny rosette of narrow red leaves, earns its living by luring insects with a sweet, sticky nectar, then using digestive enzymes to suck nutrients from its victims.

The cordial made from the plant was called rosolio, a term that is now used to refer to any liqueur consisting of fruit and spices steeped in a spirit, sometimes mixed with wine. Scholars disagree over the origin of the word
rosolio
(some believe it actually refers to an infusion of rose petals in alcohol), but it might have come from an early word for sundew,
rosa-solis.
Sir Hugh Plat, writing in 1600, offered a recipe for rosolio that clearly referred to the carnivorous plant, as he even recommended picking out the bugs before infusing it, a step modern bartenders would be well advised to follow: “Take of the hearbe Rosa-Solis, gathered in Julie one gallon, pick out all the black motes from the leaves, dates halfe a pound, Cinnamon, Ginger, Cloves of each one ounce, grains halfe an ounce, fine sugar a pound and a halfe, red rose leaves, greene or dried foure handfuls, steepe all these in a gallon of good Aqua Composita in a glasse close stopped with wax, during twenty dayes, shake it well together once everie two dayes.”
Although sundew rarely makes an appearance behind the bar today, there is a German liqueur, Sonnentau Likör, that claims it as an ingredient. Collecting a sufficient quantity of sundew from marshes, and picking the bugs from it, might be more effort than the average cocktailian wishes to undertake, but it's probably a safe enterprise. Sundew has no known toxicity and has even shown limited promise as a cough treatment and anti-inflammatory—demonstrating, once again, that those medieval herbalists might have known what they were doing.

SWEET WOODRUFF

Galium odoratum

rubiaceae (madder family)

T
his low-growing perennial puts out beautiful star-shaped leaves and, in spring, even smaller white, star-shaped flowers. Although it could easily be overlooked as an insignificant, shade-loving woodland groundcover, it gives off a sweet, grassy fragrance, which is an indicator that it contains high levels of potentially toxic coumarin. For this reason, the plant is not considered a safe food additive in the United States—except as a flavoring in alcoholic beverages.

Sweet woodruff is a traditional ingredient in May wine (or
Maiwein
), a German aromatized wine made by infusing the wine with sprigs of woodruff in early spring, before the coumarin levels in the plant have risen to a dangerous level. It is often served with fruit at May Day festivals.

TOBACCO

Nicotiana tabacum

solanaceae (nightshade family)

S
mokers may insist that nothing goes better with a drink than a cigarette—but combining them in the bottle? Tobacco liqueur is a strange concoction that could only have been invented in the Americas. In anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's 1973 book
From Honey to Ashes,
he described the practice of soaking tobacco in honey in Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. Because fermented honey drinks were also known in South America, it is not inconceivable that people were drinking tobacco in a fermented form.

Native Americans have been cultivating and smoking tobacco leaves for over two thousand years, but Europeans had never heard of the plant—and, in fact, had not smoked much of anything—until explorers brought it back from the New World. It didn't take long for the plant to spread to India, Asia, and the Middle East. At first it was embraced as a kind of medicine: people thought it would treat migraines, ward off the plague, subdue coughs, and cure cancer.

The plant's active ingredient, a neurotoxin called nicotine, is meant to kill insects, but it also happens to kill humans as well. Something called tobacco liquor was widely recommended as a bug spray in the nineteenth century—but it had little to do with the tobacco liqueurs that have been introduced recently.