The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (43 page)

JASMINE

Jasminum officinale

oleaceae (olive family)

S
urely the first person who ever smelled jasmine thought to make a drink of it. Who could resist that sweetly intoxicating fragrance? Jasmine does, in fact, appear in early recipes for cordials and liqueurs: Ambrose Cooper's
The Complete Distiller,
published in 1757, includes a recipe for jasmine water that calls for jasmine flowers, citrus, spirits, water, and sugar. Similar recipes abound in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century cookbooks, and a record from the Great London Exposition of 1862 shows that jasmine liqueurs from the Greek Ionian islands were winning awards.

The jasmine most used in perfumes and liqueurs is
Jasminum officinale,
sometimes called poet's jasmine. (Botanists are in a disagreement at present over whether another species called poet's jasmine or Spanish jasmine,
J. grandiflorum,
is really a separate species.)
J. sambac,
also called Arabian jasmine, or pikake, is popular in Hawaiian leis and is also used in Asian jasmine teas and perfumes. (Jasmine tea, by the way, is usually green tea sprayed with jasmine essence, not a tea made of actual flowers.) None of these are common garden jasmines, but collectors of tropical and fragrant plants have no trouble tracking them down.

Jasmine's fragrance comes several interesting compounds, including benzyl acetate and farnesol, both of which impart a sweet flowery fragrance with notes of honey and pear. Linalool, the ever-present citrus and floral aroma, is there as well, and so is phenylacetic acid. This last substance is also found in honey—and its by-product is excreted in urine. Perfume makers know that, owing
to genetic differences in how we experience fragrances, about half the people who inhale jasmine will think of honey, and the other half, unfortunately, will think of urine. They're both right.

Jasmine is not a common ingredient in liqueurs today, in part because of its cost: the makers of Joy perfume love to brag that over ten thousand jasmine flowers go into a single ounce. Jacques Cardin makes a jasmine-infused Cognac, and two American distillers, Koval in Chicago and GreenBar Collective in Los Angeles, produce jasmine liqueurs.

OPIUM POPPY

Papaver somniferum

papaveraceae (poppy family)

T
his beautiful annual flower, with its enormous petals the texture of crumpled tissue, has been banned around the world because its pods produce a milky sap laden with opium. While the drug has its uses as a painkiller—morphine, codeine, and other opiates are derived from the plant—it can also be used to make heroin, and for that reason the plant is classified as a Schedule II narcotic in the United States. This has not stopped gardeners from growing the plant in violation of the law; it's actually quite common. Only the seeds can be sold legally, since poppy seeds are used in baked goods. This loophole allows garden centers and seed catalogs to sell them as well.

Perhaps the earliest description of an opium cocktail comes from Homer's
Odyssey,
in which an elixir called nepenthe gave Helen of Troy an
escape from her sorrows. While opium was not mentioned specifically, many scholars believe that the wine mixed “with an herb that banishes all care, sorrow, and ill humour” must have referred to an opium-laced drink.

Such a potion continued to be used as a medicinal drink and surgical anesthetic through the Victorian era. At that point laudanum, a medicinal tonic of opium steeped in alcohol, was used to control pain and relieve the suffering brought about by a wide range of ailments. To relieve the symptoms of gout, King George IV liked to tip a little laudanum into his brandy—and then a little more, and a little more, as the highly addictive narcotic took its hold on him.

An opium syrup gained respectability in 1895, when Bayer sold it under the name Heroin. The syrup was banned in the 1920s, and opium cocktails became a relic of the past.

ROSE

Rosa damascena
and
Rosa centifolia

rosaceae (rose family)

R
ed Roses do strengthen the Heart, the Stomach, and the Liver, and the retentive Faculty. They mitigate the Pains that arise from Heat, assuage Inflammations, procure Rest and Sleep, stay both Whites and Reds in Women, the Gonorrhea, or Running of the Reins, and Fluxes of the Belly; the Juice of them doth purge and cleanse the Body from Choler and Phlegm.” So proclaimed Nicholas Culpeper in his 1652 medical manual,
The English Physician.
He prescribed rose wines, rose cordials, and rose syrups for a long list of alarming ailments.

Roses are ancient plants that first appeared in the fossil record about forty million years ago. The fragrant garden roses we know today have traveled to Europe from China and the Near East in the last few thousand years. The most popular rose for liqueurs, the fragrant damask rose
Rosa damascena,
came from Syria, where it was being distilled for perfume. European botanists brought it into cultivation as a garden rose and to use in their strange medical preparations, but the Middle East remained the center of rose perfume and rose water production.