The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (47 page)

Figuring this out was not easy for European explorers wandering the jungle, often in a fever themselves. One noted character in the quinine drama was a British merchant named Charles Ledger. In the 1860s, he sold a collection of seeds to the British government, but they turned out to yield little quinine. He hired a Bolivian man named Manuel Incra Mamani to gather more seed for him, but Mamani was captured by local officials. As Ledger himself described it: “Poor Manuel is dead also; he was put in prison by the Corregidor of Coroico, beaten so as to make him confess who the seed found on him was for; after being confined in prison for some twenty days, beaten and half starved, he was set at liberty, robbed of his donkeys, blankets and everything he had, dying very soon after.”

Manuel did, however, manage to ship some seed to Ledger. By this point the British government would have no more of Ledger's schemes, so he instead sold them to the Dutch for the equivalent of twenty dollars. The Dutch sent them to Java, where they already had a long history of controlling spice plantations. Unlike the seeds Ledger sold to the British, these seeds proved viable, and soon the Dutch had a global monopoly. They developed an alternative to logging the trees: they would strip the bark and then wrap the trunk in moss to heal the wound so it could regenerate.

Everything changed in World War II, when Japanese troops took control of Java and Germans seized a quinine warehouse in Amsterdam. The last American plane to fly out of the Philippines before Japanese control carried four million quinine seeds—but the trees could not be grown fast enough to provide malaria remedies to Allied troops.

A desperate search for a synthetic alternative was under way, but meanwhile, American botanist Raymond Fosberg was sent by the USDA to South America to find more quinine. He traced the routes of the old explorers and managed to acquire 12.5 million pounds of bark to ship home—but it wasn't enough. One night in Columbia, Fosberg heard a knock at the door and discovered Nazi agents ready to make a deal. They'd followed him through South America and wanted to offer for sale a supply of pure quinine they'd smuggled from Germany. He didn't have to debate long before accepting their offer. American troops needed the drug if they were to keep fighting—even if it came from corrupt Nazis.

From its beginning as a medicine, one difficulty with quinine was its bitter taste. Mixing it with soda water, and perhaps a bit of sugar, was helpful. British colonists realized that adding a splash of gin improved the medicine considerably, and the gin and tonic was born. Quinine also became an important ingredient in bitters, herbal liqueurs, and vermouth. Byrrh (pronounced “beer”) is a mixture of wine and quinine; Maurin Quina is a white wine aperitif infused with quinine, wild cherries, lemon, and cherry brandy. Italian aperitifs such as China Martini and Liquore Elixir di China are also quinine-based, as is the Spanish citrus liqueur Calisay. A wide range of quinine-infused aperitif wines are coming on the market or enjoying a renaissance; all of them are worth exploring.

Perhaps one of the loveliest uses of quinine in a drink can be found in a bottle of Lillet, a wine infused with citrus, herbs and a bit of quinine. Lillet, available in blanc, rosé, and rouge styles, is best enjoyed like wine, chilled in a glass, preferably while sitting in a French sidewalk café in spring—but bartenders are putting it to good use in cocktails as well.

CINNAMON

Cinnamomum verum

lauraceae (laurel family)

N
o one knows where cinnamon sticks come from. There is a bird called the cinnamon bird that gathers the fragrant twigs from some unknown location and builds its nest from them. To harvest the cinnamon, people attach weights to the tips of arrows and shoot the nests down.

That's not actually true, but it was Aristotle's best guess when he described cinnamon in his
Historia Animalium
in 350 BC. We have since located the source of cinnamon, relieving us of the necessity of shooting down the nests of mythical birds.

Cinnamon is, in fact, the bark of a tree native to what is now Sri Lanka. Arab spice traders had managed to keep the location a secret, but once Portuguese sailors found it, the news got out. They learned to wait until the rainy season to cut down young shoots, a practice called coppicing, which would stunt the growth of the tree and force it to put up one young trunk after another rather than grow into a fully mature tree. These pieces would be scraped to remove the gray outer bark, making it easier to cut long peels of the light inner bark. The peels would dry in the sun and roll into the curled pieces we buy today as cinnamon sticks.

Until the late 1700s, cinnamon was harvested from wild trees, but after that they were grown on plantations. Today the highest-quality cinnamon comes from Sri Lanka, but India and Brazil also supply the world market. It is generally labeled as true cinnamon or Ceylon cinnamon.

Another species of cinnamon tree native to India and China,
Cinnamomum aromaticum,
produces what is often called cassia cinnamon. It is widely sold in the United States and is easy to distinguish from true cinnamon: the sticks of cassia are thick and generally form a large double roll, whereas true cinnamon sticks look more like a tightly rolled bunch of thinner bark. The two are harder to tell apart after they've been ground into a spice powder, but there's a reason to check labels: cassia cinnamon can contain high levels of coumarin, which could cause liver damage to people who are sensitive to it. This makes Ceylon or true cinnamon a safer choice for anyone who has liver problems and plans to eat large quantities of the spice. Still, there is no ban or restriction on cassia as there is for tonka bean, another spice that contains a comparable amount of coumarin.

Cinnamon leaves are high in eugenol, also found in cloves. In the bark, the main component is called cinnamaldehyde, although the ever-present linalool, a spicy floral compound, is also there. Cinnamon is ubiquitous in the cocktail world: it's found in gin, vermouth, bitters, and spicy liqueurs. Perhaps the best-known cinnamon liqueur is Goldschläger, a clear cinnamon schnapps with bits of gold leaf floating in the bottle. The French distiller Paul Devoille makes a gingerbread liqueur called Liqueur de Pain d'Épices that is the perfect expression of cinnamon in a bottle.

DOUGLAS FIR

Pseudotsuga menziesii

pinaceae (pine family)

I
nspired by the traditional pine liqueurs of Alsace, Portland distiller Stephen McCarthy wanted to make a spirit infused with his local conifer, the Douglas fir. This majestic evergreen grows to over two hundred feet along the Oregon coast, where it is the state tree. It is the host plant for a number of moths and butterflies, its sturdy wood is prized for timber, and it makes a fine Christmas tree.

To make his spirit, McCarthy went into the forest, handpicked buds from the tips of the branches, and tried, without success, to extract flavor from them. He was unable to create a drink to his liking, in part because the buds—young dark shoots that form the next year's needles—would oxidize as they were picked and handled.