Licorice Whipped
If you want to develop a taste for anise, start young. Good advice, indeed, for many tastes.
It’s totally unsurprising, then, that the first New York Times’ Sunday Styles section of 2009 declared absinthe “uncool,” with Styles reporter Eric Konigsberg calling it “falsely subversive” and likening absinthe to such fleeting cultural fads as cigar bars, soul patches, women’s lower-back tattoos, the band Interpol, and brushed nickel kitchen fixtures. He writes: “Once the naughty aura of the forbidden fruit is removed, all that remains is a grasp at unearned sophistication.”
The San Francisco Chronicle food section was more blunt, calling absinthe “out” in its 2009 New Year’s predictions. Harsher still: “We liked it much better when it was illegal. Somehow the notion of being illicit overrides the flavor of NyQuil dripping down your throat.”
News flash: Americans generally don’t like the taste of licorice. Absinthe is flavored with anise, giving it a strong licorice taste. These basic truths pretty much ensure that the spirit would never be wildly popular in the United States. So presenting the sleight-of-hand notion that absinthe was ever “cool” before being reported as “uncool” — essentially hyping absinthe, then 12 months later calling it overhyped — is breathtakingly shallow even by the usual standards of lifestyle journalism. It smacks of high school.
But maybe this makes sense. There’s always been a whiff of adolescence when it comes to Americans and absinthe, a teenage sort of longing to experience something thrilling and subversive — drama followed by the callow need to point out, Holden-Caulfield-like, just how phony it all is.
I can empathize. I first tasted absinthe while on a magazine assignment in the late 1990s, in Barcelona at a dive called Bar Marsella. “An absinthe or two at Bar Marsella” was firmly established as one of Lonely Planet’s “Highlights” of the city, and the crowd was a typical mishmash of backpacker-ish tourists from around the globe. Sure, some Moroccan guys tried to sell me hash outside. Sure, the bartender physically tossed two pickpockets out the door. And sure, that bartender was a dodgy, middle-aged American guy named Scotty, a 6’2”, well-over-200-pound red-haired man who wore pink shirts, who referred to himself as “Super Queer,” who claimed to be a former child actor, and who refused to tell me his last name, because “As far as you’re concerned, I don’t have a last name.” Yet for the most part, Bar Marsella was “sketchy” only in a safe, air-quotes sort of way. For years, I’d vaguely imagined myself as some sort of romantic flâneur, a Eurotrash-loving vagabond hanging out in seedy bars, like Rimbaud. In reality, my first sip of absinthe took place when I was a marginally-employed 29-year-old writing an article for an airline in-flight magazine. The letdown was unavoidable.
Had I paid attention in high school English class, I would have read of this type of anise-flavored disappointment from an earlier chronicler of subversive lifestyle trends, one Ernest Hemingway. In “Hills Like White Elephants,” as a guy and his pregnant girlfriend, in a Spanish train station bar, debate whether she should have the baby, they order two glasses of anís.
“It tastes like licorice,” the girl said and put the glass down.
“That's the way with everything.”
“Yes,” said the girl. “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe.”
It may be true. That’s not to say that the actual absinthe, in the glass, was bad. It was somewhat enjoyable, particularly when you drizzled the water over the sugar cube through the slotted spoon. But by that point in my life, I’d already experienced enough licorice-tasting firewaters to have acquired the taste. Absinthe, in reality, just tasted like slightly stronger and more bitter sambuca — the anise liqueur often served after dinner in Italian restaurants, with three coffee beans for good luck.
In fact, sambuca was the first liquor I ever acquired a taste for, as a teenager. The only reason for this is because, in our house, a lonely bottle of sambuca sat at the back of our kitchen pantry, hidden behind the hodge-podge bottles of Chivas Regal, Canadian Club, and VO. My parents didn’t drink whiskey — they were the type of Baby Boomers who as young adults had eschewed spirits and cocktails for the pleasures of wine — and so they likely kept those bottles on hand solely for guests who liked whiskey. As for why sambuca lurked in a dark corner of our shelf…I have never discovered an explanation. It’s not as if my parents were jet-setting in Portofino (more like Ocean City, New Jersey). And we’d never hosted a foreign exchange student. Perhaps it was a gift from a guest, someone who believed that my parents might enjoy a bracing, licorice-tasting after-dinner spirit? In that case, it was one of the most misguided gifts of all time.
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| Sweet lady sambuca, the drink of my youth. |
However, since this bottle of sambuca sat totally untouched and unmonitored, it ended up being the perfect liquor for a 16-year-old boy and his friends. My parents were occasionally out to dinner, and so after the police had broken up a keg party in the woods or on the 11th hole of the local golf course and we were suddenly out of Milwaukee’s Best, my friends and I would find ourselves rummaging deep in my family’s pantry for our now-favorite Italian digestivo.
A strange choice, really, since most American kids grow up calling red Twizzlers “licorice” and picking around the black jelly beans in the jar. My friends thought sambuca was gross, and we mainly drank it in shots. But I kind of liked it. Or at least I pretended to like it. I don’t mean to suggest that I had esoteric tastes as a teenager. In reality, I was a rube who subsisted on Gatorade and Ho-Hos, gagged on mustard, and scraped the onions or mushrooms off any dish served with them. But I had seen La Dolce Vita and I took on an air of sambuca connoisseurship as if I’d just returned from café life on the Via Veneto, traipsing in the Trevi Fountain with Anita Ekberg, and now had a Vespa parked in the garage next to our riding mower.
The reason was quite simple: L., a certain Valkyrie-like girl who’d recently moved to our neighborhood and started hanging out with us. Her mother had an accent, and everyone said they were “European.” They had a last named that seemed vaguely Scandinavian or, as some in the neighborhood called it, “sort of Aryan.” But who knows where they came from. Regardless, the stunning blond-haired, blue-eyed L. was clearly different from most of the Jersey girls who went to high school with me. I was smitten, and spent an entire summer trying to convince her to fall in love with me, but had remained squarely in the friend zone.
Still, I was on the lookout for ways to impress her. One autumn night, a group of us fled a busted party on the golf course. “Sambuca, anyone?” I suggested. Among our friends, L. and I walked to my house cozily arm-in-arm in the crisp fall air. On that night, I decided to make my move.
The sambuca bottle had one of those pourer spouts. After so much usage — since we didn’t really know how to use it properly and never wiped it off — a sugary crust began to form, making it increasingly hard to pour. As luck would have it, on that very night the crust had finally grown impenetrable; I couldn’t even coax a trickle of sambuca from the spout. “What’s the deal?” my friends wanted to know. “We want shots!” L. joined the chorus. Panicked, seeing my moment slipping away from me, I began hacking away at the crust with a butter knife. When that didn’t work, I grabbed a pencil from the kitchen counter and jammed it, forcefully, into the spout. The pencil immediately broke in two, and the top part somehow ended up floating inside the sambuca bottle.
My friends erupted in laughter. L. did, too. I was eventually able to pour the shots, but by then — humiliated in the way only a love-struck teenage boy can be — I’d lost my nerve and pride. When, later, I embarassingly, tearfully professed my undying affection to L., she gently patted me on the head and told me I was “a good friend.”
The only other thing I remember from that night is my mother dragging me to my bedroom by the ear, yelling at me. Apparently, my parents found me passed out in the kitchen in my boxers, and I would be grounded for quite some time. Fortunately (or unfortunately) my brother had earlier stashed the sambuca bottle safely in its regular hiding spot. Years later, well after I’d graduated from college, my mother was clearing out the pantry and found it. She remained puzzled as to why there was a broken pencil floating inside a half-empty bottle.
Soon after, L. began dating one of our school’s assistant football coaches, a man in his 20s with a classic Mustang who drove around town with photos of L. in his hubcaps as a sign of affection — perhaps as close to louche as one might get in late 1980s suburban New Jersey. Of course, I was crushed. This was my first true romantic heartbreak, and its sting was so acute that I can vividly recall the feeling more than 20 years later. What could I do? I was still a boy, and no match for a dangerous older man with a Mustang. Stealing that sambuca, gagging down the overwhelming 80-proof anise, this was about as edgy as I got in those days.
And yet, this act had its own small element of subversiveness. No matter how much I wanted to feel edgy or illicit sitting in a seedy bar in Barcelona years later, how could a legally purchased absinthe ever compare to a stolen sambuca? Besides, even Rimbaud had moved beyond his absinthe-drinking flâneur stage by the age of 19. Having shocked the bourgeoisie quite enough for one lifetime, he never wrote another line of poetry.
Perhaps we experience drinks very much like we experience the popular songs of our youth. An ounce and a half of booze, a three-minute song — ephemeral for sure, yet in the right context you may remember it your whole life. We know that no song — regardless of how well made it is — will ever matter as much the one we heard as a teenager with a broken heart. Similarly, maybe no drink matters quite like the first ones we procure, with our own guile and wits, for ourselves. Only later, as we trudge into adulthood, do we realize that many of the things we wait for our whole lives do indeed taste of licorice. I believe this is why so many Americans end up drinking what they enjoyed in high school or college. Disappointed, people fall back on visceral experience.
Viewed this way, the idea that you could ever hope to sustain the imagination of adults with a $60 bottle of absinthe becomes absurd. Sure, many will purchase a bottle and try it — once — out of curiosity: Will it make me hallucinate? Will I become a decadent anarchist and write Symbolist poetry? Will I cut my own ear off, like Van Gogh? When none of that happens, and they realize they don’t really like licorice, they’ll shove the bottle into the back of their liquor cabinet, where it will languish for the next decade or so.
My future advice to these people’s children: If the absinthe bottle has a pourer spout, don’t try to unclog it with a pencil. • 21 January 2009
Jason Wilson is editor of The Smart Set. He also edits The Best American Travel Writing series (Houghton Mifflin).
Images by Laughing Squid via Flickr (Creative Commons) and VoxEfx (Creative Commons).
