A couple of days ago I offered my friend Bea one of my Curiously Strong Liquorice Flavored Altoid Breath Mints. While she commended my correct pronunciation of the word "liquorice," she pooh-poohed the flavor selection and turned away, grimacing. "At least it's not the ginger-flavored kind," I said, secretly enjoying those as well. But this got me thinking a little about the Death of Licorice as we know it. Licorice seems like another weird (but time-tested) flavor destined for the scrap heap of sweeteners. Say licorice to anyone under twenty-five and they probably think Red Vines or Twizzlers. And what exactly is a Twizzler anyway? It seems Europeans still enjoy liquorice, the heady challenging kind (another reason why they are superior to us), and I even think I might have had some salty liquorice in the Amsterdam airport (am I dreaming?), but here in America the Palate Numbification Project has been going for some time now. Sweet and tasteless, that is how we like our desserts. Order a vanilla milkshake and you get some white soft serve in a disposable cup.
Like all things in life, it's probably connected to our move away from an agrarian society. We just don't know where our food comes from anymore. We don't raise animals for slaughter, we don't grow our own corn, we don't make our own desserts from scratch. No wonder that ginger root, anise, tapioca, and licorice seem like a bizarre place to start building a dessert. Look at some of the original ingredients of root beer: "allspice, birch bark, coriander, juniper, ginger, wintergreen, hops, burdock root, dandelion root, spikenard, pipsissewa, guaiacum chips, sarsaparilla, spicewood, wild cherry bark, yellow dock, prickly ash bark, sassafras root, vanilla beans, hops, dog grass, molasses and licorice." How weird is that? An enterprise like that would never get off the ground today. I wonder often how close the original Hires recipe varies from what we drink (or don't drink) today.
Of course, now that I write this I'm noticing a blurb in Time Magazine for Palapa Azul, which offers "frozen desserts in hibiscus and cucumber-chile (spicy but refreshing) flavors." I am not sure what I think about this. My initial reaction is very very negative but I don't know why. Check back later. At first it appears that maybe we are coming full circle--that a hibiscus-flavored juice pop is in close kinship to that orignial root beer recipe--but I am extremely skeptical. Who will pay to eat an upmarket snack like this? Richies in Sedona, perhaps, and they only.
Admittedly, the Asianification of the US is bringing a lot of interesting flavors to boba shops everywhere. Lychee, taro, ume (sour plum), red bean, and the appearance of green tea ice cream (it's too sweet, okay) seem promising. I don't think Americans will ever be able to truly enjoy "anko," that sweet and glutinous red bean paste present in so many Asian desserts. People can't reconcile the refried-beany texture with the thick and chokey sweetness. Forty years ago, though, I don't think we'd have a problem with these sweetbean desserts. I mean, people were drinking absinthe and eating brains back then, right?
These things I remember: ginger snaps in Grampa's house, licorice candies in pastel hues, the odd pleasure of a cream soda in the afternoon, Gramma's peanut brittle (or is it brickle?) on that large glass plate, Pops scooping up spoonfuls of tapioca pudding on his birthday, and a young Sleepy E marveling at the weird, granuled, fish-egg texture of the stuff.
3 comments:
I hate Root Beer (maybe because it seemed so one note: sweet) but my dad loves these disgusting candies that my sisters and I used to dare each other to eat: horehound. It's hard and black and revolting. Whoever decided it was "candy" was obviously under the influence of snuff. But I hate liquorice too, so maybe there's just something wrong with me. But I agree that red licorice is just candy and bears no relation to actual liquorice. Did you see that Starbucks has a green tea frappuccino? It of course has dairy in it, and so looks disgusting. I like that it's green though, and so looks like it could be a weird wheatgrass concoction.
I have a friend whose (Mormon) family tradition was to make root beer with hops. I got to taste it once--it had that spicy, slightly medicinal quality, along with a distinctly beer-y taste, from the hops, no doubt. It was great. A local brew pub makes their own root beer, which I love, because it has that very bracing flavor, not too sweet. They also used to make their own ginger ale, which was fantastically ginger-y. Alas, they make it no longer, because no one (but me) would order it. One last thing--I have a great recipe for gingerbread--the cake kind--that uses quantities of fresh grated ginger. DEEE licious.
Yes, there is such a thing as salty licorice--yum, yum. While I do often like super-sweetness, I think we do need more complex flavors to challenge our palates. (too bad those complex flavor challenges only come in altoids and snooty, upscale concoctions). Last week I made green apple mint sorbet in my new ice cream maker, which I thought was clever, but maybe I need to branch out a bit--birch bark sorbet? salty licorice ice cream? hmm... we'll see.
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