The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

by Amy Stewart

  As wonderful as these plums are, we don’t eat many of them. The average American eats just less than a pound of plums per year, and we use far fewer of them in booze. That is a tragedy that a few intrepid distillers are working to rectify.

  European plums, P. domestica, have a long history in alcoholic beverages. There are over 950 varieties and many subspecies, all of which are subject to regular renaming and reclassification. The plums of most interest to the average drinker include four members of P. domestica: the bluish purple, oval-shaped damson (from Damascus, pointing to its ancient origins in Syria), the small golden mirabelle, the round bullace, which comes in a range of colors, and the pale lime-colored greengage. (The first three are usually assigned to the subspecies insista, while the gages are placed in a separate subspecies, italica, but even this is up for debate.) There are so many varieties of damsons, mirabelles, bullaces, and gages that even fruit growers can’t keep them all straight; ask a farmer what variety of damson grows in the orchard and you might get nothing but a shrug in response.

  But all of these plums make delightful liqueurs, eaux-de-vie, and brandies. The new Averell Damson Gin Liqueur from the American Gin Company, made with damsons grown in Geneva, New York, is the latest in a long line of fine damson liqueurs. Recipes for damson wine or damson-infused brandy date to 1717, and by the late nineteenth century, damson gin was a common drink in the English countryside. While it is a sweet liqueur, it is not cloying: modern, well-made damson gins are simply bright, clean expressions of a wild, natural plum flavor. Damsons, greengages, and bullace plums all grow wild in English hedgerows; both homemade and commercially produced liqueurs are made with each of them.

  There is a bit of a botanical mystery surrounding the greengage. Many nineteenth-century botanical journals claim it was named after a member of the Gage family, who brought the tree back to England from the Chartreuse monastery sometime between 1725 and 1820, depending on which account you read. This anecdote is enough to send any inventive bartender scurrying around to create a cocktail that combines plum eau-de-vie and Chartreuse liqueur—but unfortunately, it is impossible to prove. An 1820 history of English fruits claims that some member of the aristocratic Gage family picked the trees up at the monastery and shipped them back to Hengrave Hall in Suffolk. Apparently a label was lost in transit and the French plum Reine Claude was simply labeled “Green Gage” to reflect the fruit’s color and the estate where it was grown. Other accounts claim that a similar event took place within another branch of the Gage family on their estate called Firle.

  All we know for certain is that “gage” plums were established in England before 1726, when they first appeared in horticultural literature, which means that if the Gage-Chartreuse label mixup happened, it surely took place well before 1725 or there wouldn’t have been time for the trees to be planted, bear fruit, and attract the notice of horticulturists. An early mention of green plums, in a 1693 catalog of English plants, implies that an even earlier generation of Gages would have had to be involved. Arthur Simmonds, deputy secretary to the Royal Horticultural Society in the early 1900s, made a heroic effort to clear up the confusion, concluding only that the various Gage candidates put forth in the botanical literature were either not alive, old men, or young children when this mysterious trip to Chartreuse and subsequent label mixup occurred. Any connection between the Gage family and the green plums is, at this point, only speculative.

  In France, the deep golden mirabelle plums are a specialty of the Lorraine region. In nearby Alsace the local plum is the quetsche, a violet-skinned fruit with yellowish green flesh. Each are made into jams, tarts, candies, liqueurs and remarkable eaux-de-vie. Eastern European countries are known for slivovitz, a kosher blue plum brandy that is often distilled with whole fruit and their pits, giving it a slight marzipan flavor, and sometimes aged in oak to add notes of vanilla and spice. While cheap imitation slivovitz, made from crude sugar-based liquor and prune juice, has a deservedly bad reputation, a well-made plum brandy or eau-de-vie is an extraordinary experience.

  Other Prunus species are also put to use in liqueurs: for instance, Japanese plum wine, umeshu, is usually made with P. mume, a Chinese species more closely related to apricots. The ume fruit are soaked in a mixture of sugar and shochu (a spirit made of rice, buckwheat, or sweet potatoes bottled at 25 percent ABV) for up to a year before drinking. While commercial umeshu is available—sometimes with ume floating in the bottle—it is also something people make at home when the fruit is ripe.

  QUANDONG

  Santalum acuminatum

  santalaceae (sandalwood family)

  This Australian native is a hemiparasite, which means that it gets some, but not all, of its nutrition by robbing other plants. It thrives in poor soil, where its roots reach out to any nearby trees or shrubs, piercing their root systems and taking water, nitrogen, and other nutrients from them. It does produce its own sugars, but that’s not enough to let it stand on its own. Quandong cannot grow unless other plants are nearby, making it difficult to cultivate.

  The small red fruit is a uniquely Australian treat. Imagine a tart version of a peach, apricot, or guava. It’s an aboriginal delicacy that has been made into jams, syrups, and pie fillings. The nuts were used as a traditional medicine; because they are encased in a hard shell, they would pass unmolested through the digestive tracts of emus and could be gathered from emu droppings.

  But there’s no need to go digging through emu droppings to enjoy a quandong cocktail. The fruits are being used by inventive Australian distillers eager to celebrate indigenous plants. Tamborine Mountain Distillery makes a quandong and gentian bitter liqueur; these and other products are helping to put quandong on fine cocktail menus around Australia.

  ROWAN BERRY

  Sorbus aucuparia

  rosaceae (rose family)

  Also called the European mountain ash, this flowering tree is not related to ash trees at all but is instead a relative of roses and blackberries. It thrives in hedgerows and wild areas throughout England and much of Europe, where the small, orange-red berries are prized for their high vitamin C content. They are used in homemade country wines, and to flavor traditional ales and liqueurs. An Austrian eau-de-vie called Vogelbeer, distilled from rowan berries, is an excellent example of an entire class of rowan berry spirits called Vogelbeerschnaps. Alsatian distillers, not to be outdone by the Austrians, make a lovely version of their own called eau-de-vie de sorbier.

  SLOE BERRY

  Prunus spinosa

  rosaceae (rose family)

  It took a renewed interest in wild, local, seasonal fruit to bring the sloe back from obscurity. Sloe gin, called snag gin in the nineteenth century, is nothing more than gin infused with sugar, perhaps some spices, and the small, astringent fruit of the thorny blackthorn shrub. It is a sweet red liqueur, much like damson gin, that people once made at home from fruit gathered in the countryside. Syrupy, artificially flavored versions gave it a bad reputation in the twentieth century, but fresh ingredients and authentic recipes have returned. The makers of Plymouth Gin have come to the rescue, distributing their sloe gin internationally, and craft distillers are undoubtedly experimenting with sloes at this very moment.

  The blackthorn is a close relative to the plum and cherry, but unlike those lovely trees, the blackthorn is not usually cultivated in orchards or gardens. It takes the form of a massive, fifteen foot-tall shrub covered in thorns and stiff branches. While it makes an excellent thicket or hedgerow, its messy habit and small, sour fruit make it the sort of plant that is best left in the countryside. It grows throughout England and most of Europe but is only cultivated in North America by the most dedicated growers of obscure fruit.

  Its starry white flowers are among the first to appear in the spring, followed in fall by blackish purple fruits that can be harvested through the first frost. They are not sweet enough to be eaten on their own, so sloes are made into jams and pies—but their highest and best use is sloe gin. The fruit is picked
, washed, scored with a knife to break the skin, and soaked in gin or neutral grain spirits, along with sugar, for up to a year. The liqueur can be sipped neat—it’s a nice winter pick-me-up—or mixed into a classic cocktail like the sloe gin fizz.

  In the Basque region of Spain and southwestern France, a liqueur called pacharán or patxaran is made by macerating sloes in anisette, or a neutral spirit mixed with aniseed, and perhaps a few other spices such as vanilla and coffee beans. While it is commercially produced—Zoco is one such brand—families often make it themselves, and homemade versions are still served in small restaurants. Similar drinks include Germany’s Schlehenfeuer and Italy’s bargnolino or prugnolino, which combines sloes with a high-proof spirit, sugar, and either red or white wine. An eau-de-vie de prunelle sauvage is made in France’s Alsace region.

  Before sloe gin was adulterated with artificial flavors, it was itself an adulterant: added to bad wine, it passed for port in cheap wine shops. In their 1895 book The New Forest: Its Traditions, Inhabitants and Customs, authors Rose Champion De Crespigny and Horace Hutchinson noted that “when port wine went out of fashion we were told that it was made of log-wood and old boots. Since it has returned to fashion the demand for sloes has increased proportionately, affording strong grounds for inference that other things besides the log-wood and the boots are of its composition.”

  SLOES

  Sloes are common hedgerow plants in England; in North America, they are difficult (but not impossible) to find at specialty fruit tree nurseries. These tough, hardy shrubs can form an impenetrable thicket given the opportunity. Expect them to reach fifteen feet and spread to at least five feet, but they can be pruned and kept small.

  Plant sloes in full sun or light shade in moist, well-drained soil, preferably out of high-traffic areas as the thorns can be a nuisance. The shrubs are deciduous, meaning that they drop their leaves in winter, and will bloom in early spring and produce fruit in fall. Sloes are hardy to about –20 degrees Fahrenheit.

  * * *

  shade/sun

  regular water

  hardy to -20f/-29c

  * * *

  Leaving fruit on the branch until the first frost makes them a little sweeter, but the tart flavor is what makes them so good in sloe gin.

  SLOE GIN FIZZ

  2 ounces sloe gin

  ½ ounce lemon juice (the juice of roughly half a lemon)

  1 teaspoon simple syrup or sugar

  1 fresh egg white

  Club soda

  Pour all the ingredients except club soda into a cocktail shaker without ice. Shake vigorously for at least 15 seconds. (This “dry shake” helps the egg white get frothy in the shaker; you can skip it if you’d rather not include egg whites.) Then add ice and shake for at least 10 to 15 seconds more. Pour into a highball glass filled with ice and top with club soda. Some people replace half the sloe gin with dry gin to make it less sweet, but try it this way first—you’ll be surprised by how refreshingly tart it is.

  CITRUS

  Citrus: The botanical genus that includes lemon, orange, lime, citron, shaddock, and other varieties and cultivars. Because it is segmented into sections, citrus fruit is classified as a hesperidium, or a berry with a thick, leathery rind.

  CITRUS: THE BARTENDER’S ORANGERIE

  Citrus spp.

  rutaceae (rue family)

  Imagine how difficult a bartender’s job would be if every recipe involving citrus was taken away. Mojitos? Fresh lime is a requirement. Margaritas? They call for lime and triple sec, an orange liqueur. Martinis? Gin is flavored with citrus peels. Citrus adds a certain brightness, a certain sparkle, to most drinks. It boosts the top notes, those ephemeral floral and herbal flavors that might otherwise be lost in a complex distillation process. And remarkably, some of the most sour, inedible citrus make some of the best liqueurs.

  Today’s citrus varieties are the result of centuries of experimentation and hybridizing, making their exact lineage difficult to trace. All citrus trees we know today, including lemons and limes, probably originated from three unlikely candidates: the pomelo, a large, thick-skinned fruit like a grapefruit; the citron, with its formidable peel and distasteful fruit; and the sweet, thin-skinned mandarin. Some botanists believe that there were a couple other ancestors to modern citrus, which are now extinct.

  Early records of citrus come from China, where four-thousand-year-old writings described people carrying bundles of small oranges and pomelos. Two thousand years later, the citron was moving across Europe. As impossible as it may be to imagine the Mediterranean and north Africa without its citrus trees, Arab traders brought the sour orange, the lime, and the pomelo to the region only eight hundred to a thousand years ago. The sweet orange came only four hundred years ago, when Portuguese traders carried it back from China. By this time, citrus was moving all over the world—sometimes with strange and unintended consequences.

  On Columbus’s second voyage to the Americas, in 1493, he brought sweet oranges with him and made some attempts to establish them in the Caribbean. Just a few decades later, the first orange trees showed up in Florida. But something surprising happened when explorers, familiar only with growing conditions in their Mediterranean climate back home, planted citrus in the hot, tropical Caribbean region.

  First, many of the trees refused to produce orange fruit. In the hottest weather, citrus can remain stubbornly green. It turns out that the most vivid color develops only when the night air takes on a slight chill, as it does in California or, for that matter, in Spain or Italy. Cooler temperatures break down the chlorophyll in the rind, letting the orange pigments show through. In hot climates, the fruit might taste sweet, but the rind remains tinged in green and yellow.

  The other surprise? Some trees became mutant freaks after being planted on tropical islands, producing bitter, pithy fruit with thick rinds that seemed to have no culinary value. But colonists, desperate to make use of the crops they’d worked so hard to plant, discovered that drowning them in hard liquor improved them considerably.

  BITTER ORANGE

  Citrus aurantium

  This sour orange, also called the Seville bitter orange, came to Spain by way of the Moors in the eighth century. It was probably never eaten raw, but its peel quickly found its way into liqueurs, perfume, and marmalade. As dreadful as the juice might be on its own, it is the essential ingredient in mojo, a marinade combining the bitter orange juice with herbs and garlic.

  Bitter oranges also flavor triple sec. Although many orange liqueurs go by the name triple sec, a French distiller, Combier, lays claim to the original recipe. They offer up a royal legend to explain their elixir’s origin: the company’s story involves a chemist, François Raspail, who was imprisoned after he ran unsuccessfully against Napoleon III and later led a revolt against him. Raspail was also a noted botanist—he was one of the first to use microscopes to identify plant cells—and he’d apparently created a medicinal potion from aromatic plants. In prison, the story goes, he met confectioner Jean-Baptiste Combier, who was also serving time for denouncing Napoleon III’s authoritarian rule. Combier had already developed an orange liqueur recipe with his wife. The men agreed that when they were released, they’d go into business together, combine their recipes, and release the result as Royal Combier.

  Imprisoned chemists aside, what modern drinkers need to know is that triple sec as it is made by Combier is a sugar beet spirit combined with bitter orange peel. Even this high-quality version is not complex enough to be drinkable on its own; every good triple sec tastes more or less like orange candy. It is nonetheless worth seeking out a quality orange liqueur for margaritas, sidecars, and other recipes that call for it.

  We have Spanish explorers to thank for bringing their bitter Seville oranges to Curaçao, an island of the Lesser Antilles off the coast of Venezuela. The variety that grew from those early discarded seeds came to be called Laraha (Citrus aurantium var. curassaviensis). They tasted terrible, but desperate sailors ate them anyway as a trea
tment for scurvy after a long journey across the ocean. In fact, the island’s name may come from the Portuguese word for “cured.” And, of course, Laraha was made into liqueur. Originally the peels were dried in the sun and soaked in spirits along with other spices. Today, according to the makers of the real curaçao liqueur, there is still an original plantation of forty-five Laraha trees on the island. Twice a year the trees are harvested, producing only nine hundred oranges. After drying the peels in the sun for five days, they are suspended inside the still in jute bags to extract the citrus flavors. Then other flavors are added—the exact recipe is a secret, but nutmeg, clove, coriander, and cinnamon are likely suspects—and it is bottled with or without food coloring. Curaçao is known for its vivid, Caribbean blue color, but this is simply an artificial color and true curaçao can be purchased without it.

  The extract of bitter orange can also be found in Grand Marnier, a Cognac-based liqueur. The peels are left to dry in the sun and then soaked in a high-proof neutral alcohol to extract the flavor. That essence is then combined with Cognac and a few other secret ingredients, then aged in oak. Grand Marnier works as a mixer for any cocktail that calls for a citrus liqueur, giving it a rich elegance that other orange liqueurs lack.

  AND NOW FOR A BOTANICAL QUIBBLE

  The distillers of Grand Marnier claim to flavor it with the rinds of a fruit called Citrus bigaradia, but don’t try to find it at a nursery: the name dates back to 1819 but is no longer in use by botanists. At best it refers to a particular variety of the C. aurantium species, Citrus × aurantium var. bigaradia.

  RED LION HYBRID

  This variation on the classic Red Lion is designed to showcase the flavor of Grand Marnier, like the original did, but also to feature fresh, seasonal orange juice. It’s fantastic in the winter when tangerines are at their peak.