Mixologia: Potions, Cocktails & Deadly Spirits

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe
mccourmakin today in the I guess this will be the
final installment of our totally unplanned run of food Stuffs

(00:25):
and drink Stuffs science podcasts. Yeah, we kind of had
a post New Year's run of foodie topics, think with
some exorcism there in the middle. What did you You
did green tea with Christian Yes, we did. There there's
a green tea and butter and butter and now we're
going to get into a little mixology and and and

(00:46):
we'll even come back to exorcism at one point, believe
it or not, No way, Yeah, yeah, it comes up.
It's important when you're talking about cocktails, you're inevitably going
to talk about exercist. Wait is that what they always
meant by holy water? Um? Well wait and initi'll see.
But one of the important things we want to get
out at the top of this episode is that, yes,

(01:06):
in this episode we are going to talk about mixology.
We're gonna talk about the history and science and botany
of mixed drinks that involve various alcoholic substances. Right, But
we do want to make clear that we know we've
got some younger listeners out there, and so you shouldn't
take this podcast is an encouragement to go out and
try all the drinks we're gonna be talking about, right,

(01:28):
And we certainly have non drinkers out there as well. Uh,
don't worry. This is not going to be a scandalous, um,
out of control exploration of cocktails by any means. And
on a personal note, I want to add that my
wife and myself we are currently doing a dry January,
so we are only doing mock tails at the moment,

(01:49):
which is kind of ironic having just finished research on
this episode. Yeah, well you wanted to do it, I
think because you read a couple of books this month, right, Yeah,
two books in particular that I picked up over the holidays.
One is Amy Stewart's The Drunken Botanist The Plants that
Create the World's Great Drinks. And this is a really

(02:10):
wonderful book, very flippable, kind of the kind of book
you can bring to a bar or a nice dinner
and look up the things you're ordering. It takes a
a botanist approach to all of the ingredients, basically coming
down to the fact that just about anything, pretty much
anything in a drink except for maybe bacon. If you're
if you go that route, it's going to have some
sort of botanical origin. Where because things come from bacon

(02:33):
has a botanical origin. Well, in a sense, yes, if
you follow it that far enough, all of our drinks
really have a solar origin. Just true. True. You can
say that it's all a gift of the sun. I
really enjoyed the Sami Stewart book. I didn't have a
chance that you you lent it to me yesterday, and
I didn't have a chance to read the whole thing yet,
but I just flipped through it, and as you say,
it is very flippable. You can just drop to any

(02:54):
page and there's something interesting on it. It's sort of
a mix between the science book and a recipe book
and like that, uh, and the other book that you
lent me, which I got through some of, and I
really really enjoyed the writing style of the Second Guys.
This book by David wonder Ches. He says his name, yeah,
believe so imbibe. He has a couple of books out

(03:15):
related to extremes. One is entirely about punches, and this
one is really focused more in on on the cocktail
and it it has recipes in it as well, but
it is more about the history and culture, especially the origins,
the very American origins of the cocktail. And along those lines,
I believe you had a quote that you wanted to
read from David Wondrich's book, right, yeah. I think this

(03:38):
sets the tone fabulously for a lot of what we're
gonna talk about here, and just for discussion of basically
what a cocktail is, he writes, Anyone who has spent
any time pondering the origins of the cocktail, be it
for the months or years it takes to write a
book or seconds it takes to internalize a dry martini,
will agree that it's a quintessentially American control action. How

(04:01):
could it be anything but it's quick, direct, and vigorous.
It's flashy and a little bit vulgar. It induces an
unreflective overconfidence. It's democratic, forcing the finest liquors to rub
elbows with ingredients of far more humble stamp. It's profligate
with natural resources. Think of the electricity generated to make

(04:21):
ice that gets used for ten seconds and discarded in short,
it rocks. But the cocktail is American. It's American in
the same way as the hot dog, that is, the frankfurter,
the hamburger, the hamburger steak, and the ice cream cone
with its rolled good fret. As a nation, we have
a knack for taking underperforming elements of other people's cultures,

(04:43):
streamlining them, supercharging them, and then letting them rip from
nobody to superstar with a trail of sparks and a
hell of a noise along the way. That's how the
cocktail did it, anyway. So yeah, that's uh, that's from
page two o nine in his book. Uh, it's It's
full of just weird historical details, colorful characters, and more

(05:03):
than a few classic cocktail recipes. So we'll keep referring
back to it, but I highly recommend picking it up
if you're a cocktail fan or an American history fan.
It's a great rate. Yeah, you mentioned historical characters. One
of the great colorful characters in this book is in
the section I was reading. I think he's a central
figure in the book is Jerry Thomas, legendary bartender who

(05:24):
operated bars all over the place in San Francisco during
the gold rush boom and in New York. Who was
this crazy, flamboyant character, a man of what is it
called the sports sporting fraternity, yes, which I think generally
means no good lay abouts of the of the eighteen hundreds,
and who loved to celebrate with these extravagant drinks that

(05:48):
he was very good at making. And he loved lavish clothes,
and he loved diamonds, and he loved big pieces of art.
And there's a great story where somebody interviews him for
a newspaper at some point and he's got a couple
of pet rats scampering along on his shoulders or something. Yeah,
he seems to have had a wonderful sense of showmanship,
which is is ultimately such a huge part of of

(06:10):
cocktails and cocktail cultures. Like there's the there's that's the
pure mixology of what's going on, and then there's the
flash of creating something, creating an experience and selling it
to the customer and maybe making a few things up
if he flourishes up to to to grease the sale. Yeah,
the mixed up cocktail, the product of any real endeavor

(06:31):
of mixology is an event. It's not just something to
be consumed. It's something to be admired in many cases,
to watch the bartender making for you. Uh, it's a
process and and it's kind of a process in the
same way that I don't know, going to like one
of those Teppanyaki steakhouses is right, Yeah, we're setting it

(06:51):
a sushi bar for instance. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you get
to see the magic of the food come together. I
mean in a sense, it's like you know, like making
cocktails at your home or cooking at your home. There's
this there's this experience, this this process. You're following instructions,
maybe you're improvising a little bit, you're going through an
experience to get this thing. You're richer for the experience,
and that plays a part in your enjoyment of it. Well,

(07:14):
before we look at the science of some cocktails and
and the alcohols, and then maybe we should look a
little bit at the history of the cocktail. What's what's
the social relevance of this tradition of mixing different alcoholic
beverages together to produce a newer, better, higher emergent form. Well,
one of the core points that one which makes is

(07:35):
that the the origins of the cocktail and cocktail culture
are largely American. Now, certainly it's a culture that we
lost and we had to rediscover and reclaim the realm
of mixology from the tyranny of apple teen ease and
an unimaginable, unimaginable tryst with vodka. This is a thing
in in the book I noticed. I I didn't get
to the part where he explains this, but he makes

(07:57):
some snide comments about vodka. Well, I think his main deal,
wonder which is that, you know, he's very interesting in
the origins of cocktail culture, in this golden age of
cocktail culture, and vodka really didn't, you know, make it
splash until until after that point. Now that's not to
say there aren't some wonderful vodka cocktails out there, but

(08:17):
is we were discussing before the podcast, you said that
you personally feel vodka is a little bit workhorse, right, Yeah,
it's not. I mean, I don't know of any of
my favorite cocktails that have vodka in them. It just
seems like it's something that you mix with something vaguely
sugary and it makes a drink that has alcohol in it.
I mean maybe I don't know. You can see James

(08:38):
Bond ordering vodka martinis, but I just look at that
and be like, why not just get a real martini?
What's wrong with you? Um? Well, another thing that came
up when we were preparing for the episode, going along
with your your point about the food culture and a
bit the preparation culture and how that enriches the social
experience of enjoying the cocktail. I also personally feel experimenting

(08:59):
with with the mocktails this month as I am that
a concoction without alcohol in it can go down a
bit fast, you can be a little bit thirstier for it,
whereas my in my own experience, if it has a
strong spirit in there, it forces you to take smaller
drinks and it's sort of draws out the experience of
enjoying the beverage. Yeah, Like, the relaxation brought on by

(09:21):
a cocktail might not just be from the drug content
the alcohol content acting upon your brain, but it's also
from the process of drinking because you're you're forced to
slow down and relax and take your time for a moment. Yeah. Now,
cock culture is also something that some might argue that
the Japanese have elevated and perfected as they've done with
other Western properties, but but not all still. But it

(09:45):
was all still one of America's first true art forms,
at least culinarily speaking. Now. To be sure, the American
cocktail float followed closely on the heels of a tradition
of proper punches, which one which is quick to remind us.
So we're more comp lex back in the day. Yeah,
you can think of the punches being like the big
bowl of stuff that somebody's drinking at a Christmas party

(10:07):
in a Christmas carol, that that party that Scrooge won't
go to. They're having some punch punch. Sure, yeah, And
it wasn't just sprite and fruit juice and some booze
it was. It was more complex. I mean, the Wonder
wrote an entire book about it. Uh. He makes a
distinction between between today's punches and the greater punches he
calls them, calls him that were made quote long and strong.

(10:30):
And so this style of mixology rain from the sixteen
seventies to the eighteen fifties, and then Temperance and the
Temperance move movement in Europe put the brakes on punch
a bit, as did the busy approach to life in
the Americas. So instead of going through the whole rigmarole
of having this giant punch bowl with this this carefully
balanced concoction inside of it, punched by the glass became

(10:52):
a thing and this was sort of a precursor to
the cocktail. Yeah, that sort of makes sense. I mean,
punch punches for parties. As I was saying, it's there
to s of a lot of people in a limited
time frame. Yeah, why would you make make yourself a
punch after work? Yeah? Or you go into a bar
it's just you and maybe you're not you don't have
that much of a social situation going on. You want

(11:13):
to a glass of punch? Why not? Why can it
not be provided by the glass? After this, you have
what Wonderage calls the children of punch. So you have
collins Is, Daisies, Fizzies, sours, Cobblers, coolers, the swizzle, uh,
the egg drinks, the various egg drinks where you have
especially the white of the egg that's been frothed up.

(11:35):
And before the cocktail, you had Toddies, Slings, julips. So
even the just trying to figure out what a proper
cocktail is. That can be kind of hard to nail
it down. You'll find various historical tidbits and descriptions that
entail cocktail like concoctions. So, for instance, Dickensie and Londoners
the drink what we're known as pearls. This was hot

(11:57):
ale Hold on this pearl with a you, not an
oyster's not like an oyster pearl like p U r
l s. And this would have been hot ale, gin, sugar,
eggs and nutmeg. So very close. Samuel Peeps recorded the
drinking of a great many things, including pearls as well

(12:17):
as gin and vermouth, so as as one Bridge points out,
he was really close to having invented martinis. H Now,
I do remember in the Diaries of Samuel Peeps an
episode in which he drinks far too much alcohol and
has to run outside and urinate in an alley way somewhere,
But I don't remember what he's drinking in this episode.

(12:38):
I think it is beer, though okay, yeah I might.
I believe he was not opposed to just straight up
beer as well. I certainly think of beer as the
quintessential uh English drink. I should also point out there
are various stories about why we even call it a cocktail.
One story I ran across is that it had to
do it was a horse analogy. So, if you have
an old, older horror and you're gonna sell it off,

(13:01):
you want to make it appear young and spirited, so
you might give it something to perk it up, to
cock its tail. No, well, I mean I I don't know.
I'm not I'm not up on the details of how
you would cock the tail. I'm not saying this is
something intrusive. Well, no, I I've heard stories of this. Well,
the idea stories are like rubbing ginger on its butt. Okay, stuff, Well,

(13:24):
I guess the idea here, then, is that the cocktail
would be the human equivalent of a little ginger on
the butt, you know, to to perk you up, to
live in your spirits and uh and make you a
little more presentable for a short period of time. Stuff
to blow your mind does not advocate putting ginger on
horses buds. No, not at all. So by the nineteenth
century standards, a true cocktail had specific ingredients spirits or wine,

(13:47):
and then you'd sweeten it with sugar diluted with water.
If you needed to and and it may be throwing
a dash of bitters bitters or of course a medicinal
infusion of bitter roots or spices, what have you. And
if you've ever tried to make a cocktail without bitters
and wondered what's missing, that's what's missing. Bitter as I
think are essential. Yeah, as you sort of triangulate the flavor, right,

(14:09):
because you gotta have your your bitter, you have your
sweet um. You want you want to be able to
to to define that balance. You don't want it to
be just this ultra swite or this ultra bitter concoction.
So you can get really high and mighty about the
definition of the cocktail. You can stick to the to
a narrow definition. But all you really need is the
mixture of an alcohol with some other ingredient, right, I

(14:31):
mean a jack and coke is a cocktail? Am I
being high and mighty here? I I promise I'm not
high and mighty? That just sounds like it, really, is it?
By the my modern deluded standards, I think you can say, yes,
it's on the cocktail menu. Um, but it's of course
far from a perfectly balanced Manhattan and old fashioned etcetera.

(14:52):
A punch wasn't a cocktail, but we can certainly go
back much further in time and find examples of its
basic principles. On that note, let's take a quick break,
and when we come back, we will look at some
in some cases very ancient concoctions that you can argue
where cocktails, though you might not want to try and
order them at your favorite restaurant this weekend. So looking

(15:19):
at the origins of cocktails, I want to throw out
an idea that I'm I don't know, I've been mulling over.
So I'm sort of sympathetic to the idea that cooking
has multiple anthropological functions. Of course, there's the basic biological
role of it in that it makes food safer to eat,
you know, killing food born in bacteria and stuff like that.

(15:41):
And it makes food easier to digest. It's externalizing some
of the process of digestion. You can get more nutrition
out of the food. But it might also, I think,
kind of provide a psychological effect in that it sort
of d natures or provides psychological distancing effects, uh by
putting a veneer of artificiality and civilization over the brute

(16:05):
animal activity of gorging oneself on calories of plant matter
and animal flesh in order to stay alive. It's almost
like a way of putting death out of mind in
the process of eating. Okay, kind of like how we
we distance ourselves from the reality of especially meat products. Yeah, yeah,
we like sometimes people are disturbed to see their meat

(16:28):
being cut off of an animal carcass instead of just
arriving in a wrapped container. Uh. Some people don't even
want to look at raw meat. They might buy pre
cooked meat or something like that. And I think that
there's some of this same anthropological desire for distancing from
our animal nature that that's operating here. And again this
is this is just my speculation. I'm not This is

(16:49):
not backed up by any hard science. Um, but I
wonder if some of the same thing could be going
on with the idea of mixing alcohols uh, cocktail culture,
or even going back to some of these things we're
about to talk about, you know, the origins of mixing
wine with various ingredients. It is tasty, I'll give it
that so, but also cooked food is tasty. I wonder

(17:13):
if there is also an element that's operating that is
putting a veneer of civilization and sophistication onto the act
of ingesting ethanol to dull your senses, right, or sort
of the to take a page from nature documentaries and
of course overdrawn at the memory bank, the idea of
a of a monkey eating a rotting, fermenting fruit and

(17:36):
then falling out of a tree. Yeah, exactly. We don't
want that experience, though, essentially, how is it that different, Right,
We've we've taken something that has been transformed by its
uh by its demise, we've we've we've eaten it, or
we've we've sipped of it, and then it's altered our
senses a bit. Yeah. So I'm certainly not saying that

(17:57):
the you know, the visual art and the the taste
and smell pleasure of a cocktail is not the primary
reason for it. But I wonder if it's fulfilling this
other role, to if it makes us feel just a
little more human and a little bit less like an
ape rolling around while we're getting in this state of
mind that you know, if if it goes wrong, could

(18:19):
lead to some actual rolling around. Well, suddenly, there's there's
no shortage of of culture attacked attached to cocktails, especially
when you get into the even the particulars of the
glasses and and what sort of glass is suitable for
this type of beverage, some of which is grounded in
the physics of the chemistry of the thing, but more

(18:39):
often than not, it's just pure cultural distinctions. This type
of glack coop glass or a nick and Nora is
more appropriate for this drink. Why just because it looks nice,
Because it is. Yeah, yeah, that's how it's always been done.
That's what your culture says. Yes, but anyway, let's go
back through that culture. Let us retreat into the clouds

(18:59):
of story and see if we can find the origins
of this process of mixing alcoholic beverages. Well, the true
origins are ultimately going to be lost to the midst
of history because essentially, what we're talking about, it's just
it's very basis combining wines or other alcoholic concoctions with

(19:20):
herbal ingredients or other ingredients that alters the finished beverage.
Because distilled liquor is not that old. So making wine
with some selection of specialized ingredients, well, these have been
with us for for ages. So you might choose to
call them magical potions, or you might call it a
medicinal elixir. But let's consider a few interesting examples. What

(19:44):
do they call it in Game of Thrones? Mold wine?
Mold wine? Yes, and if everybody drinks mold wine, and
don't forget the milk of the poppy. Oh yeah, which
will we'll kind of come back to in a bit.
So these are a few examples. These are not necessarily
in order of historical um occurrence. But one of Emperor
Claudius's physicians, one Scribonius Largus uh, prescribed the following to

(20:10):
sue the stomach ache. Sweet wine combined with dissolved black
myrtle berries and pills made up of dates, still, saffron,
nigella seeds, hazel work, and juniper. Okay, so it sounds like, wait,
hold on, some wine. So like wine that is a
precursor of a vermouth product, and you're getting some juniper here,

(20:33):
so they're working on a martini. You could yeah, juniper
berries are are are the key ingredient gin. So you
could make an argument that, yeah, this is maybe a
precursor to a martini. Certainly, almost certainly would not have
tasted like a martini. Here's another one. According to Amy
Stewart's The Drunken Botanist, an eighteenth century concoction called for

(20:54):
boiling snails with milk, brandy figs, and spices to create
to treat consumption. Mm. Yeah, can you imagine you're you're
already dealing with consumption and then somebody who really cares
about you comes at you with a cup of this. Yeah,
what's in it? Well, you know, some brandy fig spices, milk, Oh,
sounds good, and some boiled snails. That's that's how they

(21:17):
get you the final ingredient. Now, if we go back
all the way to a thirty BC. Virgil the of course,
the poet who write notably guided Dante into the underworld
and the divine comedy. Uh he He wrote of of
citron is a remedy against poison. So citron being a

(21:38):
you know, citrus fruit, the peel was added to wine
as a vomit inducing remedy. So citron is one of
the earliest species of citrus. It's a parent of various
citrus species that we've we prize today and use in
in concoctions, and you know, an all manner of recipes. Um.
So it has a thick peel, it's a sour fruit.

(21:58):
It is a quote dinosaur the citrus world. Uh kinda again,
too many fruit fruits that we cherish in our cocktails,
and more closely related to the Buddhoo's hand citron. I
don't know if you've ever seen this. It's a really
beautiful fruit that has this kind of don't think of
a straight up hand, but think of a very Eastern

(22:19):
depiction of a curly fingered hand. And you have it. It
It looks very love crafty and I just looked it up.
It does, it has, it has tentacles coming out of
its head. I have actually have a post about it
that I'll link to on the landing page for this
episode because it photographs beautifully just a beautiful, beautiful fruit.
Now I can't I can't recommend trying Virgil's recipe here,

(22:41):
but it is worth the noting that in Barbados they
originally made citron water in the eighteenth century and may
have used it to flavor of vermouth, so there is
some connection there too, more or less modern drink culture. Alright,
So a minute ago we mentioned the juniper berry is
one of the ingredients prescribed for this This hill combined
with sweet wine to soothe an upset stomach in ancient Rome.

(23:05):
But uh so, juniper actually did does, as we say,
end up being the main ingredient in gin. Right. Yeah,
It's a medicinal use goes way back as well as
used as early as twelve sixty six by Belgian theologian
Thomas van Contemporary, and he recommended boiling juniper berries in
rainwater or wine to treat stomach paint paint. Now, this,

(23:26):
it's important to note, would not have tasted like gin,
no matter what you're what a you know, bottom shelf
variety of gin you might be thinking of. I'm sure
that tasted better than a rainwater juniper concoction. Bad gin
is a bad idea, Yes, as I would. I would
advise anyone who has turned off of gin to, you know,
explore there's some there's some great gin's out there, uh

(23:48):
that that aren't that don't taste of rainwater. Now, in
the second sist century, Greek physician Galen recommended juniper berries
to quote, cleans the liver and kidneys and uh and
they evidently thin any thick and viscous juices, and for
this reason they are mixed in health medicines unquote. So
Stewart in her book writes that this suggests a mixture

(24:12):
with alcohol, which again kind of sounds like Jen probably
would not have tasted anything like Jim. Alright, moving on
from proto gen uh, here's an eighteen fifties recipe for
a concoction to treat it was, which was some sort
of bacterial infection that afflicted the skin and the joints.
So Kentucky farmer John B. Clark listed the recipe as follows.

(24:36):
This was listed in the Drunken Botanists as well. You
would need to combine one pint of hog lard, one
handful I think you said lard. Yes, lard, yes, hog lard, yes,
straight up hog lard in the drink. Yes. Again, not
that different from the bacon related drinks that would briefly
become the fad. So okay, you get your pine ahog lard,

(24:59):
You got your handful of earthworms. That's what you're gonna
You're gonna need that handful of tobacco, four pods of
red pepper, a spoonful of black pepper, a race of ginger,
and you stew this together and mix with brandy. Well,
that sounds dangerous on one hand, because if you're using tobacco,

(25:19):
and that sounds like you could easily accidentally extract too
much nicotine and poison yourself. Right, Well, this is a
good good point as well, and this this will come
up again as we discuss uh, the weird connection between
alcohol and tobacco there and tobacco and fused alcohols. You
can actually buy one today, but yeah, that would have
been a potential threat here. Or maybe that's how it works.

(25:42):
Maybe you're you're isolating the the true power of this folklorimity. Yeah,
I mean, I guess when you think about it, the
whole nature of of drinking ethanol based drinks is you're
kind of slightly poisoning yourself. Yeah. Yeah. And as we
get into the some of the so called nefarious spirits
that have been used in cocktails over time, it's worth

(26:03):
stressing that alcohol is kind of the nefarious spirit. Very
few of the substances that get mixed in with it
are as potentially dangerous as the thing itself. Finally, I
want to mention this is a little, a little far
less of a cocktail, but certainly a mixture of spirits. Uh.
If you look back at the Homer's Odyssey, you find

(26:25):
a mixture that is referred to as kai kion, and
this would have been a mixture of beer, wine and
meat that was given by Circe to um to Odyssey's
his crew in the Odyssey. So a mixture of spirits
and maybe a little magic in there as well. That
doesn't sound like a good combination, right, Yeah, I mean

(26:45):
it either it doled them out enough that she could
turn them into pigs, or it had some role in
turning them into pigs. Either way, not something you want
out of your your your beverage. Bottom line, Don't accept
drinks from a witch, right, Yeah, never accept to drink
from a witch. I think we should all we should
all know that by that point, been fooled too many times.
All right, So let's get into these nefarious spirits. Touching uh,

(27:07):
touching down once again on tobacco. So tobacco liqueur. What's
the history here? Well, we don't know for certain on this,
but Amy Stewart points out that people that the people
of Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil had a long standing practice
of soaking tobacco leaves and honey. And since honey can
of course be fermented into mead and such drinks, such

(27:29):
mead type drinks were known in South America. It's possible
but unproven, that some manner of nicotine mead may have emerged.
So nicomede nicomede, I guess yeah, so it would have
u your your alcohol and nicotine buzz combined into a
single experience. No need to drink and smoke, you just
have one concoction, that is. Yeah. But let's leave the

(27:51):
ambiguous world of conjecture and consider actual, verified, and perfectly
legal tobacco liqueurs. The best one of these is periq
Liqueur de tobacco. So this is a French tobacco liqueur
and pretty much the tobacco liqueur. I gotta say, I'm
surprised to I would not have expected anybody was actually
making tobacco booze, yeah, or that it was like a

(28:14):
refined thing and not some sort of weird, gimmicky somebody's
dangerous backyard concoctions. Right. The distillers here at the Combert facility,
they claim that it has no nicotine in it, though,
and this is apparently quite likely, since the high boiling
point of nicotine is like four seventy five degrees fahrenheit,

(28:35):
meaning that it probably doesn't rise through the still during
the distillation process. That's interesting. So that makes it seem like,
given that fact, it's actually safer to have a tobacco
based liquor or liqueur than it would be to do
what we were talking about earlier, and like soaked tobacco
leaves in a wine that you're drinking or something where
the essence could come out into the liquid, whereas in

(28:57):
a still you're saying it would not have evaporate correctly, right,
And that's something she points out there, is that, especially
in this age of mixed mixological enthusiasm and often home
bitter making projects, that some some might make a cigar
bitters for instance, at their house, but if you don't
know what you're doing, uh, you might accidentally create this

(29:22):
supercharged nicotine concoction and you could create a cocktail with
an inappropriate dose of nicotine in it that sounds like
a very bad night. Now. Now some of you are
probably wondering, well, what is that actual tobacco liqueur taste like? Well,
Stewart describes it as quote sweet, aromatic and decidedly different,
and that it quote tastes the way sweet damp pipe

(29:45):
tobacco smells. So I know that smell, but I can't
imagine that taste. Yeah, so that's why. If anyone out
there has any experience with this one and has a
more detailed explanation or additional thoughts on its a particular bouquet,
then let us know. Okay, so that's nicotine, But how

(30:06):
about how about cocaine? How about coca wines and tonics?
Moving up the ladder of stimulants? Yeah, this so, so
this is another hold on? When do we get to
four loco then four local? What is in four local?
I'm not familiar with this one. Oh, I just made
a four loco joke, and I don't really know. I
believe it is a or at least was a combined

(30:27):
alcoholic beverage and energy drink wrap. Yes, I think it
might not be anymore something. I don't know. I've never
had a four loco. I'm not advocating it, Okay, well,
I mean to. Of course, there are other drinks out
there that combine alcohol and coffee, so or the much
dreaded UH vodka and Red Bull, which David Wondridge does
not cover in his book. But really, it didn't make

(30:50):
it into didn't make it in. Yeah, it's not refined enough.
Go figure. But but as far as the history of
coca leaves, the prime ingredient in cocaine and alcohol. Uh,
this this gets really interesting. So Peruvians made use of
the coca plant leaves as early as three thousand BC.
So they would choose the leaves for energy. It provided

(31:12):
mild stimulus and it would also help against altitude sickness.
It could be brut and tease as well. Now, did
we mention the the idea that this was employed by
the the runners in the Kingdom of the Incan's, the
runners who would uh carry the not messages across the
high altitude I believe we did. Yeah, Yeah, that would

(31:34):
have been an example of usage there where you just
needed a little more boost or a little a little
better ability to uh, to really go at it in
the uh, in the higher altitudes, they would have turned
to the coca leaf. Now, when the Europeans came in,
they figured out how to extract the cocaine alkaloid and
it was used as a pain reliever and antiseptic, digestive

(31:56):
and various other medical uses. In fact, in the US
it remains a schedule to narcotic. That means it has
quote currently accepted medical use and treatment in the United
States or currently accepted medical use with severe restrictions. What
what what use is cocaine today in the medical community.

(32:16):
Uh well, I mean basically it comes down to some
of the properties was originally used for, um, you know,
such as, you know, alleviating pain. If anyone's ever seen
the Wonderful Believe a Cinemax show the Nick, they do
a wonderful job of exploring the use of cocaine medically
at the time. Uh pre anesthesia. You know, you could

(32:37):
you could inject cocaine and uh and and get the
desired result for surgery. Yeah. Wow. But it is an
interesting reality to to remind oneself that while marijuana is
a Schedule one narcotic, uh, cocaine is a schedule too.
Of course, today cocaine continues to power around with alcohol

(32:57):
and illicit recreational usages. But it also made its way
into coca leaf wines and tonics. So there was a
French vin Mariani. This was a tonic and it was
patent in patented in eighteen sixty three by French chemist
Angelo Mariani, and he also offered a coca wine called
then tonique Marianni, which was a combo of Bordeaux wine

(33:20):
and coca leaves. Now none of that goes on, at
least legally today, but coca flavoring is still used. And
you can order yourself some D coconut cocaine eysed cocoa
tea right off of Amazon, and it's actually pretty good.
It's it's you've had I've had it. Yeah, yeah, they've
they've They've leached all the cocaine out of it. So
it's perfectly, perfectly legal, perfectly reasonable thing to have. I

(33:43):
don't know if you should have it before a drug
test for unemployment or anything, but it's certainly interesting. Well,
one thing that occurs to me is if coca cola
originally was flavored with coca, wasn't it some kind of
coca product. I believe it's not anymore. Right, Well, they
have the whole secret recipe thing, right, and and certainly
coca can be D cocaine eyst so, so it could

(34:07):
be D cocaine and so so. But you could think,
just flavor wise, perhaps if you're mixing coca cola with
some kind of alcoholic beverage, you may be to some
very tamed extent simulating this kind of mixture, right, And
there's apparently a liqueur called Agua sold in the US
and European markets, and it's marketed as quote a premium

(34:27):
herbal liqueur made from Bolivian coca leaves and an infusion
of thirty six herbs and botanicals. So in this case
we would be talking, uh, you know, the cocaine has
been removed from it as well, and you're just getting
the flavor profile with the leaf. And of course this
the the the excitement of oh it's it's it's a
cocaine liqueur. Well yeah, there you go. I mean, as

(34:48):
we talked about, it's not just the taste, there's an
event going on, right, it's the showmanship. Now from there,
let's move on to another schedule to narcotic with a
similar time line of traditional use, medicinal use, refinement, and
then outright abuse. We're talking of course about opium. Oh okay,

(35:09):
so opium cocktails. Huh yeah, well you know this is
this is something I didn't realize. I guess I knew this,
but I never really put one and two together. But
the seeds of the opium plant, poppy seeds, they're sold
legally since they're used in baked goods. Right. I remember
the old Seinfeld bit about Elaine having poppy seed muffins

(35:30):
and then flunking a drug test. But I somehow didn't
put put together that it was actually the same plant.
I kind of, without thinking about it, assume that it
was just you know, something that's closely related to it
and it would trigger you know, a false positive. Now,
I imagine this does not mean that we have to
worry about eating poppy seed muffins because they're gonna have
opioid effects on us. No, yeah, not at all. Continue

(35:52):
to eat your, your, your, your poppy seed muffins. Now.
Stewart points out that the earliest possible description of an
opium confused cocktail of sorts is again Homer's Odyssey, Uh
the elixir Nehinthy that Helen of Troy drank to alleviate
her sorrows. It was mixed quote with an herb that
banishes all care, sorrow and ill humor. And this of

(36:16):
course may have referred to opium. Or if you're a
fan of Game of Thrones and I think this might
be yeah, there you go. Now that of course, the
more direct comparison there would be if we go to
Victorian times laudanum tonic, which was opium steeped in alcohol.
The alkaloids and opium are for more soluble in alcohol
rather than in water. There is so. I just recently

(36:39):
read the novel True Grit. Oh, yeah, Charles portis uh,
and there is so. I've seen the movie before, but
especially in the novel, there is a scene in which
the main character, who is a girl who is very
level headed and very all business like. She she sort
of messes things up in a scene because she has

(36:59):
been even laudanum to treat a cold. It was it
was one of these things that was used to treat
just about everything. And that's the thing about opium is
that whatever ails you, at least in the short term,
a little bit of opium will probably make it better.
It's the it's more the long term, not the problem.
Not make it better, but make you not care. Right

(37:21):
as far as actual cocktails go, this is kind of interesting. Uh.
King George the Fifth like to consume a mixture of
brandy and laud him to alleviate his gout. So there
you go. Not alleviate his gout, would alleviate his mind. Yes,
alleviate his his experience of the gout or his relationship
to his experience of the count um and Uh. And

(37:43):
of course Bear the drug company sold and opium syrup
in under the name Heroin, which was you know, of
course often it was often marketed at kids four kids
to help with your your cough or whatever ails you.
I've seen those ads. Yeah, y'all out there, you should
look up these ads. Yeah, they they had the old
printed ads for it. It's it's phenomenal. And again, if

(38:06):
you're a fan of of all this, you want you
want sort of a fictional treatment of it. Uh. Steven
Soderbird's The Nick also explores uh, the early days of
heroin rather nicely. All right, well, what else do we
do we have here on the drink menu if you will? Well,
I was just thinking about as long as we're going
into strange and perhaps the illicit ingredients maybe less illicit

(38:30):
than opium and cocaine. Uh. But do you remember the
bacon craze of the late two thousand's, early two thousand tens. Oh, yes,
how could I not? And of course coming out of
that craze there were lots of bacon cocktails. Of course,
you know, and not to say that that was the
first time there was ever such a thing as like

(38:51):
bacon infused alcohol, but it became very popular then, and
during this time it was it was like when everybody
thought it was hilarious to have an I Heart Bacon
bumper sticker or T shirt and have bacon parties, and
to have bacon on all your food, to make like
bacon utensils, to eat your food with h Not to
disparage bacon itself, but I do think it's funny how

(39:15):
all of us at the time, for some reason, didn't
seem to realize that this was not just a spontaneous
outpouring of ironic Internet love, but to some extent a
result of market forces in the meat markets and a
manipulation of public opinion by the pork industry. I was
reading an article about that not too long ago, Like,

(39:37):
was it really just a coincidence that you knew a
guy in college who started a hilarious bacon based garments
blog right around the same time that Wendy's introduced the
bacon eight or uh that that's perfect and it again
it it fits perfectly in the culture of cocktails because
of that that marketing angle, and that's often a hidden

(39:58):
marketing angle. Like it reminds me of the origins of
the Moscow Mule, which of course is a It's a
nice beverage. It has vodka, ginger beer, what some lime.
It's pretty in that copper cup. Yeah, that copper cup.
It looks beautiful. And where did it come from? That's
the thing you might think, Oh, well, this it's it's
called a Moscow mule. Must have been this must have
been like a work working man's drink in Moscow, invented

(40:20):
by the great bartender Ivan Mulevich. No, you you might
think it might be something cool like that, but as
it turns out, it just goes back to a vodka
distributor who knew somebody. I think it was a girlfriend
who had all these copper mugs that that she needed
to sell. So just put one and two together and

(40:41):
the Moscow Mule was born. It was delicious, but the
whole story, the fictional creation story behind it, just had
no basis. In fact, that is incredibly deflating. Well, you know,
you drink half of one and then you feel better
about it. Well, anyway, you definitely remember though, how the
did happen or it was around two thousand ten. I

(41:02):
think that this was really peaking, that there was, you know,
a little bit after the years after that were suddenly
these recipes for bacon infused bourbon and stuff like that.
We're just taking over the menus everywhere, and everybody thought
it was great to give somebody bacon old fashioned sor
or something like that for Christmas. And I think I

(41:22):
still see drinks of this nature on the menu every
now and then. Sometimes it's like a bacon like the
the Glasses Room, not in salt, but some sort of
like bacon based not not straight up bacon bits, it's
the fancier version of bacon bits. I think the barbecue
place here in town, Fox Brothers Barbecue in Atlanta, they
have a Bloody Mary that's got a bunch of bacon.

(41:44):
And as of Bloody Mary's were not already pretty salty. Um,
I I can't. I can't match anything that is quite
as neat centric as a bacon cocktail. But carnivorous ats
have occasionally made their way into cocktails. So you have
a plant by the name of an we call sun Do. Yeah,

(42:06):
we talked about the sun Do in our episode on
her Neiverous plants. Yeah, so you might remember it. It
catches insects with the sticky nectar and digest them with
his enzymes. And it was once popular in a cordial
known as rosalio, and uh today rosalio entails of various
liqueurs made from fruits and spices steeped in alcohol. But

(42:27):
sun do was once a prime ingredient, and you were
advised to pick the dead insects out of the fruit first.
No way, yeah, no way, you're knocking that out. No,
I'm not making it out the dead insects in your drink. No, no,
you would take it out before you made the drink. Oh,
I see, so you'd strain it and then make your cocktail. Right. Yeah.
That being said, I don't know that it that it
would be that bad if they were bugs in the drink.

(42:48):
Speaking of dead things in your drink and meaty flesh
in your drink, I'm gonna converge these two, uh, these
two lines of inquiry into a single cocktail, which is
you may have heard about this, you may not have.
But in the town of Dawson City, in the boreal
yonder of the Yukon Territory, way up there, there is

(43:10):
a hotel bar with an infamous local tradition of bibulation
known as the sour toe cocktail. Have you heard of this, Robert?
I don't think I had, And you know, I'm already
I'm at this point. I'm already a little bit afraid
because I'm I'm picturing Yukon territory. I'm picturing very rugged
individuals here. Uh huh yeah, oh yeah, yeah. There's a

(43:32):
lot of miners, hunters, barge operators, stuff like that. So
you're probably wondering, sour toe cocktail? Okay, does it really
contain a toe? And the answer is yes, what there's
a real toe in it, a human toe. For it
is a dark, shriveled, mummified piece of toe jerky and

(43:54):
it goes in your drink for five dollars. Actually, that's
that was the price in time. I read a newspaper
article about it, so the price may have been hiked
up since then, who knows what? Wait, was this an
old thing? It is the current thing? Does the current
you can do this now? Oh? Okay, So I thought
this was like an old uh you know, frontier beverage,

(44:14):
and I was willing to give them a little more license.
Desperate times, uh, wilderness madness setting in. Maybe you would
throw a toe into a beverage for whatever reason. No,
this is less like the Frontier wine with a pound
of pork lard and more like the ironic chipster bacon cocktail. Now,
because this started in the nineteen seventies, so you have

(44:35):
to pay a five dollar toe tax to have this
toe added to whatever alcohol you want, presumably whether it's
four fingers of Yukon jack whiskey or a cranberry apple
teeny or a glass of champagne as you will see.
And the toe goes in your glass of booze, and
you drink the booze, and then the toe lives on. Uh. So,

(44:55):
of course I was wondering where did this toe come from? Well,
Atlas Obscura has excellent, very short, little history of the
sour toe that you can look up. But basic story
goes like this. In nineteen seventy three, a river barge
pilot named Captain Dick Stevenson, he's cleaning out a cabin
when he came across an amputated human toe in a
jar of alcohol. Suppose is an appropriate place to keep

(45:19):
it to preserve it? I guess right. So Supposedly the
toe had belonged to a minor named Louis Lichn, whose
toe became frost bitten sometime in the nineteen twenties up
in the Yukon and he had to get it amputated
and decided to preserve it in this jar of alcohol.
So after Stevenson found the toe in the jar in
nineteen seventy three, he got this amazing idea to head

(45:43):
down to the local saloon and start dropping it into
people's drinks, and those who could bear to drink the
booze with the toe knocking around in the glass became
the original members of the Sour Toe Cocktail Club, which
now more than forty years later, has more than five
d thousand members. So if you go up to the
Yukon Territory and you go to this bar and you

(46:05):
order the toe, you get a drink, pay the toe tax,
and get the toe in your drink and you drink it,
they will give you a certificate of membership that you
are now in the Sour Toe Club. That's sort of
local attraction. If you happen to end up in Dawson City,
there you go. But I know what you're thinking, has
anyone ever swallowed the toe several times more than once.

(46:29):
So the first time was supposedly in July nineteen eighty,
when a miner named Gary Younger had been working on
his glass of quote sour Toe champagne. According to the
Sour Toe Cocktail Club account, this guy's chair tipped over
backwards and he accidentally swallowed the toe. Now I'm not

(46:52):
sure if I buy this story, because how do you
accidentally swallow something as big as a toe from a
champagne glass? Us, I don't know. But because he's presumably
drinking it out of the traditional champagne flute, right, so
or I don't know. Maybe in the Yukon you get
your champagne and a tin cup. I don't know, of course,
thirteen glasses in who knows what was going on? Probably yeah,

(47:15):
probably not in total command of his faculties. So uh,
this wasn't the only time somebody swallowed the toe. Toes
keep disappearing, so new ones have to be supplied, and
uh it's over the years years a few more toes
were donated by people who had to have amputations due
to frost bite, diabetes, and a so called quote inoperable
corn stream. He keeps getting less and less appetizing um

(47:41):
and one donation was apparently an anonymous donation that was
later stolen from the bar. And and probably the most
famous toe origin story, one arrived at the bar in
a jar of alcohol with a note that said, quote,
don't wear open toe sandals while mowing the lawn. Well,
it's one way to live, for your toe to live

(48:02):
on right after it's it's left your body. Yeah, but
so More recently, the Toronto Star reports that a man
known only as quote Josh from New Orleans paid the
toe tax to have the toe deposited in his glass
of whiskey. And at the time there was a five
hundred dollar fee for accidentally swallowing the toe, and Josh

(48:24):
from New Orleans just popped the toe in his mouth
and down it went, and he immediately paid the five
hund dollar fee in cash and walked out of the bar.
And last last tidbit about this, apparently, when you order
the toe, the bartender recites a magical incantation to steal
you for your journey of death and alcohol, and it goes.

(48:47):
You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow,
but your lips must touch the toe. I can see
this is really goodding to you, Robert, do you have
a mummified toe thing? I don't know. It just seems
it well, I mean, it seems rather unnecessary, but it's
just not particularly apetizing. I guess. I don't know. I'm

(49:08):
just imagining this shriveled mummified toe just knocking against your
lips as you're trying to down it, kind of like
a like a like a like just any kind of
a garnish and a drink that you're not ready to consume,
except it's the It's the worst possible Maraschino cherry. I
have no evidence that they actually did this, but my
idea is they should use it in place of an
ice cube, so they should freeze it so it's always cold,

(49:31):
and then when it gets plopped into your God, I
just assumed it was frozen. I would I would hope
it would be frozen. I don't know. I've seen pictures
of it, and it looks like it's room temperature, but
it's hard to tell. It's it's like stored in salt.
I think I've seen pictures of it in a jar
of salt. I guess to keep it desiccated and mummified. Huh.
I would love to to see or hear anyone describe

(49:53):
how it affects the flavor profile. If it does it all,
it could just be pure psychology of the thing, which
is kind of right, because ultimately, like which is worse
for your body, swallowing one dead human toe or drinking
thirteen glasses of champagne in a row, I would argue
that the champagne is actually worse for you. Probably probably so,
I mean, I guess it depends on what's in the toe.

(50:15):
All right, we have just I certainly cannot top that
at all. We have just a few more nefarious spirits
to mention. One comes from uh cubab from Piper cubeba,
a member of the pepper family. It produces a fruit
that wind dried resembles black pepper as a pungent, biting
flavor that comes from high levels of lemoning, which is

(50:38):
a flavor foundain citrus and herbs, and you'll find it
as an ingredient in various gems these days as well.
But it has a medicinal and even magical history. The
Victorians had cubeb cigarettes that were supposed to help you
with your asthma. Yeah, and most exciting of all, seventeenth
century Italian priest and exorcist Luke to Vico Maria Sinistari

(51:02):
employed a brandy tonic flavored with cubeb cardaman, nutmeg, birthwartz, aloe,
and various other roots and spices. So if you're looking
to banish demons with your cocktail, take note. All right,
Another interesting concoction comes from and this is another example
from the drunken botanist, is uh uh Damiana, which is

(51:24):
from the plant turned era diffusea. So this is a
Mexican shrub produces yellow flowers and small fruits, and it's
long been reputed to have afro dzac properties. So nineteenth
century physicians prescribed it to female patients to promote orgasm,
and a two thousand nine studies saw that it quotes
sexually exhausted male rats. What does that mean? They just

(51:48):
they just kept it made of them so eager to
perform that it exhausted them. That's intense. So it seemed
to have afro dazak effects on the road. In nineteen
o eight, the FEDS confiscated a shipment of so called
Damiana gin and found that it contains stryct nine. Oh no, yeah, so,

(52:11):
and this seems to be more a matter of like
just illicit, just a poorly made and poisonous substance that
was that someone was trying to sell. But there have
been no human studies that that I'm aware of or
the steward was aware of regarding it's it's human use.
But it's a legal food additive. You can even find
a Mexican herbal decour called Damiana and it's sold in

(52:35):
like a fertility goddess kind of bottle. So if anyone
out there has tried that one, we would love to
hear from you as well. Now, finally, before we take
a break, I want to mention real quick cannabis cocktails
to move back to this schedule one narcotic. Well, of
course somebody has made that, but but is there like,

(52:57):
is there a I don't know what you'd call it,
a legitimately reduced version somewhere out there. Well, unsurprisingly, there
are a few cannabis liqueurs on the market, but the
major example of these tend to be seemed to be
flavor only, so they've captured the flavor profile of the cannabis,
but but none of the actual th HC. Part of

(53:17):
this probably is that in terms of making a THHC
laden cocktail, it's super easy tip to do. Uh. So
all you have to do is make a simple syrup
from cannabis. Cannabis simple syrup heat activates the th HC
kind of in the same way that people use th
HC butter to make brownies. Really, this is the kind
of thing you can find recipes for wherever you find

(53:40):
your marijuana related recipes. Uh. In the syrup enables you
to create a whole host of of drinks. For instance,
I found a recipe for a Malibu Malibu mule, which
is I think essentially you know, a Moscow mule, except
using the syrup. Annual and also specialty shops, especially in
California and Colorado, uh, they often sell th HC lemonades

(54:02):
or juices. So there you go. If you if you
desire that, and it's a legally permitted avenue for you,
then the means are out there. I wonder what it's
like to work at one of the companies that produces
these products. I don't know, you mean, just like th
HC latent products or just I don't know. I wonder
if you reach a point where you feel like you've

(54:23):
you've you've reached peak creativity for for marijuana based food products. Like,
at what point do you realize, Oh, I just I
just created a recipe for th HC lasagna and now
I feel a little hollow inside. Well, I mean, I
wonder so if at some point, uh, cannabis becomes widely
legal or just regulated in the same way that tobacco

(54:47):
products are now or something like that, and eventually does
the appeal of this kind of stuff go away? Is
this basically all just like novelty celebration and yeah, where
this is recently lead realized and that you wouldn't have
maybe much more in the realm of cannabis inspired drinks,
you know, a hundred years down the road than you

(55:08):
have now this one tobacco liqueur made by what was
it some company in France. Yeah, Well it comes down
to the fact, right that, uh, if something is illegal,
if it's prohibited, that just makes it all the more alluring.
And sometimes you find yourself craving a particular substance purely
because it is forbidden, like it just enhances its mythology. Well,

(55:31):
speaking of the forbidden, I thought that we could not
do an episode about these strange scientific avenues in drink making, mixology,
cocktails and liquor without taking a look at the Green ferry.
So we should take a break and when we come
back we will talk about absinthe. So absently you've had,

(55:56):
you've had absence before, Yeah, yeah, I recently had the
absinthe service at a local restaurant here in town in Atlanta,
the kimble House Restaurant. It is absolutely wonderful if you're
if you're around Atlanta, especially in the Decatur area, kimble
House is amazing. But they have a sort of old
timey bar that celebrates the traditions where they will do

(56:18):
an absence service where they will serve it up in
the traditional way, which we can describe in a minute,
I guess, but I would say maybe more than any
other liquor, absinthe is a drink that is totally surrounded
in myth. I remember when I was in college, I
was once at a party where some guys were talking
about a time a friend of theirs who had been
in the military, had brought a bottle of absinthe back

(56:41):
from overseas, And this was at a time when absinthe
was still banned in the United States, and they claimed
that when they drank this, this green liquor, they entered
a state of green hallucinations. I remember one of them
mentioning swimming through green tunnels, and I was like, I
don't know if I believe that. But in the widespread

(57:03):
version of this story that you just substitute a person
for a place, and you can read about this everywhere.
Absinthe allows one to visit her majesty the green ferry.
So is there anything to this, to this idea that
absinthe is more than just another alcoholic beverage, that it
has these advanced drug like properties causing hallucinations or or

(57:26):
these also very common negative reported qualities like uh, causing
seizures or convulsions or all this other stuff. Yeah, it really,
it really had that reputation for the longest until it
was it was finally legalized again in the US. Yeah.
And so this, uh, this mythology is very much a

(57:48):
part of what absence profile and character is. But we
should take a look at the science behind it. So,
so what is absinthe. Well, absinthe is a distilltiquer, usually
a very strong one, made by combining alcohol with wormwood,
and that's a type of plant green Annis finnel like

(58:09):
Florence finnel, and other herbs and flowers like hiss up
and lemon balm. And the exact origins of absinthe as
we know it now are unclear by most accounts. It
was invented sometime in the late seventeen Dreds probably seventeen nineties,
and the distiller per Node produced its first commercial absinthe
in eighteen o five, which is when I think we

(58:30):
should consider the birth of the absinthe era. But let's
take a look at those ingredients. So wormwood, that is
an interesting name. Yes, it brings to mind the Book
of Revelation. Right, it makes me think, doesn't C. S.
Lewis have a novel has a wormwood character, and in
the Screwtape letterswood a lower subordinate demon and advising him

(58:54):
on corrupting of a mortal soul. Right, So wormwood's a
good name for a for a demon. I would say
it all I already implies some sort of illicit magical quality.
But wormwood is just a plant. It's the the Artemisia absinthium,
and it's the famed central ingredient in absinthe. And the
one that would be later singled out in the supposed

(59:16):
case against absinthe as more poison or more drug than
than liquor. Now, it's worth noting that vermouth is derived
The word vermouth is revived from vermut, the German word
for wormwood, and the original Vermouth's would have contained this
in some quantity. And going back to the ingredients that

(59:37):
you mentioned earlier, the taste of absinthe has far more
to do with the annis in it as opposed to
the wormwood itself. Yeah, I've heard that wormwood itself has
a more mental like taste and scent. Yeah. Yeah, And
so it's basically covered up for the most part by this,
this liquorice taste. Now, the ancient Egyptians used wormwood wines

(01:00:00):
and spirits. The the Evers Papyrus from around fifteen hundred
b C. And this might have been a copy of
an earlier work recommends wormwood spirits to treat round worm
infections and digestive problems. Chinese medicinal wines of the same
era also featured wormwood, and we know this from the

(01:00:20):
chemical analysis of drinking vessels that archaeologists have uncovered. And
it's also worth pointing out, you're talking about the timeline
of absinthe in the golden age of absinthe. Uh one.
Bridge points out that absence was sold in New Orleans
by eighteen thirty seven, in New York by eighteen forty three,
but it took a while to make its way into
a true cocktail. It was something you merely dashed in

(01:00:41):
a cocktail, kind of like how if anyone's had a
proper Sazarak Chris Fame New Orleans drink, there's a there's
an absentth wash of the glass before the drink is poured,
So it's it's it's it was like a bitter You
wouldn't you wouldn't just fill up a cocktail glass with it.
You would just have a hash of it for flavoring.

(01:01:02):
Right now, while it wasn't the central ingredient, and a
lot of cocktails, there was of course a ton of
just straight drinking of absinthe right rex with water and
sugar in the traditional preparation. Yeah, now, wond which he
says that by eight seventy though, that's when you saw
absent cocktails as a thing. So the absent frope, which

(01:01:23):
was absent shaken with a lot of ice and then
strained into a glass. Now Wonderge points out that according
to a writer by the name of Clarence Louis Cullen,
another member of the Sporting Fraternity, he thought that that
the the absent Frope was just the right drink to
have a first thing in the morning when you've got quote,
a head the size of a bird cage and a
mouth that smelled like a motorman's glove. So it would

(01:01:46):
have been the perfect hangover cure. I guess, uh, yeah,
that I don't know the idea. I mean, all of
moralization on what people should and shouldn't drink aside, I
think the idea of curing a hangover with more alcohol
is just disgusting. I would agree that it tends to
be my read on the situation as well, that the

(01:02:09):
hair of the dog and all that. But but hey,
for whatever reason, people consume them. The absent Frope was popular.
There were even songs about it. Yeah. I actually had
to look up the the absinthe Frappe, a song that
was referenced in wond Rich's book, and I found the
lyrics lyrics by Glenn McDonough. I think this was from
a Broadway play, and so the song is about the

(01:02:30):
absinthe Frappe, and the lyrics go, it will free you
first from the burning thirst that is born of a
night of the bowl, like a sun twel rise through
the inky skies that so heavily hang over your soul.
At the first cool sip on your fevored lip, you
determine to live through the day. Life's again worthwhile, as

(01:02:53):
with a dawning smile, you imbibe your absinthe frappe. I
think that's a little too much credit to the to
the drink. I think so that feels a little bit,
a little bit like marketing. Yeah, but anyway, so yeah,
so you said absence was being adopted in the United States.
Absence drinking was very popular, especially in France. In the

(01:03:16):
nineteenth century, it became very fashionable in Europe, especially France
and Switzerland. Famous artists and intellectuals were notorious absence drinkers,
for example of French poets like Baudelaire and rambeau Verlaine.
In an eighteen sixty pamphlet by Henri Ballesta called Absinthe
at Absinthe Tours, he calls these types of people quote

(01:03:39):
the brilliant young men on the boulevard who were the
absinthe drinkers. You know, these were the people who were
out there making absinthe cool. And it was also reportedly
popular with Oscar Wilde and continental artists like Van Gogh.
Did I say I've always my whole life, said Van Gogh,
And now I'm retraining to say van Gogh always that

(01:03:59):
the preferred pronunciation is. I thought I thought I heard
you say it that way one time. No, maybe I
coughed a little bit. I thought it was van Go.
I've been saying van I I grew up saying van go.
We have to let you know. We just looked it
up and it's and it's. The Internet says it's Vincent
van Hall. Okay, Well, I think I might just stick
to van Go for simplicity. Set okay well, According to

(01:04:23):
Amy Stewart in The Drunken Botanist, well, I thought this
was really interesting. One explanation for the explosion of popularity
of absinthe in Europe in the nineteenth century can actually
be traced to a plant parasite. Anytime there's a good
parasite story, we gotta do it on step out of
your mind. So it is the Philoxera pest or dak

(01:04:44):
Tulos fira vitifolia, and so none other than Thomas Jefferson,
that Thomas Jefferson, not some other Thomas Jefferson had tried
to cultivate both native American and imported European grape varieties
for make wine within the United States, and neither of
them worked. The vineyards were just no good. And the

(01:05:07):
reason for this, Stewart says, is that the American varieties
failed because they just don't make good wine, and the
European varieties failed because, unlike the sturdy, resistant American grape vines,
the delicate European grape vines were susceptible to attacks from
a tiny insect much like the apid that was only
found in the Americas, and this is philox Era. And unfortunately,

(01:05:31):
before anybody knew about this, the Americans had made gifts
of native American grape vines and sent them to France,
and much like a deadly spider hiding in a bag
of bananas, the Philoxera past was thus lee imported to Europe,
and they laid waste to a vast new landscape of
maladapted grapes and as a result, the French wine making

(01:05:52):
industry was severely damaged and and production was limited throughout
the nineteenth century. Well, so Frenchmen were deprived of their
wine right. And this this mattered because wine was seen
by them as as like a you know, a drink
of rectitude. It's a family drink, it's a moral drink,
it's an upstanding and civilized drink. These other drinks like absinthe,

(01:06:15):
maybe not so much. But anyway, Stuart claims that it's
because of this severe shortage of wine due to the
parasite infestation that absinthe became the drink of choice in
cafes in France in the nineteenth century, feeding this surge
in absence consumption that culminated in the late eighteen hundreds
in early nineteen hundreds. So the idea here's this kind

(01:06:35):
of forced the birth of absent culture because people had
to embrace it to a certain degree and then kind
of stuck with it. Right, But absinthe, like I said,
was not viewed as this you know, family values kind
of drink like wine was. And so there were plenty
of people spreading a message of fear and suspicion about

(01:06:57):
the green Titania, and I want to read one because
I think it's amazing. From a New York Times article
about absentthe They had an absent scare piece running in
December eighteen eighty New York Times. Yeah, so here it goes. Quote.
A French physician of eminence has recently declared that it
is ten times more pernicious than ordinary intemperance, meaning ordinary alcohol,

(01:07:22):
and that it very seldom happens that the habit, once fixed,
can be unloosed. The same authority says that the increase
of insanity is largely due to Absinthe I didn't even
know there was an increase in insanity around eighteen eighty,
but continuing it exercises a deadly fascination, the source of
which scientists have vainly tried to discover, although they have

(01:07:44):
no trouble ascertaining it's terrible effects. It's a moderate use
speedily acts on the entire nervous system in general and
the brain in particular, in which it induces organic changes
with accompanying derangement of all the mental powers. The chual
drinker becomes at first dull, languid, is soon completely brutalized,

(01:08:05):
and then goes raving mad, he has at last holy
or partially paralyzed, unless, as often happens, disordered liver and
stomach brings a quicker end. Was this your experience at Kimbahouse? No, though,
I though, to be fair, I am not a frequenter
of absinthe cafes, and I guess this is referring to
chronic use. These would be the absente themes which I

(01:08:28):
would admit. Chronic use of absinthe. You know, drinking a
lot of absinthe regularly probably does produce some very bad
effects in people. But maybe it's not the absinthe. Uh,
maybe it's not the absinthe in particular. We can look
at the details of this. So fear of this condition
called quote absinthe is um believed to be separate from

(01:08:50):
and worse than regular alcoholism, spread throughout these temperance minded
circles in Europe, and at the time there also seemed
to be scientific evidence backing this up, for example, the
work of the French physician Valentine Magnon. According to one
two th nine review of Magnon's work, he found that
this alcohol soluble component that existed in wormwood did cause

(01:09:13):
a lot of bad things, including lapses of consciousness, myoclonic jerks,
and tonic clonic convulsions in animals. So what was that component?
While it was the natural plant essence found in wormwood
known as thusion. More on that compound in a bit.
But in addition looking at what caused this anti absinthe attitude,

(01:09:36):
there were the so called absinthe murders. Now there are
multiple versions of this story reporting slightly different details, and
the one I'm gonna I'm gonna use comes from an
article in Distillations Magazine, which is published by the Chemical
Heritage Foundation. But according to this version, in August nineteen
o five, in the village of Communi, Switzerland, a French

(01:09:57):
born laborer named Jean Lamfrey was getting ready for a
day of hard work at a local vineyard and around
daybreak he had a couple of shots of absence before
heading off to work. But Launfrey wasn't done. He was
just getting started. At lunch, he had six classes of wine,
then he had another glass of wine before heading home.

(01:10:17):
On the way home, he snagged a black coffee with brandy.
Then when he got home he had another leader of wine.
Then Launfrey got into an argument with his what with
his wife, and tragically he became enraged and he shot
her with a rifle, and then he shot his two daughters. Now,
it's a horrible crime, gets significantly less funny there right
there at the end, right, But the lesson a lot

(01:10:39):
of people apparently took away from it was that absence
that must have messed him up. Obviously, if you're like me,
you'll you'll regard this as a kind of absurd conclusion,
Like it seems like there is at least one other
major factor at play, maybe alcohol, um. But so these
forces combined, like the research on the effects of absinthe

(01:11:01):
done by people like Magnon and these stories of these crimes.
There were some other crimes I think that were attributed
to absinthe. There was some kind of axe or hatchet
murderer I think that was referred to as an absinthe murder.
And they combined into this whirlwind of anti absinthe public
sentiment that eventually led to the banning of absinthe in
the United States and much of Europe starting around nineteen fifteen,

(01:11:24):
and that lasted for nearly a century. So what is
all the fuss about, Like, what what's actually going on
in absinthe and in the wormwood plant, and wasn't justifying
all of this backlash, So we mentioned though jone the
compound though jone is an organic compound found in wormwood
but also found in herbs like sage, So if you

(01:11:47):
ever made sage stuffing there, you might be getting some
though Jane there. Uh. And the modern scientific consensus affirms
that it can be toxic at large doses, primarily acting
as a convulsant and also being a associated with kidney failure,
so it can cause convulsions. Uh. And this might be
related to the fact that it was, you know, accused
of being a cause of epilepsy. At great enough concentrations,

(01:12:12):
it could also lead to death. There are a couple isomers.
There's alpha though Jane and beta though Jane without the
alpha isomer being the more toxic of the two. And
the primary method of action in the body is that
attacks the nervous system by inhibiting the activation of GABBA receptors.
But is through jone really to blame for the so

(01:12:32):
called effects of absinthe is um and all of these
mythological accusations that absence could cause hallucinations and other stuff
like that. Yeah, I think the mythology of it is
worth keeping in mind at all times. Kind of getting
back to the whole marketing of the cocktail. To what
extent does I mean you're already drinking, But then if
there's this mystical quality involved, does it give you license

(01:12:55):
to engage, you know, maybe a little more um inappropriate
behavior than normal. Right. There's a there's a quote that
I run across before that I always got to kick
out of from Ernest Hemingway. He said, got tight last
night on absent and did knife tricks, great success, shooting
the knife into the piano. The woodworms are so bad

(01:13:16):
and eat hell out of all furniture. And you can
always claim the woodworms did it. There you go. You
can always claim the woodworms did it. You can always say, hey,
it's the wormwood, it's the it's the absent that's responsible.
I think tight is a euphemism that we should bring
back for for drunkenness. Yeah, I think so too. I
can I can just easily imagine that the violent tightness

(01:13:40):
of the the absent drinkers psyche. I remember tight also
being the drunkenness euphemism used in some classic memo or
remember reading about Winston Churchhill or his his generals in
World War two or something. We're talking about how Winston
was quite tight last night when he was giving us
our strategy. So myths a side. Modern research shows that wormwood,

(01:14:03):
you know, isn't really quite that bad. So yes, thero
jone can be dangerous compound at high levels. It can
got seizure and death at high doses, but there's actually
very little of it in absinthe and other liqueurs. Most
of the tales of absinthe fuel madness probably come from
the fact there's just a high alcohol content in absence
is compared to other, um, other other alcohols out there.

(01:14:26):
It was traditionally bottled A A B V, so that's
twice as alcoholic as your common gen So you the
scare piece of New York Times, I think it said
that it was ten times as dangerous as normal alcohol.
Now you can without quibbling on how you you factor
the numbers here, I think you could say it's at

(01:14:46):
least twice as dangerous as normal alcohol, because it's twice
as strong as most alcohols that would have been up
there on the bar for your perusal. But then again,
the traditional preparation about of absinthe as served in the
French cafe was to dilute it, right, And so if
you're diluting it, I wouldn't even say it goes. It
goes as far as the alcohol concentration, and it would

(01:15:08):
would lead you to believe. Because so the traditional uh
production is you get this glass, it's got specially shaped
glass back to these special glasses and making an event
out of it. It's got this kind of bulge in
the bottom, and your absence goes down in the bulge
at the bottom, and then you put a slotted spoon
on the top of the glass with a sugar cube
on it, and then they would dribble cold ice cold

(01:15:31):
water over the sugar cube and the spoon into the drink,
and when the water hit the drink, it would do
this very interesting thing where the clear green absence would
suddenly froth up and become this uh. It's often described
as a pale green, milky type appearance. And I've seen
you do that. It does quite look like that, like

(01:15:52):
a cloud emerging in the depths of a crystal ball. Yeah,
it's referred to as the luch and it's very interesting
because because you're like, wow, what's going on there chemically,
what's going on is that the the water is is
breaking up this the way that the oils from the
plants are held in suspension in the liquor, and when

(01:16:13):
the water enters it, it creates this emulsion essentially, like
you know, you'd create an emulsion if you're making a
vinaigrette and the salad dressing or something like that. The
oils and the water get emulsified and so it clouds
up and becomes rather beautiful. It's kind of nice it's
this production, but it also does lead to the fact
that you're deluding the drink with water, bringing it down

(01:16:33):
probably closer to or even lower than the level of
if you were dreating drinking a straight liquor of some
other kind. And I believe in this space it's been
a years since I had straight up absentthe in this scenario,
I was at a place in New Orleans called Pravda.
I don't know if it's still around, but it was
a like a Soviet theme, like the word for truth, yeah,
like that, and also like the Soviet publication, and they

(01:16:58):
did the whole ceremony is I re Hall. They also
had a version that involved fire like a small amount
of fire. Nothing flashy, no blue blazers here, but of
course fire is involved. We have potential to burn off
some of the alcohol as well, which would thus uh
make its alcoholic punch a little less. Yeah. But anyway,
so you've had absence in in this case, I've had absence.

(01:17:21):
It seems to be clear that modern absinthe is, you know,
not any more dangerous than any other alcoholic drink, with
all of the things that we should understand about the
dangerous regular alcoholic drinks. Um. But there there, it doesn't
carry this special drug like or poison like property. So
what was going on with all those experiments in the

(01:17:41):
late eighteen hundreds showing absence to be a poisonous horror. Well,
recently people have gone back and reviewed this research, and
generally the problem appears to be that they were testing
the effects of not absentthe itself, but of ridiculously high
concentrations of fusion in the form of extract and pure
wormwood essence oil essential oils. Uh. And so the thing

(01:18:05):
we know about doses is the dose makes the poison.
Pretty much all of the food and drink we consume
on a regular basis contains compounds that can be toxic
and extremely large doses. So the question is, if you
go out and get a bottle of absinthe, does it
actually contain enough throusione to hurt you? Well, if you're
getting it from a reputable distiller, the answer is no.

(01:18:28):
So modern absence really doesn't have enough through jone uh
to cause any of the effects in absence drinkers concentrations
are small enough, the alcohol content is high enough that
you would encounter toxicity due to alcohol way before you
would ingest enough throusione to hurt you. But there's another question,
what about the pre band absinthe, because maybe what's going

(01:18:48):
on is that absinthe is safer now and safety standards
were much lower back then. Well, there's actually been research
on this as well. So in two thousand and eight
there was a paper published by Dirk Lachenmeyer and at
All called a chemical Composition of vintage preban absinthe with
special reference to through Joan Finn Shone, Pinot, camphone, menthol

(01:19:11):
copper and antimony concentration. So this is looking at old,
old bottles of absinthe from before the absinthe ban to say, okay,
did they have something really poisonous going on in them.
It looked at thirteen samples of vintage absinthe bottles dating
back to before nineteen fifteen, and they were analyzed for
toxicity including naturally occurring herbal lessences like through joan all

(01:19:36):
the ones I mentioned before, and then mental higher alcohols, copper,
and antimony. And then they used gas chromatography and mass
spectrometry analysis to reveal that quote, the total through jane
content of Preban absinthe was found to range between about
zero point five and about forty eight point three milligrams

(01:19:57):
per leader of absinthe, with an average concentration of about
twenty five milligrams per leader and a median concentration of
thirty three milligrams per leader. How much is that? Turns
out not that much. This shows that vintage absinthe from
the pre Ban era is pretty much comparable to post

(01:20:18):
ban and modern commercial absinthe in terms of toxic content. Uh.
And they concluded, quote, all things considered, nothing besides ethanol
was found in the absence that was able to explain
the syndrome absinthe is um And I think that's a
that's a good note to end on the absinthe discussion
with because from my perspective, I think the reasonable conclusion

(01:20:38):
is that absinthe is um was in fact alcoholism by
another name, rebranded alcoholism, if you will, and that this
is a good reminder, I guess not to end on
a down note, but but that we should always be
careful when we're thinking about about alcoholic drinks, because, as
we pointed out, I mean, ethanol is in some sense

(01:20:59):
a poison. It is in some sense a thing that
is impairing our bodies. Now, generally, responsible adults can learn
to manage their ingestion of ethanol in a way that's
not too harmful in the long term to themselves or others.
But it's it's something we have to be careful with.
It's a it's a dragon in a cage. Yeah, I mean,
if you if you really tease it apart. What is

(01:21:21):
any cocktail but a balance of poisons that you then drink. Uh.
And Yeah, there's there's there's there's certainly a danger in
consuming too much. And there's you know, and certain people
are going to be more susceptible to problems than others,
so certainly use use caution. Uh. Employer, better judgment when

(01:21:43):
choosing which cocktails and how many to consume or if
to consume at all. And again to come back to mocktails,
I will say there are some fabulous mocktail recipes out there.
Oh yeah. So for our listeners who are underage or
who are teetotalers, Robert, what what's a great mocktail for
that you would recommend? Okay, there is a recent New
York Times article that came out because when they're not

(01:22:04):
when they're not shaming absence in previous times, they're putting
out mocktail articles in our modern times. But there's a
mocktail article that came out recently, and they included a
recipe for something called a mom Bai mule, which you
can serve in the copper UH containers if you like.
But it's a wonderful concoction that has UH I believe

(01:22:25):
it was a coconut cream or coconut milk, a few
different spices, some citrus, and it has all the complexities
because I guess one of the things that you instantly think,
all right, well, if you take the liquor and the
liqueurs out of a cocktail, what are you left with
but some juices? Well, this drink. Uh, I think is
a nice answer to that, because you get this this

(01:22:48):
balance of different flavor notes uh in the ingredients without
actually having to engage alcohol. So look around. You know
there's some definitely some lesser mocked ales out there, but
but there are some very finely crafted concoctions. They don't
involve alcohol, but do give you this appreciation for the

(01:23:09):
process and and and also in appreciation for just the
rich flavor profile. Though my one criticism is that they too,
they do tend to go down a bit fast without
the alcohol in them. Yeah. I don't know if I
told you this. When I was a kid, I was
a big fan of virgin bloody Mary's. Oh yeah, a
bloody Mary with no alcohol in it. Uh. Though it

(01:23:29):
wasn't even I wasn't even preparing what would be recognized
by a bartender as a proper bloody Mary mix. What
I was drinking was like a can of V eight
with a lot of tabasco sauce and celery salt in it. Well,
it's kind of like the rob Roys and the Shirley Temples.
Like I remember going out to dinner and and my
dad got a cocktail and I got to get a

(01:23:50):
rob Roy and you know that's just what it's. It's
it's not the most finely balanced of a of a
mock tail. It's just like bligend Rail and uh Jenn
And in my experience, like the bad Marachino cherry is
not the real Marachino cherry. Um Maraschino cherry is, by
the way, a fabulous story just about those and I
believe that shows up in The Drunken Botanists. So another

(01:24:12):
reason to pick up that book. Well, if we ever
come back to doing more episodes on food and drink,
maybe we should explore cherry science. Oh yeah, there's so much.
I mean, we've touched on cherry science a little bit
on our our most recent Dangerous Foods episode. Yeah, don't
grind up those pits, yeah, because that would be that
would make for pretty nefarious cocktail right there. Okay, so hey,

(01:24:32):
if you want to explore some of the links we
talked about here, check out the landing page for this
episode is Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's
where we'll find podcast videos, blog post links out to
our various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram.
Who knows what they'll be in the future will probably
be on those two. We will probably have to and
if you want to get in touch with us, as always,

(01:24:52):
you can email us and blow the mind at how
stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands
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(01:25:14):
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