What’s an anethole?

Foods and flavorings in the anise family run the gamut from a salty sweet black goo loved in northern Europe to the wispy green wild fennel whose smoke flavors grilled fish in the southern Mediterranean. What these two completely different items have in common is the flavoring called anethole, also found in the spices fennel seed, aniseed and star anise, as well as liqueurs like anisette, arak and sambuca.

Most subtle of anise-flavored foods is the vegetable fennel, kin to carrots and parsley and often incorrectly labeled “anise” at the supermarket. Foeniculum vulgare is anything but vulgare, but instead elegant and curvaceous, its dramatic white orbs topped with long stalks and dilly ferny foliage. Fennel is not anise and it’s not licorice-y, just mildly anise-scented, which mellows with cooking.

I never tasted it as a kid, not until I was grown up and living with an Italian man. His father, my late father-in-law Angelo, often cooked a classic fennel side dish so good I begged the recipe from him, and this is the way I cook it 90% of the time: I cut off the stalks at their base, reserving a little bit of the fresher fronds for later. Then I trim off the bottom slice and any discolored parts and cut the fennel into several wedges that are mostly held together by the core. Then the wedges go into a steamer basket for about 10-15 minutes or until tender at knifepoint. I put a thin layer of olive oil on the bottom of a baking sheet or pan, then lay out the wedges in one layer. Then I salt and pepper them and sprinkle sparingly with breadcrumbs, fresh or dry, plus grated Pecorino Romano or Parmigiano Reggiano. Over goes a few minced fennel fronds for garnish and then finally I drizzle the whole mess with olive oil. Then it goes into the broiler until just golden brown. I often use my toaster oven for this, as one fennel bulb in wedges doesn’t take up a lot of room. And it’s very nearly as good cold out of the fridge later.

Alternatively, fennel is crunchy-sweet shaved thinly and dressed with a simple vinaigrette or added to a green salad. Some cooks like to blanch it briefly in boiling water to temper its taste before putting it in a salad. It’s perfect baked with fish or in fish soup, going with all sea creatures splendidly, as well as pork, lamb and chicken. It can be stewed, braised, roasted or grilled, put into a risotto or even doused with cream sauce if that’s your style.

Wild fennel, the ancient bearer of Prometheus’ fire, is well nigh impossible to find in this part of the country but grows profusely in California and the Mediterranean. Many cookbooks suggest substituting the cultivated fennel, fennel seed or the Greek anise liqueur ouzo.

With a more assertive flavor than our mild “Florence fennel,” wild fennel isn’t bulbous at the bottom but all stalks and leaves. It goes into Sicily’s classic pasta con le sarde, an aromatic dish of fat strands of bucatini pasta with fresh sardines, saffron and currants. If I had access to wild fennel and fresh sardines I would make it a lot, it’s that great.

Wild fennel is adored in Greece, too, and at Chez Panisse in California this week you’ll find a Provençal fish soup “cooked in the fireplace” with halibut, shellfish and wild fennel, and in their café spaghetti with squid, green garlic, wild fennel, hot pepper and breadcrumbs. At the nearby Oliveto in Oakland, they’ve been known to serve wild fennel ice cream. You can even find a wild fennel pâté at allthingssicilian.com.

From the same plant comes the fennel seed you’ll find in Italian sausages, as well as in bowls at the door of Indian restaurants (said to improve digestion and breath). Sometimes you see it in tomato sauce, pickles, meat dishes, curries and various Italian charcuterie products. Supposedly it makes anything you eat after it taste better and so fennel-seed-studded salami has historically been served by unscrupulous wine sellers trying to mask poor wines. The Tom's of Maine’s fennel flavored toothpaste is made from fennel oil from the seeds, but too licorice-y for me.

Aniseed, anise seed or sweet cumin (Pimpinella anisum) is a different plant from fennel seed, with a more intense licorice flavor. It’s found whole or ground in sweet pickles, salads, stews, marinades, soap, cookies, cakes, pastries, candies and breads in Germany, Scandinavia and other European countries. The ancients believed anise to cure jaundice, poisoning, indigestions, insomnia and wrinkles.

Anise and its extracts flavor a multitude of liqueurs and distilled liquors around the world. The Arabs have their arak, which they enjoy heavily diluted and always accompanied by lots of friends and zesty appetizers like olives and stuffed grape leaves. I have never sampled arak, nor Turkey’s raki, but I love an occasional Greek ouzo, a punch-packin, not-too-sweet hooch sometimes flavored with pressed grapes, mint, wintergreen and hazelnuts. To me, ouzo is far finer than the more cloying Italian digestivo sambuca or the syrupy French anisette.

Also less sweet is the French aperitif pastis, served in cafes with small bottles of water to dilute it, a lovely way to while away a little time before a French dinner. My favorite brand is Ricard, which is flavored with aromatic Provençal herbs and star anise rather than aniseed. Similar is our own Herbsaint, the New Orleans component of the Sazerac cocktail, mixed with brandy and bitters.

Pastis began as absinthe, the infamously dangerous favorite of fin-de-siècle artists and writers like Degas, Gauguin, Hemingway, Lautrec and Manet. Laden with hallucinogenic brain-rotting wormwood, la fée verte (the green fairy, for its greenish tinge) has been blamed for both the decline of Oscar Wilde and Van Gogh’s cutting off his own ear. It was accused of leading to TB, degeneracy and dementia and banned in 1915, but the reformulated wormwood-free pastis remains.[Absinthe is once again legal—JB 5-21-08]

Other anise liqueurs are D'Aristi Xtabentun from the Yucatan, German Kümmel with caraway and cumin, and Scandinavian aquavit (“water of life”), which also contains caraway or cumin, plus citrus peel and cardamom, and is drunk neat from the freezer.

Many of these anise-y liqueurs are clear in the bottle and turn opaque and milky when you add water, because the anise oil is invisible in alcohol but turns into white crystals when the alcohol content lowers.

The gorgeous star-shaped star anise comes from a dried fruit that grows on a small tree. Its strong taste can be overpowering if too much is used, but it shines if added whole to a marinade or a simmering braise for pork or beef then removed after cooking like a bay leaf. Star anise is one of the ingredients in Chinese five-spice powder.

For some of us, all these flavorings remind us of black jellybeans, or other kinds of licorice candy like Allsorts or licorice pipes. The original licorice (Glycyrrhiza glabra) was made from licorice root, a tall shrub with purple flowers, although licorice candy these days may contain part or all anise extract rather than real licorice root. Glycyrrhizin is 50 times sweeter than ordinary sugar. You’ll find an acid of this substance flavoring food and cosmetics, but most of it goes into tobacco. Licorice root is claimed to cause hypertension, fatigue and headaches, but reduces stomach acid.

Most of us ardently hate or love the sweet black stuff. Some go mad for it, lurking around candy stores looking for new kinds, sending away to Holland for the intensely salty kind, or seeking out Black Jack gum. Others toss those black jellybeans in the garbage with no regrets, saying they taste like burnt hair. I’m not nuts about licorice myself, although I don’t give away my black jellybeans, but I think I‘ll stick to my favorite forms of the flavor, fennel and pastis.

Jennifer Brizzi | P.O. Box 48 | Rhinecliff, New York 12574 | U.S.A.

jenniferbrizzi@yahoo.com

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