The Book of Spice by John O'Connell

Author:John O'Connell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

The yellow, fibrous sticks of its raw root have been chewed for millennia as mouth-fresheners, and still are in Italy and Spain. Liquorice can be bought ground and in dried slivers, though it is more commonly sold as hard black sticks manufactured from the boiled root extract. Its flavour, as evocative as Proust’s madeleine for generations of schoolchildren, is bittersweet, slightly salty: redolent of seasides and hospital corridors.

Of all the liquorice-based sweets, Bassett’s Allsorts – alternating layers of refined black liquorice and brightly coloured, marzipanlike paste – have the firmest footing in the national consciousness. They date from 1899 and were, so the story goes, inspired by an accident that befell a Bassett’s sales rep called Charlie Thompson. He dropped a tray of samples he was showing a client in Leicester, mixing them up and prompting her to ask ‘What have you got to show me now?’ He replied: ‘All sorts.’ Before Allsorts, however, there were (and continue to be) Pontefract Cakes: shiny, black, coin-shaped sweets about 2 cm in diameter, stamped with an image of a castle and an owl. They are still manufactured in Pontefract, although the liquorice used to make them has been imported since the 1880s, when demand for the cakes began to exceed supply – first from Spain (hence ‘Spanish’ as Yorkshire slang for liquorice), now mostly from Russia.

Pontefract Cakes were developed in the early seventeenth century. At first they were marketed as a medicine. Then a local chemist called George Dunhill suggested including newly abundant sugar in the recipe to make them even sweeter. (Liquorice is already fifty times sweeter than sugar, though its initial ‘hit’ is less brutal and its ‘delay’ longer.) The sweets were hand-made and hand-stamped until the 1960s. Pontefract hosts an annual liquorice festival to celebrate the connection.

A wonderfully efficient demulcent and expectorant, especially when mixed with menthol, liquorice is commonly found in cough medicines and lozenges. Echoing Arab manuals, Culpeper recommends it for ‘dry cough, hoarseness, wheezing and shortness of breath and all complaints of the breast and lung’, also for consumption and bladder infections.

‘In cold, damp Northern Europe, where colds, catarrh and other pulmonary problems were rife, liquorice was considered an essential commodity,’ writes David C. Stuart.213 Another popular medical use was in the treatment of gastric ulcers, glycyrrhizin being chemically similar to carbenoxolone, a commonly prescribed anti-ulcer drug. Having found its way along the Silk Road into China, liquorice became almost as important as ginseng – deployed as a pick-me-up and as an antidote to poisoning both by aconite and by a juice made from the shrub Ephedra sinica (ephedrine) that the Chinese were in the habit of drinking as a sexual stimulant.

Beware, though, for while it can be an effective medicine, it is poisonous in large quantities. In 2004 a fifty-six-year-old woman from Yorkshire was admitted to hospital after overdosing on liquorice. She had, admittedly, been eating a lot of it – 200 g of Pontefract Cakes a day, ostensibly to relieve chronic constipation. She experienced catastrophic muscle failure after her potassium levels plummeted and her blood pressure soared.

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