Reading For Whom the Bell Tolls in Spain, appropriately enough, I came across these lines. Absinthe “takes the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafés, of all the chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month . . . .”
If anyone knew absinthe, Hemingway did. “Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife underhand into the piano. The woodworms are so bad and eat hell out of all the furniture that you can always claim the woodworms did it.”
Cool word play, for wormwood is a prime constituent of absinthe, known as “La Fée Verte” (The Green Fairy), a tribute to its seductive powers.
An air of danger, a wild romance with writers, and a tortured history — that’s why absinthe fascinates me. So when a woman bound for Southern France said, “I’m bringing you some absinthe,” I was ready to dance with the green fairy.
Upon returning, she handed me a slender box with art of a green, shapely nude woman bearing wings. I opened my bottle of Liqueur Aux Plantes D’ Absinthe (110 proof!) and inhaled licorice.
That hint of licorice comes from herbs, especially Artemisia absinthium, the infamous wormwood with its thujone, a convulsant poison similar to marijuana’s THC. No worries, though. If you binged on absinthe, alcohol poisoning would get you long before thujone could.
Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Poe, Picasso and other creative souls featured absinthe in their works. Some went insane, making it easy for prohibitionists to portray absinthe as an addictive psychoactive drug. By 1915, the United States and most European countries had banned it. Today, some experts attribute absinthe’s delirious effects to toxic artificial coloring such as copper sulfate. So pay absinthe’s bad rep no attention.
Absinthe’s making a comeback. In 2007, it became legal to sell authentic varieties using 19th century distilling methods. Some liquor stores sell absinthe because the export version contains no wormwood. I, myself, have seen a bottle at Total Wine. Try some.
The French do it this way. Pour a dose into a glass. Place a sugar cube on a flat perforated spoon, and rest it across the glass. Drip iced water (three parts water, one part absinthe) over the sugar cube. True absintheurs drop the water slowly, watching each drip cut a milky swath through the peridot green absinthe.
Absinthe’s reputedly an aphrodisiac. Does absinthe really make the heart fonder? Dance with the green fairy and see for yourself.