| 21 January 2010
| Article Index |
|---|
| The Bitter Miracle |
| The Beginning... |
| Tasting Notes... |
| All Pages |
Now that I’m 35 years old, I can feel myself losing the imperviousness of youth. It’s the same with all of my friends. We gain weight, lose hair, fall asleep early, throw out our backs, and blow our knees. Worst of all, I know someone whose stomach has become sensitive with age. For a whole month, he had to cut cheese out of his diet. When you see someone’s quality of life is so hobbled, it’s easy to see thorny philosophical problems in a new light. I can’t say I counseled him to consider euthanasia, yet I can’t say I discouraged him either.
With these cracks in the foundation, it’s no wonder that I notice a lot of advertisements for alternative medicine. Echinacea for colds. St John’s Wort for depression. Chinese medicine for low energy. Chiropractors for crumbling lumbars. I notice, but I do not partake. For me, there is only one alternative remedy that counts. It is a miracle drug — what Moses and his biblical cronies would refer to as the Balm of Gilead. Best of all, I can find it at the liquor store. It is called Fernet Branca Amer.Fernet Branca is an Italian herbal liqueur with an almost magical ability to assist digestion. No matter how much I eat, no matter how rich the sauce or how fatty the duck, it can calm my stomach. My wife and I take it like medicine when we are afflicted by any sort of dyspepsia, be it the flu or food poisoning. If that weren’t enough, Fernet Branca is also recommended for motion sickness, headaches and hangovers. Since it’s 40 per cent alcohol, it can presumably also be used to disinfect wounds or clean your CD player.
Fernet Branca is part of the family of Italian liqueurs called amari or bitters. In Italy, an amaro is traditionally drunk as a digestif. Like bitters from Germany or France, they are produced by steeping herbs, roots, flowers, bark and spices in alcoholic spirits. The ingredients are limited only by the imagination; some amari contain nuts, fruit peels, vegetables and bits of mineral.
There are several different styles of amaro. The Fernet style is the bitterest because there is little sugar added to this dense concoction of herbs. Vermouth is perhaps the best known because of its pride of place in the Martini. It is lighter — its name comes from the fact that it used to be infused with wormwood or wermut. Campari is another light style of amaro.
Some amari are so heavily sweetened that it is hard to think of them as bitters at all — for example, Limoncello is technically an amaro since it is made by macerating citrus rinds in alcohol and sugar. Between the two extremes of Fernet and Limoncello is the most common style of medium amaro — a viscous digestif liqueur that balances the astringent herbs with a strong dose of sugar.