Apples and Absinthe

March 16, 2006

One fact about modern life that often goes unobserved is the way certain popular foods and drinks have faded away.. become extinct. Large grocery stores are convenient for all of us, but they also have a finite number of slots for fruits and vegetables, and inevitably varieties get streamlined to meet the general taste. I have nothing but admiration for those who try to preserve old versions of food.

The New Yorker on occasion runs articles on this topic. In the issue that came out September 5, 2005 I found an article entitled "Renaissance Pears: Saving the favorite fruits of the Medici." John Seabrook notes concerning the peasants in Umbria and Tuscany:

The farmers planted as many varieties as possible, because the different trees would bear fruit at different times over the growing season. The mountainous topography of Umbria, and its lack of roads, insured that varieties common to one valley were unknown in the next. When a woman married, she often carried seeds from her family's farm with her, in order to prepare her mother's recipes, which were based on the particular varieties of fruit in her home valley.

The story continues, however, and this kind of local food culture fades after World War II. All those old varieties of pears and apples were forgotten. We now rely on a woman such as Dalla Ragione, who practices archeologia arborea, to rediscover these old varieties.. and give people a chance to taste these fruits.

Last week the New Yorker (March 13, 2006) came out with a similar article, this one on the drink absinthe. Emily assures me that this drink does exist and tastes something like black licorice. But this modern version of absinthe is quite distant from the liquor that was so popular in the 19th century—before it was banned in the early twentieth century and effectively became an extinct drink. The article by Jack Turner chronicles the efforts by Ted Breaux to reinvent this drink, famous or its bright green color.

Breaux tasted his pre-ban absinthe, and performed a chemical analysis, to give him an idea of what he was aiming at. Through archival research, he found the "protocols"—recipes followed by the great nineteenth-century distilleries—and stayed there late in his lab after work to make absinthe according to their instructions. His results, he recalls with a laugh, were not impressive: "What I had there didn't seem convincing." He began to realize that the knowledge communicable in a recipe was useless without the tricks of the trade that distillers failed to include in their protocols, perhaps unwilling to write them down.

That paragraph gives a sense of the labor needed to re-invent something that was perfected over a long period of time and for which all living traditions have been lost.

Why should anyone care about old apples and original absinthe? My answer to that is central to the aims of Old Roads and to my vocation as a teacher. An unsavory element of our increasingly globalized culture is the rift between our own experience of the world and that of people who lived in the past. In our cut-off modern world fundamentalisms offering false versions of the past flourish.. and we find it harder to understand who we are.. since we have no idea where we come from.

Having a sense for how apples and absinthe tasted is in itself no big deal, but in the aggregate these kinds of labors to rediscover the past build thin fibers of connection between ourselves and the past. One goal of Old Roads is to highlight these efforts.