Pimpinella anisum, a single cultivated species with no culinary varieties worth separating; it is unrelated to star anise (Illicium verum), to liquorice (Glycyrrhiza glabra), and only distantly related to fennel (Foeniculum vulgare), all of which taste of it
Origin: The eastern Mediterranean and south-western Asia. The Levantine coast, Cyprus, and the Aegean islands are the likeliest wild ground, with Egypt the place it is first written down; no securely wild population has ever been identified, which is the usual signature of a plant cultivated for so long that its ancestor has been absorbed.
Anise is one of the small group of spices whose wild ancestor has vanished. Botanists place Pimpinella anisum in the eastern Mediterranean and south-western Asia, but no convincingly wild stand has been found, and the plant that grows outside gardens today is almost always an escape from one. It is a cultigen of very long standing: a plant so thoroughly taken into human hands that it no longer exists apart from them.
The habit of the plant explains a great deal about where it went. Anise is an annual, sown and harvested within a single season, and it wants a long warm summer to ripen its fruit properly. That combination made it portable in a way that a tree spice never is. A gardener who could not dream of raising cinnamon or nutmeg could grow anise from a spoonful of last year's crop, and monastic gardeners, Andalusi agronomists, and Dutch smallholders all did exactly that. It is why the plant travelled as a seed to be sown rather than as a cargo to be bought, and why almost every country it reached ended by growing its own.
What is harvested is not a seed at all but a schizocarp: a dry fruit that splits into two halves, each about five millimetres long, ridged, downy, greenish-grey when fresh and dulling to brown with age. The little curved stalk is often left attached, and its presence is a fair sign of careful hand-harvesting. The umbels ripen unevenly, so the crop is traditionally cut whole in the early morning whilst still damp, stooked, and threshed once dry, a method that has changed remarkably little.
The flavour is almost entirely one compound. trans-Anethole makes up somewhere between eighty and ninety-five per cent of the essential oil, and everything else in the seed is a modifier around it. That single-mindedness is why anise is so easily overdone, why it is the flavour people most often say they dislike, and why it behaves so predictably in the still. It is also why anise has always been valued as much for what it does to the body as for what it does to a dish: anethole is a carminative, which is a polite way of saying that anise settles a heavy stomach, and every culture that adopted the seed worked out that property independently and built it into the end of a meal.
Anise moved along two quite separate routes, and the difference between them accounts for almost every use it has today.
The first was the route of the seed, and it is the older by three thousand years. Anise went from the eastern Mediterranean into Egypt, where the Ebers Papyrus records it in about 1550 BCE, and out to the Aegean, where the Greeks called it ánison and Theophrastus described its cultivation. Rome took both the plant and the name, and Cato set down a recipe for mustaceum, the must cake baked on bay leaves with anise and cumin, which was eaten to settle a heavy dinner and handed out at weddings. When the Empire receded the seed stayed, kept alive in monastery gardens: Charlemagne's Capitulare de villis of about 795 orders anesum planted on every imperial estate, and the Frankish north has been sowing it ever since. Springerle in Swabia, Lebkuchen in Nuremberg, anijsmelk and the anise comfits of a Dutch birth all descend from that garden tradition rather than from any spice trade.
The southern arm of the same route ran with Arab agronomy along North Africa and into al-Andalus, where Ibn al-'Awwām wrote on its cultivation at Seville and Andalusi Arabic ḥabbat ḥulwa, the sweet grain, gave Spanish its matalahúva. From Seville the seed went to the Indies in the first Spanish ships, and it is at home now in Mexican festival bread and in the fried rings of squash and sweet potato that Lima eats in the street. The Dutch carried it in the other direction, to the Company garden at the Cape, where the Afrikaans baker and the Cape Malay cook took it up in the same decades and made two entirely different things of it.
The second route is the route of the still, and it is medieval and Islamic in origin. Arab distillers in the Levant found that anethole dissolves in spirit but not in water, and that a spirit charged with it turns milk-white the moment water is added. That trick, which colloid chemists now call the ouzo effect, produced ʿaraq, and ʿaraq produced almost everything else: Turkish rakı, Greek ouzo by way of the Ottoman stills of Thessaly and Lesvos, Spanish anís, Italian sambuca and mistrà, and, at the far western end, the absinthe of the Jura and the pastis that replaced it in Marseille after 1915. From Beirut to Marseille there runs a continuous belt of countries whose aperitif is the same seed in the same suspension, drunk with cold water, at the same hour, before the same kind of meal. It is one of the most coherent culinary regions in the world and nobody planned it.
Anise now occupies three positions, and most people meet it in the third without noticing.
The first is the baker's. Across the whole northern rim of the Mediterranean and the Frankish lands beyond it, anise is a bread and biscuit spice belonging to festivals: christopsomo at a Greek Christmas, pizzelle pressed on their irons in Abruzzo, springerle carrying a moulded picture through a Swabian winter, krachel at a Moroccan breakfast, the olive-oil wafers of Seville, and the anise-and-orange-blossom pan de muerto that stands on a Mexican ofrenda at the beginning of November. The pattern is remarkably consistent: anise turns up wherever a culture bakes something sweet for a particular day of the year rather than for Tuesday.
The second is the still, and by volume it dwarfs everything else. Turkey is the world's largest producer of anise seed and drinks a good deal of what it grows as rakı; Greece protects ouzo under European law as a product that may be made nowhere but Greece and Cyprus; Lebanon and Syria make arak; France makes pastis; Spain, Italy, Portugal, Colombia, and Mexico all have their own anise spirit. Nearly all of them are drunk in the same way, poured first and watered second so that the louche forms properly, and nearly all of them are drunk with food rather than before it.
The third is industrial and largely invisible. Anethole is the flavour of the cough sweet, the gripe water, the toothpaste, the black jelly bean, the British aniseed ball, and the drag lure that hounds follow across a field. Here anise competes with two cheaper sources of the same molecule, star anise and fennel, and frequently loses; a great deal of what is labelled anise flavour in commerce is in fact Illicium verum shipped from Guangxi, because it yields more anethole for less money.
That competition is worth stating plainly, because it is the single most confusing thing about this spice. Four unrelated plants taste of anise. Anise and fennel are both umbellifers and are genuine relatives, if distant ones. Star anise is a magnolia relative from southern China and shares nothing with either but the compound. Liquorice, a legume, arrives at a similar sweetness by an entirely different route, through glycyrrhizin. They are freely substituted, they are constantly confused, and in a Marseille pastis two of them are deliberately used together.
Historical Journey of Anise
The Levantine Coast, Cyprus & the Eastern Mediterranean — c. 2000 BCE
Anise begins on the eastern rim of the Mediterranean, on the coast that runs from the Orontes mouth down past Byblos and across to Cyprus, and it begins as a plant nobody can now find in the wild.
That absence is the interesting part. Pimpinella anisum is grown from Spain to Iran and has escaped from cultivation in a hundred places, but no population has ever been identified that is convincingly wild rather than feral, and the standard botanical surveys place its home in this region on the strength of relatives, climate, and the earliest records rather than of any living stand. It is the signature of a plant taken into the garden so early that its ancestor was absorbed and lost.
What this coast contributed was not a dish but a habit and a route. The seed is small, keeps for a season, and comes true from a spoonful of last year's crop, so it moved as something to be sown rather than as a cargo to be bought. Phoenician shipping carried it west to the Aegean and Egyptian demand pulled it south, and both journeys were under way long before anyone wrote either of them down. The same hills would supply the anise for arak three thousand years later, but that is a story for the stills of the Bekaa and not for this point, which is simply where the plant was.
The Nile Valley & Pharaonic Egypt — c. 1550 BCE
Egypt is where anise enters the written record, and it enters it as medicine. The Ebers Papyrus, compiled in about 1550 BCE and the fullest surviving Egyptian medical text, lists the seed amongst its remedies, chiefly for complaints of the stomach and the chest. Egyptian gardeners grew it along the Nile alongside cumin, coriander, and fenugreek, and the Delta has been a producer ever since; Egypt remains one of the largest exporters of anise seed in the world.
The use that survives is unbroken and entirely domestic. Yansoon is anise steeped in boiling water, taken sweetened and very hot, and it is what an Egyptian household reaches for against a cough, a cold, a colicky infant, or a stomach that has been overtaxed. It is sold on every street where tea is sold, and it belongs to the same family of restorative drinks as helba and karkadeh. Nursing mothers drink it in the belief that it encourages milk, a belief the Mediterranean holds from one end to the other and which turns out to have a basis: anethole has a weak oestrogenic action.
The seed keeps its ceremonial place too. At the subūʿ, the celebration held on the seventh day after a birth, sweet spiced drinks are handed round the house, and anise is amongst them. It is a reasonable claim that no other culture has kept one use of one spice going quite so steadily for three and a half thousand years.
Chios, Attica & the Aegean World — c. 600 BCE
Greek shipping brought anise across the Aegean, and Greek writers gave it the name every European language now uses. Theophrastus described its cultivation in the Historia Plantarum, Dioscorides set out its medical properties, and Pythagoras is reported to have thought well of it, which in the ancient world counted as an endorsement.
Greek was, however, careless about the word. Ánison and ánēthon were both applied to anise and to dill, two umbellifers that resemble one another closely in the field, and the confusion passed into Latin and from Latin into every language that borrowed from it. The most durable consequence is a verse of the King James Bible, where the Pharisees are made to tithe mint, anise, and cummin; the Greek word is ánēthon and means dill. Modern Greek has settled the matter by adding an adjective and calling the seed glykániso, sweet anise.
What the Greeks did with it in the kitchen has lasted better than the terminology. Anise belongs to the Greek festival loaf, and it is at its most concentrated in christopsomo, the Christ-bread baked on Christmas Eve and marked with a cross, in which anise, mastic from Chios, and orange are worked into an enriched dough and walnuts pressed into the crust. It is baked once a year, in the house rather than the bakery, and it is not eaten until the head of the household has cut it.
Rome & the Roman Empire — c. 160 BCE
Rome took anise from the Greeks, kept their name for it as anisum, and put it to work at the end of dinner. The earliest full instructions we have for cooking with it are Cato's, written about 160 BCE in De Agri Cultura: mustaceum, a cake of grape must, flour, lard, and cheese, seasoned with anise and cumin and baked on a bed of bay leaves. Cato says plainly what it is for. It is eaten after a heavy meal, and it is handed to the guests at a wedding, from which a reasonable if untidy line can be drawn to the celebration cakes of modern Europe by way of the mostaccioli and mustazzoli of the Italian south.
Pliny gives the fullest Roman account. He recommends anise with practically everything, credits it with sweetening the breath and settling the stomach, and passes on the belief that a sprig kept by the bed wards off bad dreams. Anise seeds turn up at Roman sites as far north as Britain, which is a fair measure of how thoroughly the army and the estate garden carried it.
Italy never let it go. The clearest survival is the pizzelle of Abruzzo, batter pressed between two carved irons into a thin patterned wafer and scented with nothing but anise; it is claimed for the eighth century, is baked for the feast of San Costanzo at Ortona, and is made in enormous quantities at Christmas and at weddings. Italy's other anise inheritance is liquid, in the sambuca of Civitavecchia and the mistrà of the Marche, and belongs to the second half of this journey.
Reichenau, Swabia & the Carolingian Empire — c. 795 CE
When Roman authority withdrew from the north the anise stayed, because it had been planted rather than imported. The Capitulare de villis, the estate ordinance issued for Charlemagne about 795, lists anesum amongst the plants to be grown on every imperial holding, and Walahfrid Strabo's Hortulus, written at the abbey of Reichenau on Lake Constance a generation or so later, treats it as an ordinary garden herb. This is the mechanism by which a Mediterranean annual became a fixture of German baking: not trade but administration, and then the monastery garden.
Swabia produced the most particular thing anyone has ever done with the seed. Springerle are made from a stiff egg-and-sugar dough pressed into carved wooden moulds, cut out, and then left uncovered overnight so that the surface dries and holds the image; when they go into a cool oven the base rises and the picture does not, and the biscuit springs up onto a pale foot. Moulds survive from the fifteenth century, some of them very fine, and the pictures were once a way of putting a saint, a proverb, or a scene from a fair into the hands of people who could not read. Anise is the only flavouring, and it belongs there: the biscuit is dry, hard, and meant to keep, and anise is what keeps it interesting.
Nuremberg's contribution is Lebkuchen, in which anise is one voice in the town's celebrated spice blend rather than the soloist, and the anise-and-hartshorn tradition runs on through Anisplätzchen, Pfeffernüsse, and the whole German Christmas biscuit tin.
Fez, Kairouan & the Maghreb — c. 900 CE
Anise travelled west along North Africa with the agricultural expansion that followed the Arab conquests, moving through Ifriqiya and the Kairouan hinterland into the gardens of Fez, and the Maghreb has grown it ever since. Two Arabic names are in use here: ḥabbat ḥulwa, the sweet grain, which is the ordinary Moroccan word, and nafaa, the useful one, which tells you what the seed was thought to be for.
Morocco puts anise almost entirely into things eaten with mint tea, and the pairing is deliberate: the seed is warm and sweet where the tea is sharp and green. Krachel are the everyday case, small enriched rolls studded with sesame and scented with anise and orange-blossom water, eaten at breakfast and at the late afternoon, and sold from bakeries in stacks. The other great use is sellou, the pressed sweet of toasted flour, browned almonds, and sesame that a Moroccan family makes for Ramadan and for the birth of a child; anise and fennel are the two seeds that define it, and it is eaten by the spoonful because it is far too rich for anything else.
Anise also goes, in small quantity, into khobz and into the round semolina breads of the countryside, and it appears amongst the very long ingredient lists of ras el hanout. In neither of those is it the leading voice, and the entry does not pretend otherwise.
Córdoba, Seville & al-Andalus — c. 1000 CE
Anise crossed from the Maghreb into al-Andalus with the same wave of plants and irrigation techniques that gave Iberia its citrus, its sugar cane, and its aubergines. Ibn al-'Awwām, writing at Seville in the twelfth century, gives instructions for growing it in the Kitāb al-Filāḥa, and the Andalusi Arabic name went into Castilian and stayed there: ḥabbat ḥulwa, the sweet grain, became matalahúva. Spanish is unusual in holding two words for the seed at once, the Arabic matalahúva that a baker uses and the Latin-descended anís on the bottle, and neither has driven out the other.
Andalusia's characteristic use is the thinnest and plainest thing made anywhere with the seed. Tortas de aceite are wafers of flour, olive oil, sugar, sesame, and anise, rolled out almost to transparency, sprinkled and baked until they blister and shatter; they have been made around Castilleja de la Cuesta outside Seville for as long as anyone can date, and are still wrapped one by one in waxed paper by hand. The seed goes equally into pan de higo, the pressed fig loaf of the Moorish south, into rosquillas de anís, and into fried Christmas buñuelos.
Seville matters twice over. It was the intellectual centre of Andalusi agronomy, and from 1503 it held the monopoly on the Indies trade, so every ship that carried Spanish seed to the Americas cleared from its river. What follows in Mexico and in Peru leaves from this point.
Mount Lebanon & the Bekaa Valley — c. 1200 CE
This point is the hinge of the whole entry, and it is not about growing anise but about distilling it. Anise had grown on these hills since before it was written about; what changed in the medieval Levant was the still. Arab alchemists had refined distillation to a degree unmatched anywhere, and the word alcohol is itself Arabic. Somebody discovered that a grape spirit redistilled over aniseed does something no other flavouring does: anethole dissolves in the spirit but not in water, so the moment cold water is added it comes out of solution as a cloud of microscopic droplets and the glass turns opaque and pearl-white.
ʿAraq is the result, and the Levant has made it ever since. The best comes from the Bekaa, the high plateau between the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon ranges where the grapes are grown, and it is triple-distilled and rested in clay. It is never drunk alone or without food; it belongs to the mezze table and is sipped for two or three hours alongside twenty or thirty small dishes, and the order of pouring is fixed. Arak first, then water, then ice.
The Levantine kitchen uses the seed dry as well. Sfouf is the plainest example: a semolina cake turned brilliant yellow with turmeric, scented with anise, and baked in a tin brushed with tahini, cut into diamonds and eaten with coffee. Kaʿak and the anise breads of the feast days belong to the same tradition.
Everything downstream of this point is a variation on the still. Ottoman Anatolia took ʿaraq and made rakı; from Ottoman stills it reached the Aegean and became ouzo; and the family eventually stretched to Marseille.
Mexico City, Puebla & New Spain — c. 1520 CE
Anise went to the Americas in the first Spanish ships out of Seville, as a garden seed rather than as a cargo, and it was growing in the conventual gardens of New Spain within a generation of the conquest. The convent kitchens of Puebla and Mexico City did what convent kitchens everywhere did with a Spanish sweet repertoire and a new set of local ingredients, and anise came through the process intact.
Where it settled was the festival bread. Pan de muerto, the round loaf set on the ofrenda for the Day of the Dead with its ring of bone-shaped canillas and its teardrop at the crown, is scented with orange zest, orange-blossom water, and anise, and the anise is what stops the sweetness from being merely sweet. It is baked and eaten only in the weeks around the beginning of November. The rest of the year the seed goes into the enormous repertoire of pan dulce sold by the tray in every Mexican bakery, into buñuelos and rosca, into atole de anís, and into té de anís, which is drunk for a bad stomach exactly as yansoon is drunk in Cairo.
Mexico is worth a word of caution, because it holds two anises and a third thing that is neither. Anís is this seed; anís estrella is star anise, which arrived from the opposite direction on the Manila galleons; and pericón is Tagetes lucida, a marigold that smells of anise and is used quite differently. All three are in the atlas, and they are not interchangeable.
Lima & the Viceroyalty of Peru — c. 1535 CE
Lima was founded in 1535 and provisioned from Seville, and anise arrived with the rest of the Spanish garden. What Peru made of it is the single most inventive thing in this journey, because it involved throwing away most of the Spanish original.
Spain brought buñuelos, fritters of wheat dough. Colonial Lima had limited wheat and abundant squash and sweet potato, and the cooks of the city, largely African and Andean women working in Spanish households, rebuilt the fritter around what was there. Picarones are made from a yeasted batter of zapallo macre and camote cooked down and mashed, slackened with a little flour, and raised with an infusion of anise; the batter is dropped into hot fat as a ring formed on the fingers, and the finished rings are drenched in chancaca, a syrup of unrefined cane sugar simmered with fig leaf, orange peel, cinnamon, and clove. The anise is not a garnish. It is worked into the dough at the raising stage and it is what makes the dish smell the way it does from three streets away.
They are street food and have been for centuries, sold by the picaronera from a copper pan, and they are most associated with October, when the Señor de los Milagros procession fills central Lima and the stalls follow it. Ricardo Palma noticed them in the Tradiciones Peruanas. Anise runs on through the rest of the Peruvian sweet kitchen, in arroz zambito, in the anise bread of the highlands, and in the anisado that is drunk in the sierra.
Amsterdam & the Dutch Republic — c. 1600 CE
The Low Countries inherited anise from the Frankish garden tradition and then grew it commercially on the sandy soils of Zeeland and Brabant, and the Dutch have built more ritual around this one seed than anybody else in Europe.
Beschuit met muisjes is the ritual in question, and it is not a figure of speech to call it national. When a child is born the household buys rusks and a tin of muisjes, anise seeds coated in hard sugar so that each keeps a small tail and looks like a mouse; the rusks are buttered thickly and scattered with them, and every visitor to the house is given one. Pink and white are put out for a girl, blue and white for a boy, and orange for a royal birth. The custom is old, certainly seventeenth-century and probably older, and it rests on the same belief the Mediterranean holds: that anise is good for a nursing mother and good for the child. The sugar shell was also once thought to keep evil away from the cradle.
The other Dutch use is anijsmelk, hot milk infused with anise seed and sweetened, which is a bedtime drink for a child and a winter drink for anybody, and which is sold in the form of anijsblokjes, pressed cubes of anise and sugar to be dropped into a pan of milk. Both uses are quiet, domestic, and unbroken, and both went to sea with the Company.
Tekirdağ, Çeşme & Ottoman Anatolia — c. 1650 CE
The Ottomans took ʿaraq from the Arab provinces, kept the word, and made it their own: rakı is the Turkish form of the same name. Evliya Çelebi, writing in the seventeenth century, counts the arak-sellers of Istanbul amongst the city's guilds, which is a plain indication of how established the drink already was despite recurring official disapproval of it.
Anatolia is not merely a consumer. Turkey is the largest producer of anise seed in the world, grown chiefly around Çeşme on the Aegean coast and inland in Burdur, Denizli, and Antalya, and Turkish law is specific about what may be done with it: rakı is made by redistilling suma, a spirit of grape or raisin, over aniseed, and nothing else may be used to flavour it. Tekirdağ on the Sea of Marmara is the name most often on the bottle.
The drinking is as codified as the making. Rakı is poured into a tall narrow glass, watered until it clouds, and never drunk without food: white cheese and honeydew melon at minimum, and properly a long table of meze ending with grilled fish, an evening the Turks call balık-rakı. It is aslan sütü, lion's milk, which is what the Lebanese call arak too, and it is drunk slowly over several hours in company. The distinguishing feature against its neighbours is the grape base; ouzo is generally built on a neutral spirit, and pastis on nothing but alcohol and water.
The Cape of Good Hope — 1652 CE
The Dutch East India Company established its refreshment station at Table Bay in 1652 and planted a garden to supply passing ships. Anise went in with the rest of the Dutch kitchen garden, and at the Cape it did something it did nowhere else: it was taken up almost simultaneously by two communities who had nothing else in common, and produced two dishes that are constantly confused and are not remotely the same.
Mosbolletjies are the Cape Dutch inheritance and belong to the wine districts. The dough is raised not with baker's yeast but with mos, fermenting grape must from the harvest, and flavoured with crushed aniseed; the buns are baked touching in a cluster so they must be torn apart, and what is not eaten fresh is dried slowly into beskuit for the coffee of the following months. It is a harvest bread, and it tastes of the two things the Boland has most of.
Koesisters are the Cape Malay inheritance and belong to Bo-Kaap, made by the descendants of people brought to the Cape from the Indonesian archipelago and elsewhere in the Company's territories, many of them as slaves. They are spiced, boiled in syrup, and rolled in coconut, and the spice mixture in which anise sits beside cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, and dried naartjie peel is the whole point of them. They are eaten on a Sunday morning. The Afrikaans koeksister, plaited and drenched in cold syrup and carrying no spice at all, is a different thing with a similar name, and Cape Town will correct you.
Marseille, the Jura & Provence — c. 1797 CE
Anise reached Gaul with Rome, gave French its anis straight from Latin anisum, and was grown in Provence for centuries without anybody making much fuss about it. Then, in the last years of the eighteenth century, it became the defining drink of the French south by a route nobody could have predicted.
The first stage was absinthe. A preparation of green anise, fennel, and grande wormwood was being sold in the Val-de-Travers in the 1790s, and Henri-Louis Pernod set up in Pontarlier in the Jura in 1805 to make it at scale. By the end of the nineteenth century absinthe was the national aperitif and l'heure verte was an institution, and by 1915 it was banned outright, blamed for a catalogue of social ills of which it was guilty of some and framed for the rest by a wine lobby that had lost its market to phylloxera and wanted it back.
The second stage was the replacement. Anise drinks without wormwood were permitted again in the 1920s at restricted strength, and in 1932 Paul Ricard began selling what he called le vrai pastis de Marseille: anise and liquorice together, at forty-five degrees, unmistakably yellow. Pastis is the only member of the anise family that combines two of the four anise-tasting plants on purpose, and the liquorice is what makes it rounder and sweeter than ouzo or rakı.
The ritual is Provençal and exact. Roughly one part to five of cold water, poured in that order and never the reverse, ice last if at all, drunk standing at a bar at midday or sitting under a plane tree at six. A perroquet takes mint syrup, a tomate grenadine, a mauresque orgeat. Anise is also in the kitchen here, in the navettes of Marseille and in the fennel and pastis that go under a whole grilled sea bass.
Plomari, Lesvos & Tyrnavos — 1856 CE
Greek anise distilling grew out of the Ottoman still rather than the classical garden. The ancestor is tsipouro, the pomace spirit made by the monasteries of Mount Athos from the fourteenth century onwards; when aniseed was added to it in quantity and the result rectified, the outcome was ouzo. The name is disputed and probably always will be: the tidiest story has crates of Thessalian spirit stencilled uso Massalia, for use in Marseille, and the stencil becoming the name, which is charming and unproven.
What is documented is the industry. Distilleries were established in Tyrnavos in Thessaly and, decisively, in Plomari on the southern coast of Lesvos, where Nikolaos Barbayannis founded his house in 1860 and where the island's soft water and its own anise made the standard by which the rest is judged. Roughly half of all Greek ouzo still comes from Lesvos.
Ouzo is now protected in European law: it may be made only in Greece and Cyprus, must be flavoured with anise, and a proportion of its alcohol must be distilled in traditional copper pot stills. Fennel, coriander, cardamom, and Chian mastic are permitted alongside the anise, and each house guards its own combination.
It is drunk the way the whole belt drinks: watered until it clouds, iced afterwards, and never without mezédes. In Greece the pairing runs to grilled octopus, salted anchovy, and fried courgette rather than to the Turkish white cheese and melon, and the establishment that serves it, the ouzeri, is a category of restaurant in its own right.
