Illicium verum, the only edible species; Illicium anisatum, Japanese star anise, is a neurotoxic look-alike and is never food
Origin: A single small region: the karst hills where Guangxi, southern Yunnan, and Guangdong meet the northern Vietnamese border, principally Lạng Sơn and Cao Bằng. It is grown almost nowhere else even now.
Star anise is the least travelled of the great spices. Pepper, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg all left their homelands and were planted successfully across the tropics; star anise never did. Something between eighty and ninety per cent of the world's supply still comes from the same few hundred kilometres of karst hill country where Guangxi and Yunnan meet Lạng Sơn and Cao Bằng in northern Vietnam, and attempts to establish it elsewhere have mostly failed. The tree wants humid subtropical shade, acid soil, and a great deal of patience: it fruits at around six years and does not reach full yield until fifteen or twenty.
The fruit is a follicle, and the eight-pointed woody star is the spice; the seed inside each arm contributes comparatively little. It is picked green and dried in the sun until it turns the colour of rust and opens.
The most important thing to know about it is a warning. Illicium verum is the only species that may be eaten. Illicium anisatum, the Japanese star anise or shikimi, looks so similar that the two are difficult to tell apart once dried, and it contains anisatin, a potent neurotoxin that causes seizures. In Japan it is grown for temple and grave incense and is understood to be poisonous. Adulterated and mislabelled shipments have caused genuine harm, most notably in a series of infant poisonings in Spain and the Netherlands in the early 2000s traced to star anise teas given for colic. The practical rule is to buy from a reputable spice merchant and to be suspicious of stars that are misshapen, have more than eight points, or smell sharply medicinal rather than sweet.
Star anise moved as cargo rather than as a crop, which is why its journey is a map of trade routes rather than of plantations.
Within China it went everywhere and became structural. It is the leading note of wǔ xiāng fěn, five-spice powder, and the indispensable element of red-braising, of the master stock, and of the tea egg. Southward it crossed into Đại Việt, where the growing region straddles the border anyway, and became the defining aroma of phở and of the caramel braises of the north. Cantonese and Fujianese merchants carried it along the maritime routes into Siam, Malacca, and the Indonesian archipelago, and Chinese communities in each place built it into local cooking: into Malay ayam masak merah, into Sumatran soto, and into the Hokkien pork rib soup that became bak kut teh. Fujianese settlers took it across the strait to Taiwan, where it anchors the braises that define the island's everyday food.
Westward it reached the Indian coasts through the same trade, becoming chakra phool, the wheel flower, in the masalas of Goa and Chettinad, and the Portuguese carried it home from Goa to Lisbon.
The crossing that matters most is the one nobody expects. Star anise reached the Americas across the Pacific, not the Atlantic. From 1565 until 1815 the Manila Galleons ran between Manila and Acapulco carrying Chinese goods into New Spain, and star anise went with them. It is why anís estrella is at home in Mexican sweets and Christmas punch, and why it arrived in Mexico a century or more before it was common in northern Europe. Europe received it later and by sea from the east, through the Dutch and English companies, where it settled into mulled wine and into the anise liqueurs of the Mediterranean.
Star anise occupies two positions that have almost nothing to do with each other.
The first is culinary and is overwhelmingly Asian. It is the backbone of Chinese braising in every form: red-braised pork, master stock, soy sauce chicken, tea eggs, the roast meats hanging in a Cantonese shop window, and the beef noodle soups of Taiwan. It is one of the two or three things that make phở smell like phở. Outside Asia it is used far more narrowly, chiefly in sweet preparations, in mulled and spiced drinks, and in the anise liqueurs of the Mediterranean, where it supplies much of the anethole in commercial pastis, ouzo, and sambuca.
That anethole is worth pausing on. It is the compound responsible for the anise flavour, and it is shared by three entirely unrelated plants: star anise, a magnolia relative; green anise, an umbellifer; and fennel, another umbellifer. Liquorice, a legume, tastes similar by way of a different compound altogether. Four unrelated families arriving at the same flavour is one of the odder coincidences in the plant kingdom, and it is why the four are so often substituted for one another despite sharing no botanical relationship whatever.
The second position is pharmaceutical, and it briefly made star anise a strategic commodity. The spice is the principal commercial source of shikimic acid, the starting material for oseltamivir, the antiviral sold as Tamiflu. When avian influenza raised the prospect of a pandemic in 2005, the manufacturer was reported to be using a substantial share of the world crop, prices rose sharply, and a culinary spice grown in a few Chinese and Vietnamese valleys found itself the subject of national stockpiling debates. Synthetic and fermentation routes to shikimic acid have since reduced that dependence, but the episode remains the clearest modern example of a kitchen spice becoming a matter of state.
Historical Journey of Star Anise
Guangxi, Yunnan & the Sino-Vietnamese Border Hills — c. 200 BCE
Star anise comes from one place and has essentially stayed there. Illicium verum is native to the humid karst hills where Guangxi and southern Yunnan meet Lạng Sơn and Cao Bằng across the Vietnamese border, and something between eighty and ninety per cent of the world's supply still grows within that small compass. This makes it the least dispersed of the major spices: pepper, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg were all successfully transplanted across the tropics, and star anise never was.
The tree is slow and particular. It wants shade, acid soil, and humidity, it does not fruit until about its sixth year, and it does not reach full yield for fifteen or twenty. The eight-pointed star is a woody follicle, picked green and dried in the sun until it turns rust-coloured and splits open.
In Chinese cooking it became structural rather than decorative. It is the leading voice in wǔ xiāng fěn, five-spice powder, the blend that governs a whole family of southern Chinese cooking, and it is the indispensable element of the braise: red-cooked pork, soy-braised beef shin, the master stock, and the tea egg all depend on it. Chinese medicine classes it as warming and prescribes it against cold in the stomach, which is a fair description of what it does on the plate, since it belongs almost exclusively to long, rich, fatty braises and hardly ever to anything quick.
Lạng Sơn & Đại Việt — c. 500 CE
The growing region straddles the border, so star anise did not so much travel into Vietnam as already be there. Lạng Sơn and Cao Bằng provinces are amongst the largest producers in the world, the trees grown on hillsides in the same way and often by the same families across generations, and hồi is a significant Vietnamese export.
What Vietnam did with it is distinct from what China did. In the north it became the defining aroma of phở, where it sits in a small fixed spice bundle with cassia, coriander seed, clove, and black cardamom, and where it is the note that a diner will name even if they can name nothing else in the bowl. It is equally central to the caramel braises that run through the whole cuisine: thịt kho tàu, pork and eggs simmered in caramel and coconut water, and bò kho, the beef stew that sits somewhere between a Chinese red braise and a French daube, and which is the clearest single dish in the atlas for showing what the spice does to beef.
The border has been contested, closed, and reopened many times, and the spice has crossed it in both directions throughout, largely indifferent to the state of relations above it.
Guangzhou & Guangdong — c. 900 CE
Canton took star anise and built an entire technique around it. The Cantonese repertoire of braised, roasted, and master-stocked meats is unimaginable without it, and it is the spice that a shop window full of hanging roast duck, char siu, and crisp-skinned pork belly smells of before you reach the door.
Three things anchor it here. Lǔ shuǐ, the master stock, is kept, strained, boiled, and handed down for years, and star anise is one of its four pillars alongside cassia, cǎo guǒ, and dried tangerine peel; soy sauce chicken is the dish that stock most famously produces. Char siu, the barbecued pork of the shop window, takes its character from five-spice, in which star anise leads. And siu yuk, roast pork belly, is rubbed with five-spice beneath a skin dried and blistered into glass.
The Cantonese merchant networks are also what carried the spice outward. It went south into Siam, Malacca, and the Indonesian archipelago in Chinese ships, east across the strait to Taiwan with Fujianese settlers, west to the Indian coasts, and, most improbably, across the Pacific to Mexico in the holds of the Manila Galleons.
Goa & the Coromandel Coast — c. 1300 CE
Star anise reached the Indian coasts through the same maritime trade that carried every other eastern good, and India gave it the best name it has anywhere: chakra phool, the wheel flower, which describes the thing exactly.
It never became a pan-Indian spice, and that is worth being precise about. It is absent from most northern cooking and from the everyday garam masala of the plains. Where it took hold was on the coasts that traded directly with the east and had absorbed outside influence for centuries: in Goa, where it goes into the xacuti masala alongside a long roll-call of roasted whole spices; and in Chettinad in Tamil Nadu, whose merchant community traded across South East Asia for generations and whose cooking is the most spice-forward in the south. In both, star anise is one voice in a large and deliberately complex blend rather than a solo.
From Goa the Portuguese carried it home, which is how a Chinese border spice found its way into Iberian preserves and sweets.
Ayutthaya & the Kingdom of Siam — c. 1400 CE
Chinese traders had been resident in Siam for centuries before Ayutthaya became a great entrepôt, and star anise arrived with them rather than through any European route. Where it settled in Thai cooking is revealing: not in the green and red curries of the central plain, which are built on fresh aromatics pounded to a paste, but in the dishes that carry a foreign accent.
Massaman is the clearest case. It is the curry Thailand acknowledges as coming from outside, its name derived from a word for Muslim, and it is built on dry roasted spices rather than fresh ones: cardamom, cinnamon, clove, cumin, and star anise, which is the combination of a Persian or Indian kitchen rather than a Thai one. It is richer, sweeter, and slower than anything in the indigenous repertoire.
The spice also went into the Chinese-influenced braises of the Thai-Chinese kitchen and, more visibly to any visitor, into cha yen, Thai iced tea, where star anise and tamarind seed are amongst the things that give the orange brew its distinctive perfume.
Malacca & the Malay Peninsula — c. 1500 CE
Malacca was the hinge of the eastern trade, and the Hokkien and Cantonese communities that settled along the strait brought their spice cupboard with them. Star anise entered Malay cooking through that door and stayed.
Bak kut teh is the dish that shows the transmission most plainly. The name is Hokkien for meat bone tea, it is a pork rib soup built on garlic and a herbal-spice bundle in which star anise is the leading aromatic, and it belongs to the Chinese communities of Klang and Singapore rather than to Malay cooking as such. It is eaten for breakfast with rice, dough sticks, and strong tea, and the two schools differ sharply: the Klang style is dark with soy and heavily herbal, the Teochew style pale and dominated by garlic and white pepper.
Star anise also crossed into Malay cooking itself, where it goes whole into ayam masak merah and into the rempah-based braises that show a Chinese or Indian hand. On a peninsula whose cuisine is a negotiation between Malay, Chinese, and Indian kitchens, star anise is one of the ingredients that belongs to all three.
Manila & the Philippine Archipelago — 1565 CE
Manila is the hinge of the whole western half of this journey, and it is the point at which star anise did two things at once.
The first was transhipment. From 1565 the Manila Galleons ran between Manila and Acapulco, and Chinese junks brought silk, porcelain, and spices down from Fujian and Guangdong to be loaded aboard them. Star anise crossed the Pacific in those holds, and it reached the Americas without ever passing through Europe. Manila was the warehouse for a trade route that ran the wrong way round the world.
The second was that a good deal of it stayed. Hokkien communities had been trading in and settling around Manila since well before the Spanish arrived, and they brought their braising pot with them. What resulted is a family of Filipino dishes that are Chinese in technique and Filipino in seasoning, and star anise is the marker of all of them. Humba, the Visayan braise whose very name descends from Hokkien hong ba, sets soy, palm sugar, fermented black beans, and star anise against the cane vinegar that no Chinese cook would add. Beef pares, sold from Manila night stalls as a set of braised beef, garlic rice, and clear broth, is a Hokkien red-cooked beef reorganised into a Filipino way of eating. Pork asado and lengua estofado belong to the same group.
The distinction between humba and adobo is the neatest illustration of what the spice signifies here. The two dishes are constantly confused, and the three things that separate them are star anise, fermented black beans, and dried banana blossom, none of which adobo has. Star anise is, in effect, the ingredient that tells you a Filipino braise has Chinese ancestry.
Acapulco & New Spain — 1571 CE
This is the crossing nobody expects. Star anise reached the Americas across the Pacific, not the Atlantic, and it arrived in Mexico long before it was common in northern Europe.
From 1565 until 1815 the Manila Galleons ran a single annual route between Manila and Acapulco, carrying Chinese silk, porcelain, lacquer, and spices east across the ocean in exchange for Mexican silver. It was the longest continuously operated trade route in the world and the first genuinely global one, and it deposited a cargo of Asian goods into New Spain that came nowhere near Europe. Star anise went with it, and Mexico has called it anís estrella ever since.
Where it settled was the sweet kitchen and the festival drink. Calabaza en tacha, pumpkin candied whole in piloncillo syrup for the Day of the Dead, and camotes en tacha, the same treatment given to sweet potato, both take star anise with cinnamon and orange. Ponche navideño, the hot fruit punch drunk through the Christmas posadas, is unthinkable without it. A Chinese border spice became a fixture of Mexican Catholic festivity by way of a Spanish galleon, which is about as direct an illustration of early globalisation as the kitchen affords.
Java & the Dutch East Indies — c. 1600 CE
Star anise reached the Indonesian archipelago through the Chinese trade rather than the Dutch one, but the Dutch presence determined what happened next. Batavia was the Company's eastern capital, and the kitchen that developed there was a genuine hybrid: Chinese technique, Indonesian ingredients, and European cake-making in the same building.
Lapis legit, the thousand-layer cake, is that hybrid in its most extravagant form. It is built from dozens of separate layers, each grilled individually, and enriched with a spice blend in which star anise, cassia, clove, cardamom, and nutmeg are combined in the manner of a European mixed spice using an Asian palette. It takes hours and a great many egg yolks, and it survives in Indonesia as a celebration cake.
Star anise went equally into savoury cooking, most characteristically into the soto family of soups. Soto Padang from West Sumatra, with its fried beef and clear spiced broth, is one of many regional sotos that use it, and the spice sits comfortably in a cuisine that was already accustomed to complex dry-spice blends.
From Batavia the Dutch carried it home, and it is largely through the Company's warehouses that star anise entered northern European cooking at all.
Lisbon & Madeira, Portugal — c. 1600 CE
The Portuguese brought star anise home from Goa, and Iberia put it where it puts most warm spices: into preserved fruit, into honeyed cakes, and into anything cooked long and sweet.
Bolo de mel, the Madeiran honey cake, is the most characteristic use. It is made once a year in early December, keeps for months and is meant to, and is spiced with a blend that runs to star anise, cinnamon, clove, fennel, and allspice against a base of sugarcane molasses rather than honey, despite the name. Spain uses the spice in the same register: in melocotones en almíbar, peaches preserved in syrup, and in mostillo, the thick grape-must and walnut confection of Castile and La Mancha.
What Iberia did not do was take star anise into savoury cooking, and the division has held. Across southern Europe it remains a sweet spice and a spice for drinks, which is precisely the opposite of its position in the Chinese kitchen it came from, where it belongs almost entirely to meat.
Fujian & Taiwan — c. 1650 CE
Fujianese settlers crossed the strait to Taiwan in large numbers from the seventeenth century onwards, and they took the Hokkien braising repertoire with them. Star anise is at the centre of it, and it defines what Taiwan eats every day rather than on any special occasion.
Lǔ ròu fàn is the island's comfort food: finely chopped or minced fatty pork simmered slowly in soy, rice wine, fried shallots, and five-spice until it collapses into a glossy sauce, then spooned over rice. It is sold everywhere, costs very little, and is argued over endlessly. Niú ròu miàn, beef noodle soup, is the other pillar, and its dominant form is the red-braised one, in which shin and tendon are cooked for hours with doubanjiang, soy, and a spice bag led by star anise. It is treated as something close to a national dish and has an annual competition in Taipei to prove it.
Both are braises, both are Hokkien in origin, and both would be unrecognisable without the spice.
The Rhineland & Northern Europe — c. 1700 CE
Star anise came into northern Europe late and through the Dutch and English companies, arriving in warehouses rather than gardens, and it found a single seasonal home there.
The northern European winter drink is its territory: Glühwein in Germany, vin chaud in Alsace, and their relatives across Scandinavia and central Europe, in which red wine is warmed with sugar, citrus, cinnamon, clove, and a star or two of anise. The whole star is used rather than any ground form, partly because it looks well floating in a glass and partly because ground star anise turns muddy and bitter in liquid.
The spice never crossed into northern European savoury cooking in the way it did in Asia, and its use remains almost entirely confined to sweet and to drink. Its other European foothold is the anise liqueur, where it is a principal commercial source of anethole for pastis, ouzo, and sambuca, and where it is doing chemical rather than culinary work.
