The Provençal aperitif of anise and liquorice, watered five to one and drunk in the shade at noon
Origin: Marseille & Provence, France
From the journey of Anise.
Pastis exists because absinthe was banned, and it is the only member of the Mediterranean anise family that combines two anise-tasting plants on purpose. The story begins in the Val-de-Travers in the 1790s with a preparation of green anise, fennel, and grande wormwood, and moves across the border to Pontarlier in the Jura, where Henri-Louis Pernod began distilling absinthe at scale in 1805. By the end of the century it was the national aperitif of France and l'heure verte, the green hour, was an institution. In 1915 it was banned outright, blamed for a long catalogue of social ills of which it was guilty of some and framed for the rest by a wine industry that had lost its market to phylloxera and wanted it back. What replaced it arrived in stages. Anise drinks without wormwood were permitted again in the 1920s at restricted strength, and in 1932 a young Marseille wine merchant named Paul Ricard began selling what he called le vrai pastis de Marseille: anise and liquorice together, at forty-five degrees, unmistakably yellow rather than green. The name comes from Provençal pastís, a mixture or a muddle, and it is a fair description of the recipe. Liquorice, which is a legume and arrives at its sweetness by a different compound entirely, is what makes pastis rounder, softer, and heavier than ouzo or rakı. The ritual is Provençal, exact, and unhurried. 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 zinc counter at midday or sitting under a plane tree at six, with olives and saucisson and a game of pétanque going on somewhere nearby. The variations have their own names and are ordered by them: a perroquet, parrot, takes mint syrup; a tomate takes grenadine; a mauresque takes orgeat; and a feuille morte, dead leaf, takes a little of both mint and grenadine. Anise is not confined to the glass in Provence. It goes into the navettes of Marseille, and a splash of pastis with fennel under a whole grilled sea bass is one of the region's oldest tricks.
Water matters, because the finished drink is five-sixths water. Soft bottled water gives a cleaner, brighter louche; hard water can make it dull and greyish. Styles vary more than the two famous yellow labels suggest. Ricard is anise-forward and sweet with liquorice; Pernod 51 is lighter; Henri Bardouin from Forcalquier carries some sixty-five plants alongside the anise and is much the most complex of the widely available bottlings; and small Marseille distillers have proliferated in the last decade. Absinthe, legal again in France since 2011, is a different drink and takes a sugar cube and a slotted spoon. In the kitchen, a tablespoon of pastis in the pan with fennel, tomato, and orange peel is the classic Provençal treatment for sea bass, red mullet, and monkfish, and a splash goes into a proper bouillabaisse and its rouille. A little in the syrup for a fruit salad of melon and peach is another local habit worth borrowing.
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