By Glenda Bartosh
It can be hard or chewy, stretchy and long, or soft and gooey. Swirled, twirled into a circle, twisted; blasted into bits or sifted. Coated or stuffed with flavoured sweet paste, or tinted and shaped into a monkey face. There are licorice cars and licorice cats, licorice babies, boats and bats. Sweet, sweet and salty, not so sweet; super salty or, frankly, reeking of pee.
Licorice (liquorice if you’re from England) is about as ancient and universal sweet treat as you can get. And it can touch off real passion at both ends of the spectrum.
In Canada, we’re so used to licorice in the form of candy we sometimes forget it is actually a plant — a perennial herb, to be precise, with lovely compound leaves vaguely reminiscent of caragana — that’s native to southern Europe. Its scientific name, Glycyrrhiza glabra , is from the Greek glykyrrhiza (of which “licorice” is a corruption): glykys , means “sweet” and rhiza means “root”. And that pretty much says it all.
The licorice paste, or black sugar as it’s called in the trade, typically used to flavour everything from Twizzlers to tobacco, is the thickened juice of the root of the plant. It’s prepared by boiling the crushed and ground roots, which are a lovely bright yellow inside. The characteristic sweet, pleasant licorice taste comes from two acids, one of them many times sweeter than sugar, the other resembling a steroid.
Licorice extract has been used for eons for medicinal purposes, for everything from treating ulcers to Addison’s disease. Its Asian relative, grown in China, is a popular “harmonizing” ingredient in Chinese medicine. If you eat way too much of the pure stuff, which you likely won’t, you can tip your fluid/sodium balance the wrong way or harm your liver.
But essentially licorice is pretty harmless if not outright good for you. Earl “food-as-medicine” Mindell touts it as great for sore throats, lowering blood pressure, keeping your heart and spleen healthy, and helping your digestion. Apparently, it’s even been the focus of research at various cancer institutes.
All of which points to some pretty decent rationales for trotting down to the Great Glass Elevator Candy Store and checking out just how many kinds of licorice there are. Manager Kelly Birmingham will be happy to be your licorice guide. It often turns out to be a tour down memory lane, with favourites totally dependent upon which part of the world you’re from.
For instance, stove-pipe black licorice pipes and cigars — their ends dipped in little red sugar beads to simulate a glowing tip — were big in my family’s household. They were one of the few sweets my dad liked, so one year for Christmas my mom gave him a huge box of them. I can still picture him posing under the Christmas tree with his box of licorice cigars in one hand, a big black licorice stogie clenched between his teeth, and an ear-to-ear grin.
We kids loved them because we could pretend we were smoking. But other than the sugar-coated tips, we didn’t really enjoy the strong licorice taste — too potent for tender little mouths with all their taste buds still in tact. We also went for licorice shoelaces and wheels (check them out at the Great Glass Elevator) while the elders poked through licorice allsorts or licorice bridge mixture, looking for their favourites.
“We have all kinds of black licorice,” says Kelly. “European licorice, salted licorice, Australian licorice — even salmiak truffle, which is coated with a sweet/salty sugary coating. Once you bite into it, it’s got a soft, chewy, truffley, salty centre inside.”
And that’s just the start. The Great Glass Elevator has a big bulk section with all kinds of favorites from around the world, and a pre-packaged zone with many Dutch brands like Katjes, Toms, Fazer, and Haribo — the biggest candy-maker in the world.
Salmiak licorice, by the way, is originally from Finland, also home to London drops — those pretty little pastel candy-coated, torpedo-shaped licorice treats we Canucks called Goodies and Americans called Good ’n’ Plenty. Salmiakki is a very distinctive but intensely popular flavouring in northern Europe, especially Finland. It’s used in everything from vodka to soda pop. Despite the salty taste, it doesn’t contain salt, but it does contain ammonium chloride — more on that later.
Some people swear by Dutch licorice, but Kelly points out that preferences pretty much follow childhood experiences and memories.
“It all depends on which one was your treat when you were little growing up in Germany or Holland, or wherever,” she says. “Most people like whatever type it is because their grandparents would buy it for them and they remember the flavour. Then they have to try to make sure it is exactly like their licorice back home — and it is.”
So Dutch go for the Dutch, and Aussies and Kiwis for the Australian licorice (softer, thicker and chewier than other varieties). Then there’s people like Kelly, who didn’t grow up with licorice and don’t go for any of it at all.
Overall, the big sellers at the Great Glass Elevator are licorice babies, allsorts, and Pontefract cakes. Also called Pomfret cakes, these crowd-pleasers with a strong licorice taste and chewy texture are named for their Yorkshire hometown of Pontefract. They look like a black coin with a stamped impression on top that was once done by hand, but has since been relegated to machines.
Then there are the hard-core fans of Tyrkisk Peber (Danish for "Turkish Pepper" ). This is a strong-flavoured, hard licorice spiked with peppers — be warned, it’s hot stuff. And then we have the contentious double salt. Like salmiak, it also contains ammonium chloride or sal ammoniac, a type of salt with a strong, sour taste that gives off, shall we say, a very distinctive odour that can knock your socks off either way.
“We had one customer who bought a bag of our double salt and didn’t realize it. He put a piece of it in his mouth, then came back and said, you know it tastes like someone urinated in this licorice. He didn’t want his money back, he was just totally disgusted by it and wanted me to throw it out,” says Kelly.
I wouldn’t say it’s that bad, but it’s is definitely an acquired taste, much like Twizzlers, those twisted, plastic-y red and black treats that some — me included — would charge are equally guilty of giving licorice a bad rep. But love ’em or hate ’em, at least they contain a bit of licorice extract, while many so-called licorice candies are mere imposters flavoured with anise and masquerading as licorice — heaven forbid.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who
draws the line at licorice ice cream.
