anīsum

The word anise comes through Old French anis from Latin anīsum, itself borrowed from Ancient Greek ánison. The Greek word is thought to descend from Egyptian jnst, making it one of the older spice names in the Western tradition. The plant is native to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East—Egypt, Greece, the Levant—and appears in Egyptian texts and was cultivated in ancient Tuscany at Roman request. The confusion embedded in its etymology is notable: Greek writers sometimes conflated anise with dill (anēthon), and their Latin names anīsum and anēthum drifted close enough that medieval herbalists occasionally mixed the two plants in their manuscripts.

Rome's relationship with anise was medicinal as much as culinary. Pliny the Elder prescribed it for breath, sleep disorders, and digestive complaints. More precisely, the Romans ate mustaceum—a spiced cake of meal, cumin, anise, and other aromatics—at the end of a large feast as a deliberate digestive aid. The practice was practical: Roman banquets were elaborate, extended, and demanding on the stomach, and anise's carminative properties—its ability to reduce gas and ease digestion—were well understood empirically even if the pharmacology was not. The after-dinner spiced cake is perhaps the earliest recorded use of a flavored digestif.

Anise's dominant modern identity is alcoholic. The essential oil anethole, which gives anise its characteristic licorice flavor, is remarkably soluble in alcohol and slightly less soluble in water—which produces the characteristic louche, the milky cloudiness that appears when water is added to anise-flavored spirits. Greek ouzo, French pastis and absinthe, Italian sambuca, Middle Eastern arak, Turkish rakı, and Colombian aguardiente all depend on this chemistry. The louche became an aesthetic ritual: adding water to a spirit and watching it turn white was, for 19th-century absinthe drinkers, part of the ceremony of consumption.

The absinthe panic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—which led to its prohibition in much of Europe and the United States—was not primarily about anise but about thujone, a compound in wormwood (grand wormwood, Artemisia absinthium), one of absinthe's other botanical ingredients. Anise was collateral damage: the ban on absinthe suppressed all anise-flavored spirits in some markets, and distillers reformulated with pastis (which contains no wormwood) as a substitute. Absinthe was legalized again in the European Union in 1988 and in the United States in 2007. The Romans' digestive cake became the 19th century's most vilified drink ingredient and then, quietly, a legal one again.