八角

Star anise — Illicium verum — is native to southern China and northern Vietnam. The Chinese name bājiǎo means 'eight horns,' a description of the seed pod's eight-pointed star shape. The English name 'star anise' reflects both the shape and the flavor similarity to true anise (Pimpinella anisum), a Mediterranean plant in the Apiaceae family. Star anise belongs to the Schisandraceae family. The two plants share the compound anethole, which produces the licorice flavor, but share almost nothing else.

Star anise has been used in Chinese cooking and medicine for at least three thousand years. It is one of the five components of Chinese five-spice powder — along with cinnamon, cloves, Sichuan pepper, and fennel seeds. It appears in Vietnamese phở broth, in Indian biryani, and in Malay rendang. The star-shaped pod traveled through Southeast and South Asian cuisines without needing to change its form — the whole dried pod goes into the pot.

In 1997, the pharmaceutical company Roche began extracting shikimic acid from star anise to synthesize the antiviral drug oseltamivir, sold as Tamiflu. During the avian flu panic of 2005, demand for Tamiflu caused a temporary global shortage of star anise. The price of the spice spiked. A Chinese cooking ingredient became a pharmaceutical raw material overnight. Roche eventually developed synthetic routes to shikimic acid, but for several years, the world's supply of a life-saving drug depended on a spice.

The confusion between star anise and regular anise persists. They are sold in the same spice aisle, described with the same flavor word, and used in some of the same recipes. But they come from different hemispheres, different plant families, and different culinary traditions. The flavor convergence is a chemical coincidence. Evolution produced anethole twice, independently.