[Sca-cooks] licorice, was food on St Val's day

[AEllin Olafs dotter]

Not Lindt. I don't remember the name now, though - that's the kind of 
thing that will spring into my mind on the subway later, or something 
like that...  My grandmother liked them, too, and my mom used them 
sometimes as throat lozenges, because they lasted forever even though 
they were tiny.

Now, since my feeling about licorice (and anise and all similar evils) 
is the same as Phlip's *G* I pretty much didn't eat them. Tried them 
every once in a while, as Grandma couldn't believe I wouldn't eventually 
like them.  She just thought they weren't sweet enough. That was not the 
problem...

Speaking of anise (well, I am, anyway),  I was, in preparation for a 
dessert board this June, looking at sweets recipes in Markham (I found 
that I seem to  need to go late for much sweet stuff...)  Boy, either he 
really liked anise, or it was very popular at the time!  This is going 
to be interesting...

AEllin


Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote:

>
>
> My grandmother was  a partisan of the little, individually-wrapped, 
> black licorice tablets, which were sinfully hard and quite powerful. 
> There was, AFAIK, only one brand for these, something 
> Germanic-or-Scandinavian-sounding. Maybe Lindt? Distinctive little 
> red, white, and black paper wrappers, twisted at the ends. These, of 
> course, only existed in the pungent black form (IOW, real licorice), 
> and you had to suck on them; they were too hard and tenacious to chew, 
> although strictly speaking they weren't hard-crack candy. Maybe some 
> kind of carbon-steel alloy mixed with horse-glue; I think dentists 
> owned stock in the company since the hard-licorice and dental-repair 
> industries seem to have linked fortunes. We were sort of ambivalent 
> about these as kids, but after all, what's a little suffering in the 
> name of the ancient institution of grandma pressing free sugar on a 
> child?
>
> Adamantius
>
>
>