The discreet charm of bitterness
Feared and loved, the bitter taste is a heritage of Italian gastronomic culture. Perhaps no people more than ours has developed the pleasure for what in ancient times was often the common alarm bell of a potential poison. And so it is certainly no coincidence that, right in Italy, between one radicchio and another, between an artichoke and a puntarella, the alcoholic category that bears, without hesitation and without fear, the name of “amaro” has developed and grown.
“After drinking the hemlock,” Plato writes in the Phaedo, “Socrates rebuked his students, who could not hold back their tears: 'What strange thing is this, friends? It is said that it is good to die amidst serene words of good wishes . ”
As a beardless high school student, this passage always moved me. I was a fan of Socrates. I liked him instinctively, unlike Plato, who seemed to me to be the snobby and somewhat boastful student who, in my class, always sat in the first row ready to show off for any reason. I, rigorously in the last row in a vain attempt to avoid as many physics and mathematics tests as possible (especially but not only), thought that Socrates was a very cool guy, as we would say today. And instead, they had cowardly killed him with hemlock. I hated her as a consequence, too. Hemlock, exactly, a plant that grows spontaneously even in the Italian countryside, with a nauseating smell and a bitter taste.
I still think of her every time I find myself sipping liqueurs and grappas flavoured with gentian root, which is also extremely bitter. And yet I have friends who literally go crazy for the latter.
In fact, bitter is the most divisive taste of all, more than sour, more than salty, obviously more than sweet and even more, for those who have understood exactly what it is, than umami. Since the dawn of time, when our ancestors wandered around Africa chipping stones and wielding sticks, bitter was the taste of danger, the signal that nature gave us to warn us that it was better to leave that plant or fruit alone.
Important scientific studies have even shown that, thousands of years after those first walks in the savannah, female human beings still have a greater sensitivity to bitterness than male human beings, and the deduction that has been drawn is that women, who by nature and ancient tradition are responsible for giving birth and raising children, had genetically, and to a greater extent, developed this ability in order to protect and perpetuate the species. Perhaps, who knows, when it is said that women tend to be wiser than men, it is precisely for this reason.
Yet we are surrounded by the bitter taste and not everything that is bitter delivers us to death. Indeed, if a rather widespread theory is true, bitter herbs are also those with the greatest anti-inflammatory or in any case medicinal properties.
The problem is therefore knowing how to distinguish them: if the infusion of bitter hemlock sends you to the Creator, that of dandelion, another bitter plant, helps you solve digestive problems, gallstones and even retention problems. In the human journey, and probably leaving a few thousand or million victims on the field, the human race has learned to distinguish what is bitter-good from what is bitter-bad. A discovery slightly less useful than knowing how to master fire, although less successful in the media. And, once again, women have perhaps been the main protagonists and the category to which credit must be given if today we happily consume radicchio of various types, chicory and puntarelle, endive and rocket, aubergines and artichokes as well as a nearly infinite series of cabbages, such as the very bitter black cabbage, an essential ingredient of the traditional Tuscan ribollita, and even oranges of which, until the fifteenth century, only the bitter variety was known.
A discovery, that of the good-bitter, in which our country, as Massimo Montanari points out in a small, easy-to-read volume entitled “Amaro. Un gusto italiano”, has carved out a leading role for itself.
Montanari explains this all-Italian familiarity with bitters in cultural and historical terms. Italian biodiversity combined with long periods of economic hardship have pushed us to experiment and use even “foods” usually neglected or left to animals. A familiarity that has developed and been passed down over the centuries and that, at certain times, has solved more than a few problems, such as in the aftermath of the First World War when widespread poverty, hunger and disease made the collection of edible herbs, including bitter ones, one of the main sources of sustenance, as Fulvio Piccinino recalls in his “Amari e Bitter”.
The taste of bitterness and for bitterness is therefore part of the Italian genetic code. But how do we get from this generic bitterness to the bitterness with which today we identify a certain type of liqueur?
The spark probably struck within the walls of the Salerno Medical School which, around the 9th century AD, became the most important European medical-scientific institution.
In Salerno, doctors from ancient times, such as Hippocrates and Galen, and more recent ones, from the Arab school, are studied; in Salerno, the first botanical garden in history is inaugurated and herbalism, phytotherapy, pharmacology and even the art of distillation are practiced, always for therapeutic purposes. Because liqueurs, let's quickly remember, are born for a precise purpose that is not that of a pleasant taste or mixing but for curative purposes.
And so, thanks to the Salerno Medical School, thanks to the religious orders and monasteries that, spread throughout Italy, began to deal with liqueur production, thanks to the extraordinary biodiversity and, at the same time, to the prolonged division into states and small states into which the peninsula was divided for a long time, in every place recipes for liqueurs were born, established and handed down, many of which have survived to this day.
It is worth remembering that today liqueur means:
A spirit drink with an alcohol content higher than 15% vol. with a minimum sugar content equal to or greater than one hundred grams/litre, with some significant exceptions such as cherry (70 grams/litre) and gentian (80 grams/litre) liqueurs;
A drink obtained from an alcoholic base of agricultural origin that is a distillate or a blend of spirits, which however can be added with other products of agricultural origin such as wine, fruit but also milk and cream.
Usually, and to understand a little better, they are divided into three subcategories:
fruit liqueurs
plant liqueurs
bitter liqueurs, considered as such when bittering elements appear in the recipe
It goes without saying that we want to talk about the latter here. Which, all things considered, is also a good thing, because if we were to review every liqueur produced in Italy, from the brands that have become iconic to the tiny production of a recipe found in some abandoned trunk in the attic, we probably wouldn't get out alive.
Not that Italy doesn't have an army of bitters because it does, from the Alps to Sicily, further confirming the historical national predisposition for the bitter taste, in its thousand shades of course. However, although the use of herbs and roots with bitter connotations is ancient, the definition of the category itself is much more recent.
Piccinino also places it around the nineteenth century, considering it an evolution of elixirs, liqueurs that actually included a bittering ingredient in their composition. A fundamental turning point in this evolution occurred in 1820 when two French chemists extracted and isolated quinine from the bark of a Cinchona variety tree whose healing properties had been discovered by Europeans in Peru a century earlier.
The immediate success of quinine, capable of effectively combating a disease like malaria responsible for a disproportionate number of victims, had the further consequence of "shifting" all the bittering substances that until then had been exclusively reserved for pharmacology towards the more voluptuous use of liquors.
The impetus that this specific segment of liqueurs received was decisive: in 1857, in the first Italian manual of liqueur making we find specific recipes for amaro, and the same happens in manuals published at the end of the 19th century.
Finally, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the production of bitters, now well-known and appreciated, began to standardize and conquer the national market.
However, even after the Second World War, there were several companies that preferred to use the term elixir, often declined as “elixir”, rather than the term bitter, which perhaps still sounded a little off-putting.
An old advertisement for China Martini actually talks about “Elixir of China” and promises to keep the consumer “as healthy as a fiddle”. It is not the only one: another historic company like China Clementi, created in his pharmacy by Giuseppe Clementi in 1884, still talks about “unique elixir” on its website.
The world of bitters is very varied, in the 1950s and 1960s even the “amaretti” are considered “bitter”, which are decidedly sweet, and this is because the quantity of sugar present can vary considerably, making the aromatic spectrum of the category more interesting, as well as broader. Only perhaps starting from the 1970s of the last century did the field of bitters “narrow” to those that contain herbs, roots, citrus peels and therefore are less sweet to the taste. But the nuances, even evident and in our opinion fortunately, remain. And if the recipes change according to the territory where they are born, and according to the local herbs and roots as well as the inventiveness of their creator, the production technique also changes: the aromas perceived in the glass of bitter that, I am sure otherwise why am I writing, you have in front of your nose now may have been obtained through:
maceration
infusion
decoction
percolation
distillation
n short, a wide freedom of choice, an enormous if not infinite possibility to decide one's own path, an organoleptic palette worthy of a Jackson Pollock with spices, herbs, roots, fruit instead of colors...
After the first almost “homemade” preparations, from the second half of the nineteenth century the first purely commercial brands began to appear, some of which were destined for long-lasting success: Missagli, Rossi di Asiago, the aforementioned Clementi, Martini, Zucca which focused entirely on rhubarb, soon becoming its best-known brand nationwide, and also Bordiga, Amarot, Braulio, Ramazzotti, Montenegro. The list could really become too long. Every region, almost every city has its own amaro. In Genoa and Liguria, for example, Amaro Camatti is all the rage, awarded as the best amaro in the world in 2023 by the jury of the World Liqueur Awards; Cynar, famous for the presence of artichoke among its ingredients, was born in Venice in 1948 before moving on to conquer the world, as will Fernet Branca, created a century earlier in Milan.
Italy asserts itself, if not as the only one, as the main cradle of bitters, definitively consecrating the atavistic confidence in that taste, demonstrated since the dawn of time.
The same years of the economic boom are in some way marked by the success of amari; the older ones, called “boomers” for a reason, will remember Ernesto Calindri treating himself to a Cynar in the middle of the traffic “against the wear and tear of modern life”, an advert which was also revived in much more recent times by Elio e le Storie Tese, and the Eighties of “Milano da bere” are under the banner of Amaro Ramazzotti, with which this claim was born, destined to enter common language.
The limit of bitters, if one must find one, is rather that of the concentration of moments of consumption. Perhaps because they are the bearers of “healing values” with which they were originally born, bitters remain confined to the cliché of after-dinner drinks for a long time.
These are the years of the bitter that helps you digest, that settles your stomach: popular sayings that almost always justify eight-course lunches. The same gargantuan lunches that made mothers say that, in order to take a dip in the sea, you had to wait at least three hours after the last forkful. A limit that in recent years seems to be disappearing.
The world of amari is definitely in turmoil. An unspecified number of new ones have been added to the untouchable historic brands, and old glories that have long been dusty have returned to shine. It seems almost like there isn't a week that some Italian doesn't find an amaro recipe forgotten by their grandfather in the cellar. An exaggeration of course, more or less like that of the chefs who have all learned to love cooking by watching their grandmother in an apron, but a sign of the times.
These are the times of the Amaro Revolution, a rediscovery, especially among the new generations, of bitters that is happening thanks above all to the renaissance of cocktails and everything that revolves around them. The multiplication of gins, that of tonics and sodas, the return of vermouths, the valorization of tinctures and shrubs and, finally, the new spring of bitters, all can be explained, at least in large part, by the mixology trend that is shivering all over Italy.
This is the good news with which we want to conclude this long speech and which, personally, perhaps makes me put a stone on the affair of Socrates' hemlock. Perhaps.
It certainly obliges me to give a dutiful thanks to Ada Coleman, the most famous barlady in history who, at the American Bar at the Savoy in London in 1903, perfected the recipe for the Hanky Panky, a cocktail that included among its ingredients a bitter such as Fernet Branca, and extensively to all the thousands of bartenders around the planet who are experimenting with bitters in the shaker or mixing glass.
They are largely responsible for the rise to prominence of new bitters such as Amaro Santoni, not coincidentally also signed by a world-famous bartender like Simone Caporale, of Amara, produced with hand-picked Sicilian oranges and local herbs, of Yuntaku, a Japanese-inspired bitter that features goya, also called bitter melon, but also hibiscus, Sichuan pepper and ginger. And also of Argalà and Amarot, with the first, made in Piedmont, which blends Alpine notes and Mediterranean notes, and the second, made in Turin, which has no qualms about declaring its taste right from the name.
Just like the “resurrection” of Kahneman, a very Italian bitter despite its name, born in 1812 and brought back into the limelight a few years ago by Valter Fabbro, one of the most famous homeopaths in Italy.
Yes, because today the bitter taste is no longer scary. It remains perhaps the taste of maturity and not of childhood, but it is a complex taste, with a thousand facets, that must be savored slowly, giving it time and a way to express itself. Also because, behind what may sometimes seem like a hostile facade, there is actually a lush, friendly and, why not, surprising world.
As published by Maurizio Maestrelli, January 22, 2025, Velier Explorer
