Merry Xmas from Alan!

by Alan Titchmarsh

Oh, we have a lot to thank plants for – but perhaps more so now than at most times of year. It’s plants, after all, that make Christmas merry.

As you knock back a glass of your favourite festive tipple, consider – it’s all thanks to grape vines that you can enjoy red and white wine, sherry, port, champagne and brandy. If your tastes turn to a glass of cider or perry, well, those started life as apples and pears. And beers and lagers are made from agricultural plants – malted barley flavoured with hops to be precise.

Even gin – which is distilled spirit made from grain – gets it’s characteristic flavour from various plant flavourings known collectively as ‘botanicals’. The precise blend of seeds, pods, peels and roots that goes into each brand is a closely guarded trade secret; there’s more to it than just juniper berries.

Other ingredients may include cardamom pods, coriander seeds, angelica root and the peel of various citrus fruits. These sweet botanicals as they are known, are used to create the unique flavour of Plymouth gin. But at home, you can invent your own personalised botanical gin by adding half a dozen whole juniper berries, a cardamom pod, two or three whole cloves, a star anise pod and some whole crushed fennel seeds to a bottle of budget own-label supermarket gin and leaving it to steep for several weeks.

Feel free to add a twist of fresh lemon, lime, tangerine or orange peel, but fish it out after a week or so as you don’t want it ‘going off’. Start cautiously and build up as you find out which ingredients you like best, and tweak the recipe to suit your taste.

Christmas is the time a lot of families crack open the sloe gin they’ve been keeping specially since the autumn, and very good it is too. The version made using damson instead of sloes is even better, I reckon – not quite so dry. The same technique also makes a very good plum brandy or quince vodka. Many branches of home-brewing are rising pastimes, now that so many of us are growing fruit and looking for ways to make more creative uses of it.

But it’s nothing new. Liqueurs began life as medicinal preparations made by monks; they’d steep the foliage and/or seeds of bitter herbs such as wormwood in alcohol, which simultaneously extracted the active ingredients and preserved them for use out-of-season when the fresh plant wasn’t available.

The original liqueurs (such as absinthe) were dispensed before meals to stimulate the appetite, and after meals to promote good digestion. So the traditional over-eating season – Christmas – was probably the time folk really needed them. Nowadays leaf- and seed-based liqueurs have almost disappeared; today’s tastes favour fruity kinds which are good for making cocktails – guaranteed to give any Christmas party a buzz.

Orange liqueurs such as Cointreau and Grand Marnier are regular favourites. The strange amethyst-coloured Parfait Amour is made from pomegranates, the same fruit that makes the non-alcoholic grenadine syrup which is also used in several cocktails including the notorious Tequila Sunrise. (And let’s not forget that tequila itself is made from the juice of cactus-like agave plants).

So sometime over the next few days, raise a glass to the plants that made it all possible. Well, it is Christmas. Bottoms up!