Lagniappe: Where Cinnamon Sticks Come From

No one knows where cinnamon sticks come from. There is a bird called the cinnamon bird that gathers the fragrant twigs from some unknown location and builds its nest from them. To harvest the cinnamon, people attach weights to the tips of arrows and shoot the nests down.

That's not actually true, but it was Aristotle's best guess when he described cinnamon in his Historta Animalium in 350 BC. We have since located the source of cinnamon, relieving us of the necessity of shooting down the nests of mythical birds.

Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist

I love educated guesses. This makes me remember that some of our best guesses today, often made by historians and scientists, are going to look laughable in the far future. (Sometimes in the near future.) I wonder which ones?

Lagniappe: The Sex Life of Corn

Next time you pull a piece of silk from between your teeth while you're eating a fresh ear of corn, remember that you've just spat our a fallopian tube. Corn has a curious anatomy: the tassel at the top of the plant is the male flower; when mature, it produces two million to five million grains of pollen. The wind picks up those grains and moves them around.

The ear of corn is actually a cluster of female flowers. A young ear contains about a thousand ovules, each of which could become a kernel. Those ovules produce "silks" that run to the tip of the ear. If one of them catches a grain of pollen, the pollen will germinate and produce a tube that runs down the silk to the kernel. There the egg and pollen grain will meet at last. Once fertilized, that egg will swell into a plump kernel, which represents the next generation—or a bottle of bourbon, depending on your perspective.

Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist

Okaaaaay. That next ear of corn is going to feel a little different when I eat it.

Lagniappe: A Little Splash of Water

Do not be timid about adding ice or a splash of water to a drink. It does not water down the drink; it improves it. Water actually loosens the hold that alcohol has on aromatic molecules, which heightens rather than dilutes the flavor.

Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist

See, it isn't all just odd facts. Sometimes there's info that makes a difference in our lives. In mine anyway!

Lagniappe: Lightning Pear

Pears also contain a nonfermentable sugar called sorbitol, which adds sweetness but has one drawback: for people with sensitive systems, it acts as a laxative. one popular English pear variety, Blakeney Red, is also called Lightning Pear for the way it shoots through the system. This quirk has earned cider pears yet another folk saying: "Perry goes down like velvet, round like thunder, and out like lightning."

Amy Steward, The Drunken Botanist

Lagniappe: Which apples did dinosaurs prefer?

The DNA of apples is more complex than ours; a recent sequencing of the Golden Delicious genome uncovered fifty-seven thousand genes, more than twice as many as the twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand that humans possess. Our own genetic diversity ensures that our children will all be somewhat unique—never an exact copy of their parents but bearing some resemblance to the rest of the family. Apples display "extreme heterozygosity," meaning that they produce offspring that look nothing like their parents. Plant an apple seed, wait a few decades, and you'll get a tree bearing fruit that looks and tastes entirely different from its parent. In fact, the fruit from one seedling will be, genetically speaking, unlike any other apple ever grown, at any time, anywhere in the world.

Now consider the fact that apples have been around for fifty million to sixty-five million years, emerging right around the time dinosaurs went extinct and primates made their first appearance. for millions of years, the trees reproduced without any human interference, combining and recombining those intricately complex genes the way a gambler rolls dice. When primates—and later, early humans‚encountered a new apple tree and bit into its fruit, they never knew what they were going to get.

Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist

I had no idea. Fascinating.

Lagniappe: Pechuga

I've been thoroughly enjoying The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks. This is a book to enjoy a little each day.

There is one ingredient that can make mezcal different from whiskey or brandy: a dead chicken. Pechuga is a particularly rare and wonderful version of mezcal that includes wild local fruit added to the distillation for just a hint of sweetness, and a whole raw chicken breast, skinned and washed, hung in the still as the vapors pass over it. The chicken is supposed to balance the sweetness of the fruit. Whatever its purpose, it works: do not pass up an opportunity to taste pechuga mezcal.

Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist

Crazy, but it actually makes me want to try it.