You may enjoy it sweet, salty, soft or hard, or as an ingredient or flavour in jam, tea, bread, spirits or soft drinks. You may simply enjoy it as candy, or take in its subtle aroma as an herb used to flavour tobacco. Although liquorice has been a common ingredient in kitchens and medicine chests for ages, it now seems to have been rediscovered by those who manufacture the finer things in life. It is shedding its humble image as a gnarled root and going black, smooth, glossy and fragrant. Liquorice is definitely the up–and–coming celebrity herb, and what better way to celebrate its new status than with a liquorice festival!
A visit to the liquorice festival in Stockholm in April confirmed the complete makeover of this flavourful root, and I began to see liquorice for the sophisticated delicacy that it was. Products from such diverse places as Australia and Iceland proved just how popular liquorice is across the globe, and the salesmen presented diverse ways of enjoying it. While browsing through the multitude of gourmet liquorice products at the festival it was hard not to remember the way liquorice, at least in candy form, used to just be cheap and fun. Now it is presented as something that goes well together with your espresso, wine or even cheese.
When talking about this new way of consuming liquorice, many people compare it to the chocolate boom many years back. Chocolate has its own ancient origins in the cocoa bean, but like liquorice, it existed for many years mainly as a cheap and easy candy. But when the market went back to basics and explored the possibilities of pure cocoa, dark chocolate was reinvented. The same thing now seems to be happening for liquorice.