Licorice stinks

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Please, everybody, stop trying to make me like licorice. It’s not going to happen. Sure, I used to eat it when I was a kid. I sometimes chewed bits of tar when I was a kid too, but I outgrew it.

After a while, it struck me that licorice and tar were kind of alike. Licorice was like sugared tar mixed with some kind of sickly, flowery perfume. In short, it was about as awful as anything can be. I took to spitting it out when it showed up as the center of a candy, where manufacturers evidently liked to put it as an evil prank.

In the ripeness of time, I stumbled across fennel, anise and tarragon. They have their uses, but they remain suspect in my book — even tarragon. They’re all just a little too much like the Bad Thing.

When I spent a year in Lebanon, among the inconveniences of life — and there were plenty, such as having to keep the soles of your shoes out of sight; letting them be seen would be taken as an insult — the one that bothered me most was having to drink arrack, the local version of the pan-Mediterranean liqueur anisette. Yes, it was fun to see the clear liquid turn white when you poured water into it, but then you had to drink the stuff, and it tasted like a glass full of sickly, flowery, sweetened tar.

It has been explained to me that the real licorice purists, the ones who look down on mere licorice-stick-eaters, feast on rare and exotic products made of unsweetened licorice, which, I am given to believe, combine a powerful, overwhelming flavor of pure licorice with a bit of saltiness.

These people say it’s the greatest taste experience in the world. I think they are insane and should be carefully watched.