Drink - Victoria Moore laments the passing of the taste for bitters as aperitifs
With March come the first, Barbie-sized stalks of palest pink rhubarb, newly forced into thin spring sunlight. As I am in Rome, it seems fitting to investigate an Italian liquor called Aperol, which boasts rhubarb as a key ingredient. Actually, this is slightly misleading. Though the drink has the resilient orangey-sunset pink of tougher, Triffid-sized late rhubarb, the fruit is only one of dozens of ingredients.
Aperol, like campari, is an amaro, or "bitter", the recipes of which are always closely guarded secrets. The only thing you can be certain of is that they contain an awful lot of strange things. Wormwood is often used to give the bitter, tingly taste, as is rhubarb root, or artichoke. One of the bottles of bitter I found stacked in a dusty shop in a narrow alley here has a picture of a globe artichoke splayed across its label, giving the impression that the drink might also taste of artichoke. It does not.
In the same way that few enjoy eating a peeled lemon segment, so bitters are an acquired taste. Even if you like them, it is hard not to pucker. In England they never quite caught on, perhaps because they weren't ever supposed to be enjoyed. Hippocrates was the first to take a bitter drink to aid his digestion. But it was the Italians who took to the idea of aperitifs to get the gastric juices going with all the vim of the newly converted, setting whole monasteries of monks to work growing the variety of herbs necessary to make amari.
It was a long time before the potions of roots, herbs, peel and bark brewed by monks and apothecaries entered the mainstream. Now, rosy-coloured aperitifs sit perfectly with our notion of la dolce vita: think pavement cafes, elegant blondes with unsmudged lipstick, large chunks of ancient masonry and admiring paparazzi. All in black and white. No wonder we don't bother with them at home. Out of earshot of a "Ciao, bella!" and in a country where only the foolishly optimistic or the relentlessly self-conscious bother with sunglasses, what's the point?
But when in Rome . . . Actually, says an opinionated barber I question on the subject, the Romans do not. This is quite a shock, and an enormous disappointment. But, as he snips and razes, this neat-trousered Lazio fan is insistent. Twenty, even 25 years ago, aperitifs such as Aperol were all the rage. Now, he says, while you will find it in every bar in the city, no one actually drinks it. Times have changed. The younger generation will touch nothing but beer, before their pizza, with their pizza, after their pizza. He pauses for a moment to moan about their lack of appreciation for the fine wines that Italy produces. Then he goes on. Men such as him, and their wives, prefer wine, and that is what they always drink. In fact, he has tried Aperol only once in his life, but Aperol is sweeter than most bitters (for this reason, he supposes that I might like it - the English, he says, have a sweeter tooth). He was not impressed. Being sweet, the drink took the edge off his appetite. Not what it's supposed to do at all: what is the use of an aperitif that stops you wanting to eat?
But who cares if the Romans no longer drink the stuff? I order one at midday in a cafe on the edge of the Piazza Navona. It comes neat, on the rocks, with a slice of lemon, which is how it is best drunk. It also comes with a bowl of taut-skinned green steak olives which compliment it perfectly. I take a sip. It is sweet and sour at the same time, just like Vespa diesel fumes, and equally intoxicating. And there, beneath a soothing sun, it doesn't spoil my pizza margherita one little bit.
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