In 1851 a merchant in the papal port of Civitavecchia stamped a word onto a paper label:
sambuca. He invented almost none of what was in the bottle.

This is the full history of sambuca — and it starts four thousand years earlier, with a
medicinal seed sown between rows of barley in the Nile valley. From Egyptian physicians to
Roman banquet cakes, from the copper alembic perfected in Baghdad to plague-era apothecary
licences sealed in wax, from a star-shaped pod picked in the mountains of southern China to
a bombed-out Italian port in 1945 — every part of this drink was carried there by somebody
else.

Along the way: why Rome could never have made it, why the machine behind every anise liqueur
in Europe was built inside a culture that forbids drinking, how a naval blockade forced a
continent to grow its own sugar, how the banning of absinthe cleared the shelf, and how three
coffee beans costing almost nothing turned a local after-dinner habit into a global product.

We also separate the documented history from the marketing. The real argument about where the
name comes from. What the International Bartenders Association list actually contains. And
what Michelin stars can and cannot be awarded to.

CHAPTERS
00:00  A label in Civitavecchia, 1851
01:08  Anise as medicine in Egypt and Greece
02:16  Rome and the anise cake
03:26  The machine Rome never had
04:34  Baghdad and the alembic
05:42  Where the name really comes from
06:48  Salerno, Bologna and burning water
07:56  Monasteries, guilds and the plague
09:06  Star anise arrives from China
10:14  Mistrà and the farmyard still
11:20  The century of machines
12:30  Luigi Manzi and the papal port
13:36  A new country, a single market
14:42  Sugar, slavery and the blockade
15:50  How absinthe was destroyed
17:00  Autarky, rationing and the coffee-killer
18:08  Angelo Molinari and a wrecked port
19:18  Making one flavour a hundred thousand times
20:24  Con la mosca: the three coffee beans
21:30  How it left Italy
22:40  What sambuca actually changed in bars
23:46  The burning shot and why it stopped
24:54  Sambuca in the kitchen
26:00  Michelin, and the last course
27:06  1989: written into European law
28:14  Other people's solved problems

A food history documentary from Feast & Famine — the hidden history of everything we eat and
drink. New episodes every week.

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