When: July 2
National Anisette Day celebrates anisette — a sweet anise-flavored liqueur with roots in Mediterranean folk medicine and cooking. Its distinctive black licorice flavor divides people sharply, but for those who love it, anisette is deeply tied to family traditions, digestifs after long meals, and the ritual of adding water and watching it turn milky white. That reaction — the louche effect — is culinary chemistry in a glass.
Anise-flavored spirits were among humanity's first medicines — ancient Egyptians prescribed anise wine for digestive ailments over 4,000 years ago.
The Romans ate a spiced cake called mustaceum after large feasts. It was made with anise, cumin, and laurel leaves, baked on bay leaves, and served specifically to aid digestion after rich meals. The recipe appears in the 1st century CE writings of Apicius, one of the earliest cookbooks to survive antiquity. Nearly every Mediterranean culture that came after Rome preserved some version of this same idea: anise after eating, anise after celebration, anise as the thing that makes the stomach settle. Anise has been cultivated for at least 4,000 years. Ancient Egyptian medical papyri reference it. The Romans grew it in dedicated fields. Arab distillers of the Middle Ages used it as a base for some of the earliest distilled spirits, and through the Renaissance, anise spirits spread across Europe — each region developing its own version with local botanicals but the same flavor at the center. Sambuca in Italy. Ouzo in Greece. Pastis in France. Arak in the Levant. Anisette — the sweet,...