You’re most commonly offered limoncello, a lemon-flavored liqueur that comes from southern Italy. It’s bright lemon-yellow in color and devilishly delicious—so sweet and easy-drinking you’ll be asking for more before you know it.
Speaking of devilish liqueurs, there are a few that I’m not sure I want to try. I’m no expert on Italian liqueurs, but I think the reason there are so many I haven’t had is because they tend to have such extreme names.
Take Spinello liqueur, for example. Its name has several meanings, among them “spiny shark” and “marijuana”.
The liqueur doesn’t actually have marijuana in it, or any extracts derived from sharks—apparently it’s made from the fruit of a plant with spines (spina in Italian). The story goes that Spinello came about by accident when four friends got together to try making a distilled beverage.
Regardless, I’ve never been offered Spinello after a meal. I’m not sure if that’s because the name invites such misconception or because it’s nowhere near as easy-drinking as limoncello. I guess I need to do some more research.
One liqueur I have tasted is called Strega, which means “witch.” I was afraid that if I drank it I might turn into a hook-nosed witch with warts all over her face… maybe that’s just me, though.
Still, the name of this one is pretty intense also. The fact that it’s made from 70 different herbs makes me picture a witch boiling them in her cauldron night after night with a creepy grin on her face. Both Strega and limoncello are yellow liqueurs, but Strega gets its color from saffron and can’t hold a candle to the lovely flush of limoncello—which completely reminds me of Snow White in this scenario.
As you might expect, nobody’s ever offered me a glass of Strega, either. Maybe because the look on my face says that I might turn into a witch and start crooning, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”
I’ll end with one of the most intensely-named liqueurs of all: “Mother-in-law’s milk.” There’s no milk in it and it has an extremely high alcohol content of 75%, a feature which makes it most commonly used as a showpiece to light on fire. Even though people say they want to drink it from shot glasses in tiny little sips, the manufacturer warns them that it shouldn’t ever be taken straight. One of my offbeat friends tried it and said it felt like their mouth was on fire, causing them to make a huge scene and disrupt the people around them. The fact that they put “mother-in-law” in the name of a drink like that really goes to show how people feel about their spouses’ mothers…
