Quite some time ago on this blog, I crowed about a purchase I’d made on ebay. I’d bought some cinchona powder and some quinine. These medicines were used in the olden days to treat malaria. The bottles came from an old pharmacy, which I think was being demolished or something. I thought I would be getting empty bottles (for showing at school visits) but they both came nearly full of powder and pills.
Doctors don’t prescribe quinine to treat malaria much anymore unless they’re really desperate to help a patient who hasn’t responded to other treatments. Quinine has unpredictable and potentially serious side effects (among them, an unsteady gait and ringing ears). Cinchona bark is the older form; quinine was eventually derived from it. Cinchona was “discovered” by Europeans in the seventeenth century, when some Jesuit priests noticed that Aztec people were drinking a powdered bark mixture that palliated the fever from malaria. For a few centuries, “the bark” was the only successful treatment for malaria.
I was interviewing a specialist in infectious diseases some time ago, and I asked her if it would hurt me to take a tiny taste from my bottle of cinchona powder. I’d read that it’s extremely bitter (British soldiers stationed in India masked the taste of their quinine water with gin and lime juice–and created the gin and tonic) and I wanted to know just how bitter it was. She said most likely it would not hurt me.
The problem with my bottle was that the old cork disintegrated in my fingers. I couldn’t get it out. I gave up, assuming I’d never really know what cinchona tasted like.
But then, look what I found last week at one of my favorite stores in New York:
Amazing, right? Here’s what it looks like:
It’s meant to be steeped in hot water like tea. But I just tasted a tiny—a really teeny-tiny—crumb–about the size of the one you see in the picture above.
I’d like to meet someone who’s been able to down a cup of cinchona tea. Maybe they did it on Fear Factor or something.
It’s hard to describe just how dreadful the taste was. I experienced it in several stages. The first stage (wine connoisseurs call it the “mouthfeel,” I think) was just flavorless and unpleasantly hard, like I’d gotten a piece of cork in my mouth. But as the cinchonic bouquet developed, I felt a growing sense of dread. Then the neurons began firing into my brain.
Have you ever picked a dandelion and then touched the milky end of the stem to your tongue? It’s really bitter, right? Imagine tasting something that’s fifteen fifty times worse. Bitter hardly begins to describe it. My brain’s neurons were now lighting up–abort! abort! abort! Spit this out! But then the mouth tells the brain it’s too late, that there’s nothing to spit out. Yet the vile taste remains. All hope drains from one’s soul. I wanted to wipe my tongue with a napkin like Tom Hanks does in Big when he tastes caviar. Instead I took a hasty spoonful of ice cream to expunge the memory.
But I’m glad I finally tried it. I strongly advise you, dear reader, to take my word for it, but if you’re absolutely determined to taste cinchona yourself, you can find it on the second floor of Kalustyan’s, at 28th and Lexington. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.