Ever since people started practicing medicine, it’s been known that a lot of medicines don’t taste very good. In order to make taking medicine more palatable, Greek and Roman physicians took to wiping honey around the rim of the cup the medicine was in to alleviate the bitterness (this is attested to by contemporary writers). I’m sure it was the same motive that is responsible for that “spoonful of sugar” to “help the medicine go down” that Mary Poppins sings about in the Disney movie. Or for sugar coatings on pills, or the flavorings that can be added to children’s medicine that my drugstore advertises.
The sweetening or flavoring usually doesn’t completely remove or cover up the bitterness - it just blunts it enough to make taking the medicine doable. But in some cases something odd happened – the combination of the sweetening/flavoring and the bitter medicine produced a flavor that people actually came to like, a sort of “Stockholm syndrome”, so that, even when they didn’t have to take the bitter medicine, people still sought it out in connection with the palliative.
Examples:
1.) Gin and Tonic – The classic. The British in India and other southern Asian places were prey to malaria. In the 18th century George Cleghorn found that quinine was both a preventative and a treatment for the disease. Unfortunately, quinine in water tasted awful. The British solution – mix it with sugar and gin and a little lime. A classic drink wa born. (The Wikipedia article claims that it’s not just a coverup
I wouldn’t know.) In any event, G&T has become a staple of the mixed-drink repertoire, eventhough nobody has to drink quinine water anymore. They just got to like the taste of the medicine mixed with the ameliorating mix.
2.) Absinthe – I always thought that absinthe was the concoction of Pierre Ordinaire, a French doctor living in Switzerland. Og only knows how he came up with the mixture. Wikipedia muddies his claim with alternative origins. In any event, absinthe had a heavy anise flavor, along with other medicinal tones. I know that there are societies devoted to appreciating it, but most people apparently don’t really like it straight. Absinthe made inroads to society the same way quinine did – it was given to troops (French troops) as a preventative for malaria. I don’t know if it was effective this way, but its use made it a habit among the troops. People took to diluting it with water and adding sugar (surprise!), and the habit traveled back to France, where it became a ritual widely observed. People would gather at absinthe houses at “the Green Hour”, pour absinthe into a small glass, place a special slotted spoon over it with lump sugar, then pour water over the sugar to dissolve it into the absinthe. The micture would go from clear gren to opalescent, and was then drunk. Some people added dramatic flourishes to the ritual, like setting the sugar afire. In any event, people got caught up in the ritual and the taste of absinthe when any value as an anti-malarial it had was superfluous.
3.) Coca Cola (and other 19th century soft drinks)-- like many such drinks, Coca Cola started out as a “nerve tonic”, drawing its power from the stimulating properties of the Coca Leaf (containing cocaine) and the Cola Nut (filled with caffeine). If that couldn’t keep you strung up, nothing would. The problem was that both of these were bitter. John Pemberton solved that by adding sugar and a collection of flavors to cover it up. The “fantasia” blend he came up with was so popular that it continued after the cocaine was removed, and (in the case of caffeine-free Coke) the caffeine as well. Pemberton sold the business, and eventually it ended up in the hands of Asa Candler, who built it into a food empire. He reportedly reformulated the drink, and I’m not sure how different the formula was. According to at least two sources (William Poundstone’s Big Secrets and Mark Cunningham’s For God, Country, and Coca Cola) the basic “cola” flavor consists of a mix of vanilla, cinnamon, and citrus oils (not juices), along with small amounts of other flavors. The same recipe has long appeared in Merory’s flavoring handbook. the fact that Pepsi Cola tastes so much like Coca Cola tips you off that their recipe is basically a rip-off of Coke, since neither Pepsi nor Coke tastes like Coca + Cola. so, for that matter, are RC Cola and C&C Cola and the cola soda that used to be brewed up by my home town soda bottler. Nobody drinks Coke or Pepsi for a cocaine high anymore (although some people do guzzle it for the caffeine, but that’s secondary). The drinks have continued because people liked the flavor of the cover-up.
You could probably say the same about Seven-up (which used to contain lithium salts. It was the “lithiated” soda) or Dr. Pepper (God knows what it contained). I’d suggest that Moxie did the same as a delivery mechanism for gentian root extract, but I personally think that Moxie tastes pretty awful. To people who like it (a lot of demented souls in New England, mostly), though, this is another clear case of people coming to love the weird taste after the ostensible reason for it disappeared.
Any others?