stomach (v.) to cherish indignation or bitterness. from L. stomachari—to be resentful, to be angry with. See also, Fr. s’estomaquer—to take offence.
I love, as I can imagine others loathing, the English language for just such ambiguities, inconsistencies, and transformations as this. To think that, above and beyond the familiar organ of digestion, to stomach once meant the retention and even enjoyment of one’s (metaphorical) bile, but has come over time to mean variously “to brook, put up with, endure or tolerate,” a “relish, inclination, desire (for something immaterial),” “an appetite or relish for food,” and, as above, even to relish one’s own ill-feeling. When I first stumbled upon these multiple meanings, they struck me as almost opposite to the conventional use of stomach, its negation suggesting not just an absence of positive desire, but the very limits of tolerance—the ability to keep something down, literally or figuratively. But I see now how the meanings interweave, playing with and off each other, suggestively yet uneasily. Tolerance becomes desire (or desire tolerance, in cynical romantic analogy); we come to cherish our foods as once we cherished our venom and our pride.
This brings to mind another confusing human achievement: the amaro, or bitter liqueur. We in North America are most familiar with a handful of aperatifs/aperativos and digestifs/digestivos, but almost every country has their own beloved take on the bitter, from Jägermeister and the Kräuterlikors of Germany, to the gentian liquors of France, to the Latvian Riga Black Balsam (which tastes distinctly of caramelized vegetable sugars, among other things). Many of these can be traced to the apothecarial legacies of witches, herbalists, and snake-oil salesmen, macerating plants and whatnot (I like to think there were actual snakes involved) in alcohol for their ostensibly curative properties. One such concoction that has been wildly popular both in spite and by virtue of its strange and aggressive flavour is Fernet-Branca, the taste of which has been variously likened to “black licorice-flavoured Listerine,” “medicine, mint, and bitter mud,” and “poison, with aspirin crushed up in it.” It is, as you can imagine, an acquired taste.
Created in 1845 in Milan by Bernardino Branca, and marketed as “febrifuge, vermifuge, tonic, invigorating, warming and anti-choleric,” a cure-all for everything from menstrual pains to hangovers, it became so firmly entrenched as medicine that it escaped suppression during Prohibition in America. A feat that seems all the more remarkable today, since up until the 1970s it contained, in addition to its 38 percent alcohol, an apparently not insignificant quantity of opiates. Fernet is now widely recognized as a, as it were, recreational libation, as opposed to a purely medicinal one, but it certainly still tastes like medicine, and similar products retain their ambiguous status in this respect. Zwack Unicum (a Hungarian bitter that in a movie about its life would be played by Jägermeister—sweeter and more palatable for mainstream audiences), for instance, is in some places still sold behind pharmacy counters rather than in liquor stores, evoking for the bitters fan the queer sense of pride of having defied the presupposition that no one could appreciate the stuff for its gustatory merits (and creating another strange parallel between the privileged, bearded cocktail revivalist and the Listerine-drinking hobo).
There is a Fernet-Branca advertisement from some time in the interwar years that I have always loved. Designed in Art Deco style by Lucien-Achille Mauzan, it depicts a winged, scythe-wielding angel of death fleeing a rolling bottle of Fernet, with three figures following in its wake, and a slogan that proclaims, “Fernet-Branca Estomacal. Prolonga la Vida!” One of the figures has his head turned and arm outstretched behind him, in a gesture I assume is intended to beckon others to follow, but which, in its stylish abstraction I always read as him giving the finger, in a very “Run comrade, the old world is behind you!” sort of way. Are they chasing Death away or merely chasing death? It is strange to make of the acrid, acerbic, and unpleasant a virtue, although the strangeness is somewhat congealed into a tiresome pretense in this era of adventure eating and ubiquitous foodism.
Nevertheless, I like the stuff. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I liked it before it was cool, but at least before it was quite so predictable to do so. In a self-serving mixture of metaphors, I’m willing to make the claim that goddamn bastards such as myself may cherish our bitterness both in itself and for the bile it calls forth, to better aid the digestion of what we can and must keep down, and stimulate the appetite for other pleasures. “Is not the lute that soothes your spirit,” wrote Kahlil Gibran, “the very wood that was hollowed with knives?”1 Or something like that?
1 The Prophet (Knopf, 1923) was a great favourite of mine back when I was a Sensitive Young Man, before I became so cold and spiritually feckless.