It was resting on the wall, close, as it turns out, to a carob tree. A carob pod. Dry and gnarled but oddly appealing. I took it to my Greek aunt’s husband, Manolis, and asked him to confirm whether it was, as I suspected, a carob pod. He confirmed it was. My question prompted him to reminisce, nostalgically, about a drink made from carob that he recalled from his youth. They would bring snow from the mountains, he said, and mix it with a syrup, made from boiling the fruit. And it was heavenly. Crete’s answer to Coca Cola.
Wow, I said. How do you make the syrup?
At which, Manolis whipped out his mobile and called his botanist friend Kosta for instructions. They had a conversation. Kostas, I gathered, was not well, holed up with a nasty bug in the mountains. But he passed on the recipe. The magical recipe. So, you pour water onto the carobs, Manolis informed me, and leave them overnight. And in the morning – you have it! It seemed incredible. A wondrous nectar, so simply made.
I resolved to make it. Mairi, my aunt, equipped me with a bucket for collecting the carobs. Within minutes it was full. Easy enough to snap off the wrinkly fruits hanging in sociable clusters from the tree. The next day, I brought round my home made liqueur and challenged Manolis to try it. He looked at it dubiously.
It’s darker than I remember, he said.
I confessed I’d boiled them, after a quick bout of internet research. Manolis looked disappointed.
You should have gone with the local botanist’s advice, not Google, he reprimanded me, with a degree of feeling. Still, he drunk it.
Hmm, he said. It tastes like Caroupia (the name of the drink of his memories).
But he didn’t look like someone who’d just tasted the divine.
Ariadne Birnberg 