Benedictine and Chartreuse
Benedictine
and Chartreuse
In Brief
The glories of several pieces of sacred music send Bloom into
a brief this-worldly reverie about life in the old Catholic
church, starting with art-loving popes and ending with the
daily lives of monks: "Those old popes were keen on
music, on art and statues and pictures of all kinds.
Palestrina for example too. They had a gay old time while it
lasted. Healthy too, chanting, regular hours, then brew
liqueurs. Benedictine. Green Chartreuse." The two herbal
liqueurs he names, which are among the finest in the world,
are indeed the work of French monks, though their histories
are slightly more complicated than he imagines.
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Bénédictine, a distilled spirit whose formula is a closely
guarded trade secret, is reportedly flavored with 27 herbs,
spices, fruits, flowers, roots, honeys, and conifer saps. It
is supposed to have been invented in the 16th century by
Benedictine monks at the Fécamp Abbey in Normandy, but its
mass production dates only to 1863, when a businessman named
Alexandre Le Grand, helped by a compounding chemist, devised a
formula that he said came from the abbey in the days before
the Revolution banished monastic orders. The letters "DOM"
printed on every label (Deo optimo maximo, "To God,
most good, most great") are said to be a Benedictine motto,
like the AMDG (Ad majoram
Dei gloriam, "To the greater glory of God") of the
Jesuits, but this claim may be spurious. The commonly
recognized motto of St. Benedict is Ora et labora
("prayer and work"), and putting DOM on liqueur bottles was a
marketing decision made by Le Grand.
The monastic provenance of green Chartreuse (there is also a
yellow version) is much more definite. Carthusian monks at the
Grande Chartreuse monastery in the Chartreuse Mountains of
southeastern France began making this distilled spirit in the
early 18th century. It is flavored with an even larger
assortment of herbs, spices, flowers, and roots—130 of them in
all—and as with Bénédictine only two or three people know the
formula at any given time. The monks began brewing the liqueur
for its supposed medicinal properties, rather than for
alcoholic inebriation, but here too there is a secular origin
story. In 1605 a marshal of artillery to the French king,
François Hannibal d'Estrées, gave the Carthusian order a
manuscript containing an alchemical formula for the elixir of life. One of the
monks at Chartreuse tinkered with the recipe in 1737, and
production began. After the Revolution the formula was
smuggled out of France and the liqueur was made in Catalonia
for many years, but today two monks oversee production at
Grande Chartreuse.
Benedictine and Chartreuse figure only in this one brief
passage in Lotus Eaters, but within the Homeric framework of that
chapter the two liqueurs carry strong associations: alcoholic
delights, alchemical elixirs, religious mysteries, gay old
times.
