Oh Malört: Prohibition-era dewormer cookies

These cookies aren't for most people, but are they for me? The results are...bittersweet.

I saw a post from the lovely and talented Barry Enderwick of Sandwiches of History the other day about Billy Zureikat’s Malört Cookies and was immediately intrigued by this unforgivable idea. If you haven’t had the pleasure, Malört is a liqueur popular known mainly in the Chicago area, where it’s typically consumed on a dare.

This is owing to its, um, unusual flavor, best described in my opinion as similar to undiluted pesticide.

There’s a reason to this utter madness. You really must check out their hilarious history here, but in summary, immigrant Carl Jeppson first made this version of the traditional Swedish wormwood-infused bitters bäskbrännvin in the US in 1920. Sharp-eyed students of history will recognize that this was just in time for Prohibition, so that might seem like very poor timing, but our buddy Carl was pretty smart; he skirted the law by selling it as a medicinal parasite remedy. Reportedly, the authorities believed it, because it was unthinkable that anyone would drink it recreationally.

He might not have been totally flat-out lying to profit from the ban. If the name “wormwood” rings a bell, it might be as one of the main ingredients in Absinthe and the one that was banned when winemaker propaganda smeared it in the 19th century. While its hallucinogenic properties were oversold, it actually does have some therapeutic uses (and dosage risks) because of its many bioactive compounds, so it’s probably a good thing it tastes terrible lest someone add the insult of poisoning to the injury of the taste.

Fortunately, the neurological risks seem to be associated with long-term use of wormwood oil, so if I lose my mind from tasting these, it’ll be down to the flavor and not the thujone.

The company really leans into the absurdity of this product, largely because there is no other option:

Perhaps the best way to explain its usual culinary use is that it is an ingredient in the Dead Viking shot, which also contains mead and pickled herring. Even Unemployedwineguy Prescott Vanmeyer III couldn’t deal, and he’s an intrepid guy — he liked Gatorwine, after all.

Despite all this, Zureikat decided to see whether he could make a delicious cookie based on this flavor. (He has other ideas like lemon pepper pizza and Negroni cookies that I need to try, too.) It uses solid pairing theory to assemble the complementary flavors — other ingredients with a bitter-friendly profile like grapefruit and cocoa — and crucially, it only uses the Malört in the glaze. Sandwiches of History gave it a thumb’s up, so it’s possible that it’s good, but he’s tried many a vintage sandwich horror and been okay with some of them, so I don’t think I can take him at his word.

I’m going to have to try them myself.

You can’t find Malört easily in my neck of the woods, and when you do, it’s a big ol’ bottle that I’m unwilling to buy, so I’m grateful to my friend Jen from Laughing at Chaos for sending me the mini bottle that her husband got in a Chicago conference swag bag. (Somehow they were willing to part with it.)

Let’s start by tasting it solo, for science. It smells medicinal, botanical, but not wholly offensive. It reminds me of some of the undiluted herbal tinctures you might find in your local natural foods store. The flavor, however, is beyond the pale…as in, when you taste it, you will blanch and well nigh keel over. Even though it hits like a single punch to the face with a lead-lined brick, there are a lot of layers. In a swirl of unpleasant memories, my aromatic/flavor life passes before my tongue. Licking envelope glue. Cleaning brushes with paint thinner. Washing my hands after accidentally smushing a stinkbug. Fumigating for roaches in the shadow of refinery plumes on the Gulf Coast.

I find my belief that this recipe could possibly be good shaken to the core. It’s only in the glaze, yes…but the glaze has two ounces of this Devil’s Roundup in it.

Here are the main ingredients, except my giant bottle of homemade vanilla extract didn’t fit:

Yes, I am using my expensive and transcendent Valrhona cocoa in this. I’m hoping it will be like Beauty and the Beast, okay?

Prep is super easy. You just mix finely grated grapefruit zest with sugar, cream it with butter, vanilla and egg, and add the usual cookie dry ingredients. (You can see my tip of mixing potentially clumpy things like baking soda with cocoa to check for lumps before blending with flour.)

The glaze is just powdered sugar, vanilla, and Malört. Usually I would suggest adding a pinch of salt to such glazes to bring out the flavors, but in this case, that sounds like a foolhardy idea. You can see the powdered sugar below, sitting in a pool of Malört, which appears to be seething with rage.

This recipe has no chill (pun very much intended), so you just scoop it and roll it in the reserved grapefruit zest sugar, press down a bit, and bake. You drizzle on the glaze when they cool. I was a bit worried that the lack of chilling might make them spread too much and have a bit of a greasy look, so I just made half a batch and then tried the second half with about 30 minutes of chilling. (It’s probably just the difference between room temp in Chicago vs. Texas, honestly — I made these on an 85 degree December day, courtesy climate change.) The unchilled did spread very thin, and I preferred the ones with just a little bit of a stiffer dough, but both versions were legitimately, shockingly delicious. The grapefruit zest with chocolate is just gorgeous, and although it’s strong, I love the jolt of the glaze. It really heightens the other flavors, and makes the sweetness more than just a pretty face.

Keep in mind that I really like a bitter note. I like kale, and gin and tonics, and arugula, and 85% chocolate bars. This cookie, like its signature ingredient, is not for everyone. The genetics of bitter taste responses are fascinating and complex, so if you are a coward smarter than I am, you could make Zureikat’s delightful recipe with grapefruit juice instead of Malört, and you’d get a good sense of its best qualities. If bitter is not your jam, it would still be delicious made similarly with orange zest in the dough and juice in the glaze. It’s a very easy cookie to come out so beautifully giftable.

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