Divorce Licorice

Introducing: the salmiakki blood pressure cuff

For years, I’ve insisted that I’m not a “dessert person.” This is mostly a lie. 

It’s true that when I go out to dinner, I rarely ask for a dessert menu (unless I’m there for work). But I always seem to find room for sweets that are savory: a miso-peanut-butter cookie, say, or a salt-stippled scoop of butter pecan. What I mean, I suppose, is that I’m not into uncomplicated sweetness—an endorphin rush without effort, sugar without salt. 

It’s a predictable viewpoint for a lapsed Catholic. Give me pleasure, but make me feel a little bad about it. 

I found the ultimate expression of self-flagellating sweetness—the most Gluttonous Punishment—in Finland. Specifically, I found salmiakki: an intensely salty, abrasive black licorice that tastes like the roof of a litterbox. 

Salmiakki is the dessert of my dreams, which does not mean it is any good. My dreams are largely inscrutable and unpleasant. The licorice derives its power from a peculiar kind of salt. The powdery coating on most candies isn’t sodium chloride but ammonium chloride—NH4Cl to table salt’s NaCl. Less chemically, it’s known as sal ammoniac—salmiac.  

Nordic countries in general consume a lot of salmiakki, but the Finns have turned it into an art. Walk into a movie theater in Helsinki and you’ll find bags of salmiakki in all its forms: dusty hard candies, salt-crusted gummies, sleek black licorice fish. In my view, the most concentrated expression of the candy—the ur-ammonium—are these diamond-shaped Fazer pastilles.

The “F” stands for Finland, of course.

There are only two things you really need to know about salmiakki:

1. The ammonium chloride gives the candy an eye-watering, cat-piss-like quality.

2. Eating too much of it can give you hypertension.

As you might imagine, I’m a big fan. 

I was even more intrigued when I read an NHS warning that a sustained diet of black licorice could lead to “potentially serious health problems, such as an increase in blood pressure and an irregular heart rhythm.” I had a heart murmur as a small child, and I have long yearned for its return. I think it would be good for both my psyche and my longevity to hear my heart whisper “please, liz. stop.” 

Longtime Haterade readers can see where this is going. “Is Liz going to hook herself up to a blood pressure monitor and eat a bunch of cat-piss candy?”

Yes. 

I returned from Finland armed with bags of salmiakki as well as a couple bottles of my new favorite drink: salmiari, a salty-sweet black licorice liqueur that’s much more palatable than the candy itself.

This is the national flag of Finland.

I should acknowledge that I was gooseing the outcome, a little—alcohol can raise blood pressure on its own, creating a kind of experimental comorbidity. But as with most Haterade experiments, I wanted the experience to be Goblin Level.

As a robustness check, I measured my blood pressure two ways: first with my friend Warren’s electronic blood pressure machine and then with a sphygmomanometer (a manual instrument, and an incredible spelling bee word). I’m reporting the sphygmomanometer readings because they were a little more consistent, but the trends were the same across instruments.

First, I needed a baseline. My blood pressure is usually too low, so I drank a couple of Hamm’s and watched 45 minutes of an Arsenal game to get to a normal human reading:

120/85.

Then, I ate a couple pastilles and took two shots of salmiari from a three-ounce jigger. I measured again. I didn’t expect to see a big spike right away, but I thought it might at least go up a trivial amount.

Instead, it went down.

120/75.

I ate a couple pieces and downed two more three-ounce shots.

110/65.

I was beginning to question the safety of the experiment at this point, but I was unwilling to back down. Two more candies, two more shots.

110/70.

Two and two more.

100/75.

A few shots in, and Kathleen, a former nursing assistant, and Tom, a former husband, are becoming suspicious. I am merely becoming drunk.

I’m not sure what this experiment says about my relationship with poisons in general and alcohol in particular, but I’m confident I’m not willing to hear it. I will simply choose to believe that my body thrives on trash the way a plecostomus thrives on pond scum.

To be fair, I’m not sure this short-term, unscientific experiment says anything about the hypertensive power of Helsinki’s finest, either. You can’t learn much from a sample size of one, especially when the “one” is a salt-crusted mischief monster fiending for self-destruction. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about self-destruction lately, in part because I spent the beginning of 2023 getting divorced—a delirious experience of unmaking my own future (or at the very least, the version of the future I’d banked on for the past 15 years). The ubiquity of divorce did not prepare me for its crude and singular intensity. Mostly, it did not prepare me for the months-long process of managing just about everyone’s emotions but my own. 

There were weeks when I felt bitterly lonely—abandoned by friends I thought I’d have for life, robbed even of the company of self-pity, because I knew I’d brought it on myself. And there were weeks in which the only thing that made me laugh was a sign outside of a White Castle that read “SHRIMP NIBBLERS ARE BACK.” Those were the weeks when I wondered whether I’d transposed risk and reward.

Evidence from this newsletter aside, I’ve never been a person with a lot of (emotionally) self-destructive tendencies. I’ve lived a relatively wholesome, straightforward, thoroughly Midwestern life in which I’ve largely done what’s expected of me. And I like that! I don’t have much patience for melodrama (despite my theatre degree) and the selfishness it often requires. If anything, I can be pragmatic to the point of coldness.  

I suppose the upside to doing something so out of character is that at least you know it’s not a habit or a vice.

Early in the split, my ex-husband said something that’s stayed with me: “Nothing gets between Liz Cook and having every experience she wants.” It was neither meant nor received kindly at the time, and I’m not sure it’s entirely true. (For example, I have never done cocaine on a jetski.)

But it’s true that I can be pig-headed about taking calculated risks. I do believe on some level that shaking things up every now and then—testing your limits a little, stumbling if you have to—can be good for you.

And there’s good reason not to code destruction as inherently negative. I work with economists for a living, which means I read a lot about “Schumpeterian creative destruction”—crudely, the idea that it’s necessary for inefficient businesses to die to make room for new and innovative firms. As with a lot of economic concepts, it’s true in the aggregate and callous in the particular.

Sure, drinking a traveler of salmiakki liqueur in an afternoon might not qualify as “creative destruction” (though it is, I would argue, a creative way to destroy one’s health). And I’m not going to pretend its virtuous. At best, it might be value-neutral. The trick, as with everything, is knowing where your boundaries are—and what it might take to make them move.

I used to teach composition to college freshmen, and I kept a running Word doc with my favorite lines from student papers. The morning after my divorce became final, one popped into my brain like a koan.  

"We need to have the comfortable sofa of normality torn and burned under our rump roasts."

It was a great line, from a terrible paper.

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I gave a talk and you can watch it online!

Way back in November, I spoke at an event series called Creative Mornings on criticism, the unkindness of naked boosterism, and my own struggle to balance “art” [raising my blood pressure as a bit] with a day job. I’m happy with how it came out! Would love for you to watch it here.

Die-cut Haterade stickers are still available and you can cop one for free!

Details on how to claim one here.

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