Say “licorice” and most people think of those black, chewy ropes from a bygone era of candy. But licorice is also a plant related to beans and lentils, and its root is one of the most important and most used herbs in ancient Egypt, Greece, India, and China.
The most striking thing about licorice root is its sweetness, about 50 times sweeter than sugar. The Chinese call it gan cao (“sweet herb”). The word “licorice” is the product of a centuries’ long phonetic corruption of the Greek word for the plant, glyrrhiza, which means “sweet root.”
