Food With a Hint of Licorice: Good for More Than a Lick (Published 1989) (2024)

CHILDREN munch Good and Plenty candies at the movies, and adults sip sambuca after dinner. Licorice flavors are enjoyed by young and old, and the attraction is growing.

The licorice taste and aroma found in a broad range of ingredients and seasonings - including fennel, fennel seed, anise seed and star anise - are being used in dishes from appetizers to desserts.

Fennel, a celery-like anise-flavored vegetable, is increasingly common in produce markets. Consumption of fennel seed, according to the American Spice Trade Association, has grown 255 percent in this country in the past decade, second in percentage growth only to basil. Consumption of anise seed has doubled since 1980, the association said, and fresh fennel, once found only in produce markets in Italian neighborhoods, is now widely available in supermarkets.

More and more chefs around the nation are experimenting with fennel. In New York, fish is grilled over fennel at Le Cirque and La Metairie; La Colombe d'Or has an appetizer of snails with fennel; Azzurro includes wild fennel in its Sicilian pasta con le sarde; the Four Seasons has added braised fennel with Parmesan cheese to its dinner menu; at Rakel, the chef, Thomas Keller, adorns sea scallops in a fennel sauce with a frond of fennel.

At the Trellis in Williamsburg, Va., Marcel Desaulniers offers sauteed crab meat and oysters in a fennel butter sauce. And in Santa Monica, Calif., four French chefs have established a restaurant that they call Fennel overlooking the Pacific. Among its dishes with the vegetable is a dessert tart filled with caramelized fennel cooked with sugar and butter.

When Michel Rostang, one of the four Fennel chefs, was asked why the restaurant wasn't named for, say, spinach, he said the name they chose suggested the south of France.