kümmel is an herbal liqueur of southern Baltic origin, primarily flavored with caraway seed. It was formerly renowned as an ingredient in cocktails, punches, and drinks short and tall—most famously the Silver Bullet, from the 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book. It also has traditional culinary uses in desserts, sauces, and sauerkraut.
Caraway seeds are a traditional Baltic “cover,” or basic botanical for flavoring spirits (like aniseed around the Mediterranean and juniper berries along the Rhine), although the time and place of their initial use remains obscure. See aquavit and genever. By the seventeenth century, however, “spiritus carvi,” or “caraway spirit,” was common in medical texts. The spirit soon made the jump to recreational use. In 1768, a German manual for merchants mentioned caraway as a flavoring for brandy, and a recipe for doppel-kümmel shows up in a German distillers’ manual in 1823. In that year, Wilhelm Von Blanckenhagen (1761–1840) commenced commercial production in Allasch, then a Baltic-German region in Latvia. Van Blanckenhagen’s Allasch Kümmel, thick with sugar and 40 percent ABV, achieved international recognition at the Leipzig Trade Fair in 1830.
Several Latvian-German distillers soon followed suit, including noted Riga distiller Albert Wolfschmidt (1816–1895), whose kümmel dates to 1847. Eckau Kümmel, originally distilled by another Latvian noble family, Von Pahlen, was an even more potent and slightly less sugary recipe, which, according to its producers, dated to 1805. It was often imitated and sometimes sold in bear figurine bottles, which Ernest Hemingway described in A Farewell to Arms. Founded in 1850, the Gilka brand typified the Berlin style of kümmel, somewhat dryer but not as potent.
Allasch Kümmel’s popularity spread to Britain in 1851, when Ludwig Mentzendorff contracted with the Van Blankenhagens for distribution there. In 1920, the Van Blanckenhagens fled the Soviet Revolution to northern Germany, where they continued production of the Mentzendorff Kümmel until 1939, when distillation moved to Amsterdam. Today, Mentzendorff Kümmel is distilled by the French Combier company, who also make a doppel-kümmel for US distribution.
Kümmel’s heyday as a cocktail ingredient stretched from the 1910s through the 1930s; with the Second World War devastating its home region and the public taste running toward drier, simpler drinks, it had little chance to recover. The cocktail renaissance has so far not proven itself to be kümmel-inflected, although the liqueur does have its adherents (not surprisingly, it mixes well with rye whisky).
See also: Germany, Switzerland, and Austria; liqueurs; and Russia and Eastern Europe.
“Le kummel du Domaine Eckau du Comte de Pahlen.” Journal officiel de l’alimentation, June 20, 1916, 9–10.
Miller, Anistatia, and Jared Brown. “Lost Ingredients: Kümmel.” The Historians, June 20, 2014. http://thehistorians-jaredbrown.blogspot.com/2014/06/lost-ingredients-kummel.html (accessed January 31, 2021).
Ray, Cyril, “Try Kummel on Ice.” The Observer, May 29, 1966, 19.
Schmidt, Carl Wilhelm. Das Ganze der Destillirkunst. Königsberg: Gebrüder Bornträger, 1823.
By: Doug Stailey