Anise Seed (Pimpinella anisum) Pure Essential Oil

Anise Oil offered is a dainty, white-flowered urnbelliferous annual that is about 18 inches high and has secondary feather-like leaflets of bright green color. The oil is distilled from the fruit part where that yields on distillation is from 2.5 to 3.5 percent of fragrant, syrupy and volatile oil in which anethol, the principal aromatic constituent is present to about 90 per cent.

Anise was given the nickname, Solamen intestinorum, the comforter of the bowels. The Romans often served spiced cakes at the close of ‘rich entertainment’ to avoid indigestion and flatulance. It was quite common for these cakes, known as mustaceoe, to be served at the end of a marriage feast. The tradition of wedding cake stems from this early use of spiced cake made with aniseed. Gerard, author of Herball or Historie of Plants(1597), a work that borrows its information liberally from Dr. Priest’s earlier work Pemptades (1583), says of anise: “The Aniseed helpeth the yeoxing, or hicket (hiccough), and should be given to young children to eat which are like to have the falling sickness, or to such as have it by patrimony or succession.” Germans believed so strongly in the medicinal value of anise that during the 1800s they often flavored their household bread with whole aniseed.