Check any of my pockets or totes and you’re likely to find at least one Ricola wrapper. I toss them eventually, but I tend to keep them around for a little bit, shoving them into my jacket instead of walking to a trash can. I dig the wrapper out later, mid-conversation or in a meeting, putting aside the plain little rectangle that hugs each lozenge and flattening the cheerful printed one with the yellow ends, folding it into a little packet or strip to wrap around my finger. I like how, when handled, the waxy paper gets more supple, like fabric.
I can’t part with this trash right away, because, even though I have sucked on countless Ricola in my life and the yellow-and-white packaging with the ten alpine herbs has never changed, the wrapper seems as much to be savored as the lozenge.
I started sucking on Ricola Natural Herb several years ago to deal with my food allergy anxiety, and I still pop at least one square-ish, dark amber drop into my mouth a day. There is a tactile ritual to the untwisting. I was never cool enough to roll my own cigarettes but this feels like its kin, reverence for little bits of paper that contain a small but dependable solace.
When I ate out in New York, I’d unwrap Ricola on the subway after dinner and feel the minty herbal flavor cool my lungs and tingle my mouth. The sensations refocused my attention and gave an explanation to the phantom food allergy symptoms that so often followed a meal I didn’t myself prepare. The Ricola got my mind off those scary symptoms — a prickle at the back of my throat, tingling lips and tongue, swollen throat — so I could let them go.
Rolling a lozenge around in your mouth means breathing in and breathing out that cool, Ricola air through the nose. I learned to drink wine like this, letting air pass in and out of my nose as I tasted, back in my wine pouring days at Brooklyn Wine Exchange: aroma and flavor are the sum experience of both your sense of smell and your sense of taste. It is hard to breathe shallowly with Ricola in your mouth.
I unwrap a Ricola whenever I need to focus on my breathing or be more in the moment. Ricola helps while driving in Los Angeles, helps me center myself on the way to a party. Also, I like how they taste. There is something distinctly amaro- and digestif-like about Ricola’s formula (peppermint, sage, horehound, elder, mallow, thyme, lemon balm, and hyssop, they claim), like a portable nip of Fernet I can keep in my pocket.
But escapist and exotic as that might seem, I also can’t shake that Ricola feels like Central Jersey to me, as much as everything bagels, Greek diner food, pizza, naan, and Italian ice. I am only partly joking.
I didn’t grow up eating Ricola. My parents weren’t the cough drops type — I can’t remember being given a single cough drop as a child. I would have found out about them one way or another (they’re hard to miss), but it panned out that they landed on my radar because of Dr. Schlosberg.
I grew up in the suburbs in flat Central Jersey — a “field” (Westfield, Plainfield, Scotch Plains) not a “hill” (Short Hills, Murray Hill, Berkeley Heights, Summit) — that was more or less west of Staten Island. We were as far from the alps as you can get, spiritually and geographically. But when I was a kid, my hometown contained an alphorn. Possibly two.
An alphorn, if you don’t know, is a long, slender, key-less wooden horn with the bell resting on the ground. It is at least as long as two adults standing on top of each other, and it was used in the mountains, like yodeling. (It is not, however, merely “blown yodeling,” according to researchers.) Yet our alphorn, when it appeared periodically on a street corner in the Center of Town, elicited no double takes or gawking that I remember. I’m sure people did stare or pointed their toddlers’ attention towards it — look! a big horn! — but my memory of it is mostly from the backseat of our Honda Accord as my mother drove by that corner, neither of us even acknowledging it to the other. It was like the forsythia bushes that bloomed everywhere in early spring, forgotten until the petals blared open: pleasing to remember, but not worth stopping short for.
Behind the horn was Dr. Schlosberg, as he was known, slope-shouldered, spectacled, bald with a skirt of pewter waves. His resting expression held what seemed like a half smile, like he was barely containing the brink of a joke in a serious situation. But you must have a little joke in you at all times, if you have managed to make alphorn playing unsurprising on a street corner of suburban New Jersey.
I took Dr. Schlosberg for granted, I think, but he was a huge figure in my hometown. He taught music, directed a community band, and founded an arts program for students. (The summer day camp convinced me, for a brief and innocent time, that I was bound to be an actor. I did only slightly better with guitar.) He appeared in several Ricola commercials, playing the alphorn, of course. Whenever Dr. Schlosberg’s name came up (and it did, often, because I was friends with the marching band), someone or other would croon Riiiiicolaaaa, like in the commercial. Since I left for college, he seems to have established an alphorn ensemble, which means that there are as many as five or six alphorns in my hometown now on a semi-regular basis. All these years later, I finally find this remarkable.
Time makes a difference. Around this time last year, saturated with adrenaline and a million feelings I couldn’t resolve, and with a giant and unresolvable hole in my bedroom wall from that winter’s torrential rain, I went out and bought cigarettes. I kept the carton in a toolbox full of pencils and Japanese erasers until last weekend, when I rediscovered them and threw them out.
I don’t do well with vices. I have learned the hard way that the best way for me to soothe myself has little to do with instant gratification. But as quick fixes go, Ricola breathing, this wrapper of air, seems like the most potent thing I carry around. Ricola brings me back home.
Snacks
I am not interested in the taxonomy of noshing (like, is Ricola a candy or a cough drop? is candy a snack? is a snack a meal? etc.) but I will concede that soda is not a snack. Unless? Flavored soda water and cough drops do share history in the pharmacy, at least in the United States. You can put ice cream in soda, and that’s a snack, or it can be. I digress! The point is, I thoroughly enjoyed these soda-themed pieces from Vittles. If you’re in the UK and have been wondering why Sanpellegrino soda doesn’t hit like it used to, Amelia Horgan writes:
In 2018, Nestlé changed the recipe for their Sanpellegrino line. They replaced 40% of the sugar with stevia to get around the sugar tax – reducing the sugar content to less than 5g per 100ml. I tried one lousy post-tax can: I was no longer in Italy. The hybrid sweetness recipe – apparently the product of years of research and development – was somehow, for me, both too sweet and not sweet enough. And all the talk of excess (even if now-reduced) sugar took me fearfully back to the dentist’s office; it was over.I bought Alpine Cooking by Meredith Erickson during a time in the pandemic when I felt full of wanderlust away from Los Angeles summer but was unable to travel (and couldn’t have afforded an alpine vacation, anyway). I left this beautiful book in my old apartment, but I keep wishing I still had it. It possibly contains a recipe for a dessert (or drink?) that has Ricola in it, but I can’t remember if that’s in this book, or in a book I still own. Sometimes I wish you could ctrl+F real life.