Klosterfrau Melissengeist

Klosterfrau Melissengeist is a clear, strongly aromatic spirit distilled from lemon balm and twelve other plants, among them angelica, elecampane, gentian, ginger, cloves and cinnamon, in alcohol of 79 per cent. It is sold in a clear glass bottle with a white cap and a white label crowded with the Prussian royal arms and the medals of nineteenth-century exhibitions, packed in a blue carton showing three nuns beneath a Gothic arch. A spoonful is taken in water or on sugar, or the spirit is rubbed on aching muscles.

Its maker, Maria Clementine Martin, entered a convent in Coesfeld at seventeen and lost it to secularisation in 1803. After years of nursing, and a royal pension that she attributed to her care of the wounded at Waterloo, she settled beside Cologne cathedral in 1825. She registered her business the next year and by 1827 was advertising a Carmelite spirit, claiming, without proof that historians have found, to hold the true recipe of the order.

Her gift was for persuasion. In 1829 the king of Prussia allowed her to print his eagle on her labels, an advantage the eau de Cologne house of Farina had sought in vain, and she used the whole royal coat of arms. Officially the spirit could be sold only as a cosmetic, but it was bought as a remedy for the stomach, the nerves and the head, and after her death in 1843 her assistant Peter Schaeben carried it to exhibitions and markets across the world.

The firm went bankrupt in 1933 and was rescued by Wilhelm Doerenkamp, whose advertising gave it the slogan 'Nie war er so wertvoll wie heute', never so valuable as today. Bombing destroyed the Cologne works, and production has long since moved to Berlin, but the label still carries the arms granted in 1829, and the spirit is still sold in German pharmacies and chemists.