While you're frying up some eggs and bacon, we're cooking up something else: a way to celebrate today's food holiday.

Do you like licorice? Are you that person who hoards all the black jellybeans that others fling toward the trash can? If so, then today’s holiday may be for you. Happy National Anisette Day!

Anisette is a sweet anise-flavored liqueur that’s popular all over the Mediterranean. It’s typically made by distilling aniseed and adding a sugar syrup. Other anise-flavored spirits include pastis, which is typically French and made by macerating aniseed with licorice, the Turkish raki, Greek ouzo, Colombian aguardiente, Italian Sambuca, and absinthe, which adds more herbs and wormwood to the recipe. All of these will “louche” when you add a little bit of cool water to them, meaning the essential oils that flavor them come out of solution and turn the beverage milky-white.

Anisette is primarily made in Spanish-speaking countries, and Chinchón and Anis del Mono are the most popular varieties. The French-made Marie Brizard anisette is also popular.

Anisette is most often served with just a bit of water, but you can shake it up with gin and cream and an egg white for a Café de Paris cocktail, or stir it with bourbon and bitters for a New Orleans.