Author Sara Roahen is an adopted New Orleanian, too. The former Gambit Weekly food columnist practically grew up in another country — though you could also call it Wisconsin — and moved to New Orleans when her then-boyfriend, now-husband became a medical student at Tulane. A lightweight drinker and former vegetarian who’d logged time in the health-conscious kitchens of Northern California, she wasn’t the most obvious fit for the Big Easy; nonetheless, she fell in love. “Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table” is an endearing collection of stories from the seven years she spent in the Crescent City, learning to embrace its unapologetically decadent cuisine. It is part culinary history, part memoir and part homage to places that have since been erased.

It’s been a painful recovery for New Orleans, though recently, on the WWL radio program “The Food Show,” host Tom Fitzmorris offered the encouraging news that New Orleans now has more restaurants than it did pre-Katrina. So many things were lost during the storm, but so many endured, things that Roahen writes about with the curious eye of an affectionate outsider: Hansen’s Sno-Bliz on a swampy summer afternoon; the grumpy butchers at Central Grocery; the barbecue shrimp po-boy at Liuzza’s by the Tracks; the black-tie debauchery of Galatoire’s; cocktails, oysters, crawfish, gumbo.

Let’s start out by talking about gumbo. Can you talk about some of the possible origins of gumbo in New Orleans?

There are a few theories. First of all, “gumbo” is an African word (quingumbo). I was just at a writers conference in New York, and I met a woman from Liberia who told me that gumbo in New Orleans tastes just like the dish called gumbo in Liberia. The word “gumbo” means okra in one of the Bantu languages, according to food historian Jessica Harris, and okra is the main ingredient in some gumbos. So, many food historians believe it originated in Africa. There are a lot of sources that also posit that it was inspired by French bouillabaisse, “fish soup.” That seems logical, but it doesn’t seem to be true.

The problem is that gumbo is such a huge topic. When I wrote the chapter on gumbo, I worked on it for the better part of three years. And at that point, I thought, I’m no expert, but that’s everything I know. Then, last summer, I did 20 oral histories about gumbo, and I realized I know nothing. I met people who put Spam in their gumbo. I met people who make squirrel gumbo.

So what’s your favorite bowl of gumbo?

My favorite is what I call “Big Mama Style” gumbo, after the first one I tried [Big Mama's Gumbo at the now-closed Inn Restaurant]. That’s a style of gumbo that has a lot of ingredients — it’s very chunky, there are pieces of crab with the exoskeleton still on and it’s a thin broth. But I think it became my favorite because I loved the places where I would find it. They were always these owner-operated, small places in the neighborhoods. Two Sisters Restaurant. Dunbar’s Creole Cooking. Both of those places flooded, but they’ve reopened since, although Dunbar’s didn’t get to open in its original space. And there’s a place called Stella’s, which no longer exists. These are places where the clientele was mostly African-American, and it was fun to participate in something that was not my native culture, this regular Friday tradition of eating gumbo.

Why is gumbo eaten on Fridays?

Well, you can walk into a restaurant any day of the week and get gumbo, but this kind of gumbo is usually served on Fridays, in particular because it’s expensive. And time-consuming. At some point, it probably had something to do with not eating meat on Fridays during Lent, although there’s meat in it now, most of the time. But New Orleans is big on having certain special days for specific foods.

Like eating red beans and rice on Mondays. What’s the story behind that?

There’s a folk story that says when you were doing your laundry in big pots over a fire on Mondays, it would be an all-day affair, and it made sense to put on a long-cooking dish like beans beside it. And you would go from stirring your laundry to stirring your dish. Who knows if that’s true.

But even now, on Mondays, it’ll be on the menu at so many restaurants. You can walk through the neighborhoods and smell it. You can go into stores and see people putting Blue Runner beans in their carts.

Another New Orleans staple, crawfish, is a difficult seafood to love, I find. Can you talk about how you came around to it?

I went to my first few crawfish boils, and I just thought, how does anyone get full on this? First of all, I was intimidated to peel those things in front of natives. But also, I didn’t realize you’re supposed to linger over it for hours. It’s a social event, and you get your beer, and you stand over a mound of crawfish and talk and get to know people and you wait for the boil master to bring the next pot and it took me a long time to appreciate it. It also took me a long time to appreciate the taste of crawfish because it’s very subtle, and to understand that people are enjoying the crawfish and not just the seasoning.

I want to talk about Mardi Gras, because there’s a perception of it as frat boy bacchanalia. I always figured it was something people who lived in New Orleans hated.

Well, there are a lot of natives who do leave the city, because the celebration is not only on Fat Tuesday but for weeks before. On the other hand, the most hardcore Mardi Gras revelers are New Orleanians. It’s the holiday of the year. There is that element of frat boy partying, but it’s also such an amazing time of year to be with family and friends and have fun. New Orleans, in general, taught me how to have fun. It taught me to loosen up.

It’s a very Catholic town, but there’s not a lot of guilt.

It’s a weird combination. One theory is that the Eastern seaboard was settled by the English, primarily, while the French had more of an influence on Louisianians, and the French have always had more of a free spirit. But I also think maybe climate has to do with it. You cannot remain buttoned up for most of the year. You have to let it all hang out, physically. Maybe that extends to the mentality as well.

And the lack of guilt extends to food. This is not a calorie-conscious town. At one point, you wrote about deep-fried oysters covered with brie, and I wrote a note in the margins that just said, “Whoa.”

It’s ridiculous. It can be a parody of itself. Food inventions in New Orleans can take on a comical air, trying to one-up the already excessive amounts of fat and flavor. I think the turducken [Paul Prudhomme's Thanksgiving creation that combines turkey, duck and chicken] is like that. But there are really refined Creole dishes and food preparations that aren’t so over-the-top, that still contain a lot of flavor.

What do you find to be the hardest thing to explain to outsiders about New Orleans food?

Probably that New Orleans food isn’t Cajun food. Once you try to tell them that, their eyes glaze over. Visitors always want to eat jambalaya and blackened redfish and the food they associate with Cajun food, and those things are actually kind of hard to find. I don’t have an answer about where to eat jambalaya. I’m sure it exists in lots of tourism-driven restaurants. It’s definitely something that New Orleanians eat, but it’s a home-based dish. That’s what a lot of people will eat on the parade route on Mardi Gras. But if you really want to eat Cajun food, go to Cajun country. Go to Acadiana.

You mention in the book one of the reasons people associate New Orleans so strongly with Cajun food is the prominence of chef Paul Prudhomme in the 1980s.

I think so. Also Emeril. Because he was the next big celebrity chef, and he’s associated with that word. I don’t think that’s his fault. He never says his food is Cajun. Paul Prudhomme is Cajun, and grew up in Acadiana, although he is a really innovative, creative cook who mixed all these influences and created his own cuisine. He rides the Cajun wave, because it’s bigger than he is. He’s happy to explain that his cooking isn’t 100 percent Cajun.

How is the city’s food culture different from places like San Francisco or New York?

There isn’t as diverse a variety of choices when you eat out. There’s Thai food, but there isn’t a huge range of Thai. What New Orleans does have is a lot of commmonalities. Everybody can eat and talk about gumbo. Food is a huge conversation.

You also mention that, unlike other food towns, there isn’t as much excitement about the next thing, the hot new restaurant.

Right, that does not happen. There will be a spark of curiosity but also skepticism. It’s like, well, we might just wanna go to Mandina’s and get red beans, because it’s Monday, and we love the red beans there. We’ll wait and see about this new place.

There’s a great New Orleans chef, Donald Link, who’s opened two restaurants, Herbsaint and Cochon, that really clicked. And they are hot spots, but that’s because he knows how to cook for the people, really knows what New Orleanians want to eat. Yes, he was a hot young chef who opened two comfortable, pretty designer restaurants, but that was secondary. I love that. Because I wasn’t interested in new things, either. I wanted to eat what New Orleanians have been eating for centuries. There are thousands of kinds of gumbos, and I wanted to eat all of them.

At one point you call New Orleans “an ideal city for underachievers.” One of the good ways to look at that is that people are willing, in the sense of European towns, to sit down and really enjoy a meal.

That is really true, even among the people I know there who are really busy. It’s not like New York or San Francisco where, in terms of entertainment, you have a bazillion choices. I think that’s kind of fortunate.

I haven’t lived there in a little over a year, so I can’t really speak to how the city has changed, and I’m not sure we’ll know the real effects of Katrina for some time. But when I lived there I had a really extensive group of friends who were freelancers, living on a little but having a rich life. And almost none of them are doing that there now. It has become more difficult to scrape by. Our utility bills doubled. Our insurance and our property taxes doubled. It might still seem easy if you’re coming from New York or San Francisco, but for people who were living that existence before the storm, it became cost-prohibitive.

Something I find charming, and baffling, is how the city keeps its own names for things — snoballs instead of snow cones, po-boys rather than sandwiches. There’s a willful differentiating from the rest of the world. And the city has its own vernacular. Instead of buying groceries you “make groceries.”

Right. I loved the challenge of trying to be a local. It probably took me three years to say “po-boy” and not feel like a poser. It was something to live up to. The city is very localized, which brings me back to Mardi Gras, and you can’t underestimate the power of a holiday during which every person in the city is out in the streets, dancing together, having the best day of the entire year together.

There was a time when this exchange would have flustered me, left me stammering excuses about how the card had just worked, and I couldn’t imagine what was wrong. But by late December, I had grown so accustomed to this awkward scenario that I wasn’t even all that embarrassed. It was as if I had presented him with a lottery ticket and, failing to win big, went back to the original game plan.

“Just take this.” I handed him one of my few remaining 20s. I was, officially, broke.

I was so broke, in fact, that I actually had no idea how broke I was. The exact number had become a mystery, something hidden (or, rather, stuffed) in the closet: I didn’t know how much I owed on those credit cards, or how much was in my bank account, or whether that balance — were I to check it online, which I did not do that month — would be positive or negative. I knew I owed several thousand. Five freaking digits. The evidence sat in a neat stack of unopened credit card bills, which had been piling up next to the French press since October. The evidence came in the form of phone calls from bill collectors, from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., calls that I never answered.

If this sounds like breezy indifference, if it seems that I was not worried, then good; I fooled you. I was desperately trying to pretend that my financial plight did not bother me. Who wants to confront such colossal failure? Besides, it was the holidays. Gifts and parties and free champagne. Every day the mail brought Christmas cards with pictures of friends’ babies doing adorable, uncanny things. The mail also brought bills. The pictures went on the fridge. The bills? They went into the stack.

In my apartment, alone, I had fits of anxiety. Tears, clenched fists, the works. I lay bug-eyed at 4 a.m., wondering how I was going to get out of this mess. I needed more time. I needed more work.

What I needed was an ejector seat.

Most people get into catastrophic debt for one of two reasons — job loss and medical crises — but that was not my case at all. I was single with no kids, a lifestyle that had allowed me to spend late nights at the bar, to travel, even move to New York. But I sometimes worried that living so free of responsibility for so long had left me a bit reluctant to grow up — to sacrifice immediate gratification for future stability, to acknowledge the simple confines of my bank account. I didn’t have savings. I let bills slip. For two years, I lived with no health insurance and my fingers crossed. I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was making messes for someone else to clean up. I couldn’t escape the feeling that, at 33, I had failed to become an adult.

One morning, I sat down at the kitchen table, armed with a strong cup of coffee, the stack of bills and a printout from
Oprah’s Debt Diet Web page: “How much debt do you really have?” it read. After 30 minutes, and a good deal of sighing, I had the answer: $10,710.

The number was ugly, but it wasn’t what alarmed me. No, what alarmed me was the hideous charade of my minimum balance payments. All four of my maxed-out cards had risen to around a 30 percent APR, and I was getting walloped by late fees, over-limit fees and finance charges. Agh, the finance charges: I can’t imagine the real cost of all the piddling purchases I’d made over the years; some Fatboy Slim record from 2000 probably cost me $250, which is $249 more than I should have paid for “Funk Soul Brother.”

Mostly, it made me ill thinking how hard I had scrambled to make regular payments on those cards, just to keep them current. It was like throwing money into a fire. I was paying $500 a month for the mere privilege of running in place. And I’d been doing it for two years. (By the way, this amount didn’t even include the thousands in back taxes I already owed to the federal government. Story for another time.) As I surveyed the damage, all I could think was: How did this happen?

Well, I mostly knew how this happened. I’m not the victim of identity theft. I’m the one who made all these charges. That $80 bar tab? Yeah, that’s mine. When things got tight last summer — checks weren’t coming in on time, I wasn’t getting enough work as a freelancer — I knew leaning on my credit cards was a bad idea. I knew how evil they can be. So the question isn’t, “How did this happen?” but rather: “How did I let it?” I could give you several excuses for that debacle last December — I was living in the city with the highest cost of living! I was supporting myself as a writer! — but none of them explains away the fact that I spent too much, and when I got in trouble, I closed my eyes, put my fingers in my ears, and went, “La-la-la.”

I suppose part of me believed my situation wasn’t all that bad. Most of my friends have credit card debt. Some of them have far more than I do. (And some of them have student loans, mortgages, car loans heaped on top of that.) We don’t talk about that credit card debt — even as our sex lives make for good cocktail conversation, financial instability still feels like an ugly taboo — but there is a general, jokey acknowledgment that we’re all slaves to our plastic.

America’s chronic debt has been the subject of countless news stories and at least one documentary, “Maxed Out.” Weirdly, the more I heard about our binge spending, the less I worried about my own. It started to feel normal. I watched the first episode in Oprah’s Debt Diet series, and I remember the gratitude I felt upon hearing what those poor fools owed. $90,000! They’re screwed!

The morning I calculated my debt, that’s how I felt: screwed. I also felt embarrassed, and guilty, because I should have known better. But I could only give myself so many lashes before I had to put that sucker away. Really the question wasn’t how I got into debt, or why I let myself, it was this: How was I going to get out of it?

There is no shortage of books on the subject of financial recovery. Walking into a bookstore and looking for one is like searching the Internet for hilarious cat videos. If you are looking (if your credit card wants to go through), I can recommend “Credit Repair Kit for Dummies,” though reading it on the subway made me feel like I was trumpeting not one but two personal deficiencies. A friend of mine swears by Suze Orman’s “The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous, & Broke,” in which the straight-shooting CNBC host gives you advice on using your credit cards sensibly with all the rah-rah of a self-help guru. “If you don’t think you are fabulous, if you don’t have incredible confidence in yourself, you will never have the strength to go after what can make you happy.” Go, team.

The books were full of practical advice — get your credit report, know your FICO score — but for me, using them alone wasn’t enough. It was nice to lie in bed, underlining passages and nodding in agreement. But I have a tendency to lose steam when it seems as if the solution to my problem is going to require more commitment than, say, lying in bed and underlining passages. I get overwhelmed with how much work there is to do. And that leads to my abandoning the book on my bedside table and ordering delivery sushi while I watch TV to forget the whole sordid mess, which is exactly how I got here in the first place.

So that week, I made an appointment with a financial counselor. As it happens, he’s dating a friend. But as a lawyer for a New York nonprofit called the Financial Clinic, which helps people in serious credit card debt, David Friedman works with people like me all the time.

“We demonize credit card companies, and we should,” David told me, as we sat in his office. “But a lot of what I see is a failure of people to advocate for themselves.”

I liked a lot of things about talking to David. He was honest about my problems but also encouraging. He seemed nonjudgmental about the damage I had done. Mostly I liked that I walked into that session a little bit helpless. But I left with a plan.

“We have to stop the bleeding,” said David. That meant two immediate things: getting my credit cards under the limit and trying to raise my credit score, which had been officially branded “poor.”

I had an idea: “What about transferring my balance to a no-interest card?” I asked. “Or getting them to raise my credit limit?”

“You could try that,” he said, with the tact of a hairdresser telling the old woman she might not look like Jennifer Aniston. “But I’m pretty sure you won’t qualify.”

As it turned out, all the quick fixes I had been mulling over were not going to work. Debt consolidation was too expensive. Defaulting and bankruptcy would torpedo my credit rating and set me back for years. I couldn’t ask the credit card companies to lower my APR until I got my payments under control and raised my credit score, which would take two months of no-shit efforts. I was going to have to stare down my debt the old-fashioned way: I was going to have to pay it.

David and I drew up a list of my current expenses, and I was astonished by the starkness of my bottom line. I didn’t make enough. Like, not nearly enough. Sure, I could cut out $3.50 cappuccinos, but my problem was much bigger than that. I always thought I spent reasonably because I shop at H&M and Target, don’t own designer shoes or an iPod. Looking at my expenses, I saw that I had been living outside my means for so long that I clearly didn’t have any sense what my means were.

I borrowed $2,000 from my father. It was, in some ways, the most grown-up thing to do. I don’t feel good about it — actually, I considered leaving it out of this story entirely, except that I think it’s important to point out the drastic help my situation required. If my father hadn’t been there, I would have had to call the credit card companies myself and hammer out a payment plan, and I’m incredibly grateful to bypass that step, since I’ll be making friends with them in two months, when I call to negotiate a lower APR.

In the meantime, I’ve had to change a lot of things about my lifestyle. I bring my lunch to work, and I stopped buying Diet Cokes during the day, and I don’t go out much on weekends. In a wash-and-fold town like New York, I actually do my own laundry. When my lease is up in April, I’m moving somewhere much cheaper and getting a roommate, and I hope to halve my rent. This is the painfully obvious step I’ve been avoiding all along. Ever since I moved to New York, my apartment has been a great source of personal satisfaction for me. I had it all to myself. I could let visitors stay anytime. And when they stayed, they always said the same thing — how big it was, how lovely it was, how I was really making it in New York. I loved hearing that more than anything. But it wasn’t really true. Even then, I knew it.

I didn’t cut out everything. I still get delivery sushi, I still go out for drinks with friends. It’s like a diet — you can’t deny yourself what you really love, or you’ll fail. But I don’t think of it as a diet, or as punishment at all. I think of it as being an adult.

Well, now would be a good time to get one.

Absinthe is legal in the United States for the first time since 1912, the year it was banned in America. Eight years later, Prohibition levied the same fate on all spirits, but while beer, wine, and liquor made a triumphant comeback — expanding into an industry that can cozily encompass both a Courvoisier XO and a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon — absinthe languished in exile for nearly a century, a casualty of bad publicity, special-interest lobbies and mythology. That allowed absinthe to become something of an urban legend, something to talk about in whispers, with wide eyes. Much is said about absinthe; very little of that is true.

So let’s clear up a few misconceptions. Absinthe does not make you hallucinate. It is not wildly addictive. It will not cause you to lop off your ear, unless (possibly, on the off-chance) you are a deeply disturbed painter racked by poverty, heartbreak and mental illness. Rather, absinthe is a good drink. It is most reminiscent of Pernod, a kick of licorice with a lingering menthol taste. (The similarity is not coincidental; Henri-Louis Pernod first commercialized absinthe in France in 1805.) Absinthe’s flavor comes from its muscular key components — anise, wormwood and fennel — and though it’s certainly an acquired taste, there’s also something appealing about the ritual and presentation of it. Absinthe has its own special glasses, slotted spoons and drips. Absinthe even has its own verb, “louche,” to describe the milky cloud kicking up when water hits the drink. Watching this — on the right night, in the right light–you start to understand why artists like Toulouse-Lautrec and Rimbaud and Verlaine found inspiration in the stuff. And you start to understand why people might think it contained a little bit of black magic, too.

Absinthe was the drink of 19th-century Paris. At the time, the French wine industry had been decimated, and absinthe, with its otherworldly color and reputation for spurring creativity, matched the decadence and glamour and artistry of the era. Absinthe may not cause hallucinations, but its buzz has been likened to a kind of “waking drunk,” in which inhibitions are lowered but synapses fire faster, the perfect companion for a lively barside debate. But things went sour for absinthe as the end of the century approached. Degas’ famous 1876 painting, L’Absinthe, is a portrait of overindulgence and isolation: a woman slumped over her cafe table in front of an absinthe glass, face gone slack. In 1890, the book “Wormwood: A Drama of Paris” vilified absinthe, portraying the downward spiral that inevitably follows a drink. (Think “Reefer Madness” for fin-de-siècle Paris.) In 1905, a disturbed Swiss man, drunk on absinthe, murdered his entire family. Absinthe didn’t make him do it — any more than a bipolar who hacks up his neighbor after drinking Jamesons has been deranged by Irish whiskey. But the tide of public opinion had shifted, spurred on by negative digs from prohibitionists and the wine industry, not interested in the competition. European countries began banning absinthe in 1906. Six years later, America followed suit.

Environmental chemist T.A. Breaux, who has studied absinthe for 14 years, explains what led to the drink’s decline. “As absinthe became immensely popular, there was a drive to make it cheaper,” he says. “In urban areas, where they didn’t have a lot of space for distillation equipment, people made absinthes from cheap industrial alcohol, using chemicals that would induce the green color. There were people who had an interest in capitalizing on this, and they failed to make a distinction between these cheaper drinks and real absinthe. It’s a little bit like using Mad Dog as a reason to ban Bordeaux.”

Absinthe remained legal in Spain and Czechoslovakia and the U.K. — places where it had never been popular in the first place — but as the drink’s mythology grew, those spots became magnets for tourists, who sought out the stuff for its forbidden-fruit allure. The absinthes were often served with a sugar cube — as with your iced tea, it’s a matter of personal preference — but in Czechoslovakia, bars began dribbling alcohol over the sugar cube and setting it on fire, one of those barside ta-das that became associated with the experience. “That was actually created by a distributor in England, realizing that Czech absinthes would not louche,” says Breaux. “You add ice water and nothing happens, and since that would be an extreme disappointment to the public, they had to come up with some distraction.” Breaux, like most absinthe experts, is adamantly against the practice. It caramelizes the sugar, changing the taste of the drink. It burns off the alcohol. It’s dangerous. But come on, let’s face it: It’s also cool.

By the time Breaux started his research in the early 1990s, “the international market was littered with product that had attempted to cash in on the mystique without offering anything substantive. These unscrupulous mixers would throw in some green dye and sell it to tourists, because no one knew what it was or what it was supposed to taste like.”

Absinthe became legalized in Europe in 1988, when the European Union established food and wine standards, though years passed before anyone did anything about it. Even in France, people still feared the sinister forces of the Green Fairy. Absinthe’s story proves how powerful a story can be even if it isn’t true. There are razor blades in the Halloween apples! Someone could steal your kidneys and leave you in a bathtub of ice! And you could start out the evening with a nice cocktail and end it in a mental institution, stark raving maaaaad.

Video: Tasting the devilish drink

For the past decade and a half, Breaux has been actively tearing down these myths. He has become a rock star in the absinthe community for his own high-quality artisanal line of absinthe, Jade Liqueurs (produced in France), and his obsessive analysis of pre-ban absinthe samples, which led to the crucial discovery that the most controversial element in absinthe — thujone, a component of the bitter medicinal herb wormwood — was there only in trace amounts, well under the legal limit for thujone in this country.

Earlier this year, the American government lifted its ban on absinthe. The first entrant into the market is Lucid, distributed by New York-based Viridian Spirits and currently enjoying the highest profile. Part of that is due to the man hired to collaborate on the product — none other than Breaux, who developed Lucid at a distillery in Saumur, France. I’ve heard snide comments about the bottle design — a pair of cat’s eyes meant to evoke Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen’s Le Chat Noir poster art, an homage to a Montmartre cabaret, though it mostly reminds me of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” — but I haven’t heard gripes about the drink. Lucid is a solid absinthe. And so far, a popular one.

“We’ve sold thousands more cases than expected,” says Jared Gurfein, president of Viridian Spirits. “There is a huge interest in absinthe. Unbelievable.”

And, Breaux adds, “there is nothing neutered or modified about it. This is the same absinthe they drank 100 years ago.”

(Actually, a few bloggers might argue this point. Not surprisingly, absinthe has an intense online community, where discussions of, say, thujone content spiral off into gigantic threads.)

Lance Winters became interested in absinthe after working five years as a moonshiner. Recently, his St. George Absinthe Vert was cleared for sale. “Absinthe is the pinnacle of the distiller’s art form,” he says. “It exemplifies all the things that are difficult to do but beautiful when achieved. The anise, the wormwood, the fennel– these are three very powerful ingredients, aromatically and flavor-wise. It’s like getting a whole bunch of strong voices in one room and getting them to harmonize.” At times, it can go terribly wrong. There has certainly been no shortage of nasty absinthe over the years. But, as Winters says, “when it works, it can give you goosebumps.”

St. George has a more robust flavor than Lucid, which is admittedly toned down for an American market. It has an herbal, earthy bouquet, and packs such a wallop that it almost makes my tongue feel numb, like a potent bleu cheese. Another absinthe cleared for distribution is Kübler, a Swiss absinthe. (Kübler lobbied extensively to get the U.S. absinthe ban repealed.) As an Absinthe Blanc, or clear absinthe, Kübler may lack the flair of the green-yellow louche, but perhaps audiences will eventually forgo the drama and settle for flavor.

“There’s an expansion in people’s minds about what spirits are all about,” says Winters. “We saw this take place with wine, where people went from just ordering any chablis or burgundy to actually knowing the differences between grapes. We saw this in the craft brewing revolution, which took us from these horrible, bland, mass-produced beers to people making beers with these insane peaks and flavors.”

But what happens to an illicit drink when it is robbed of its illicitness? Part of what gave absinthe so much power — in the mind, if not the marketplace — was its lore and illegality. Like opium, absinthe conjures exotic images of romantic destruction; unlike opium, absinthe isn’t actually dangerous. A great many people have learned about absinthe through films, where it is a stand-in for lawlnessness and vice. “Moulin Rouge,” “From Hell,” “Murder by Numbers,” and the frat-boy midnight movie “Eurotrip” all featured absinthe as a trippy narrative device–at the very least, an opulent set piece. But the drink’s place in pop culture is perhaps best encapsulated by “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” directed by Francis Ford Coppola (who also happens to be a vintner), where history’s bloodthirsty count sips from a green bottle marked “SIN.” So dangerous. So lavish. So goth.

In fact, goth high priest Marilyn Manson is marketing his own red absinthe — Mansinthe (!) — currently available online. This could hardly be considered a good sign, especially for those who don’t want the drink’s rich historical and literary history to be lost in the hype of another bourgie trend.

Michelle Nolan is a bartender at Pravda, a bar in New Orleans’ French Quarter that sells absinthe. “There are three types of customers who come in here looking for it,” she says. “The first is the frat guy, who maybe saw Johnny Depp drink it in a movie. They ask for shots of absinthe, and nine out of 10 times we don’t serve them, because you really don’t want to shoot a drink that costs $20. It’s like taking a shot of Remy Martin. The second type is literary — their favorite author wrote about it; they want to know if there really is a muse. And the third is connoisseurs, for whom cost is no object. But they like sitting at the bar and talking about this drink they know everything about.” A recent fourth addition might be people who read about it in a magazine. Because there has been no shortage of those stories recently.

Evidence of its current chic can be found at Employees Only — a charming roaring ’20s-style bar in New York’s West Village — where a handsome Serbian bartender named Dushan Zaric (who also co-owns the bar) makes a variety of absinthe cocktails for me. And, much as I do like straight absinthe, I find these mixed drinks easier to sip socially; they demand a little less of my attention. There is my favorite, the Billionaire Cocktail — 107-proof bourbon, homemade absinthe bitters, lemon juice and homemade grenadine. There is absinthe and champagne, crisp and effervescent, a drink reputed to be a favorite of Ernest Hemingway’s. It’s hard to imagine absinthe could ever be the next vodka and Red Bull, but if people caught on to how good these drinks taste, it might be more than a mere trend.

Nobody’s predicting a drink once fabled for inducing madness will take over the glitzy table-service clubs of L.A. anytime soon. But you know what? If that happened, I would totally start watching “The Hills” again.

This exciting news about jet-pack bras follows a story from October about doctors in the U.K. working on a bra that actually detects cancer. This means that, in the future, my bras might actually be smarter and more supportive than 80 percent of the men I have dated. Huzzah!

In the meantime, one benefit of writing about having big boobs is that people e-mail you thoughts on where to shop. Tips for my big-busted sisters (and brothers!): The Le Mystere Dream Tisha Bra and the selection at FigLeaves.com. And with that — ta-ta for now.

Well, I could hazard a guess. I was something bigger than double D. I was a 34 ridiculous. A 34 pain in the ass. Whatever I was, it was something I had avoided knowing, something I had hid from myself, like refusing to step on the doctor’s scale for, like, three decades.

“I don’t know,” I finally said, tugging my shirt back on.

“Well, they’re huge!” he said.

Yeah, OK. They are also that.

It must sound like I’m bragging. Would you believe that I’m not? A gajillion porno sites and essentially all of modern pop culture would suggest having big boobs is a wonderful thing, an aspirational thing; hey, people pay good money for these puppies. But for me, it’s something I never wanted, something that never fit what I felt like inside, something I try badly to ignore. Unfortunately, most people don’t return the favor. People talk about my boobs. People make jokes about them. And eventually, I started making jokes about them, too. Recently, I was standing outside a bar when a gay man I’d never met before asked if he could squeeze them. And the kicker? I said yes.

But underneath all the good-natured self-mockery and the saucy, low-cut tops, there is something else: I am embarrassed by my knockers. And the fact that something I am embarrassed about is the first thing people notice about me? Well, that kinda sucks. I feel like I could save a baby from a burning building, I could cure cancer with glitter alone, and I would still be referred to as “Sarah, you know, the short one with the big tits.”

I had my first bra fitting in the sixth grade, about a year after I needed it. It was an amateur affair performed by my older cousin, an expert on scratch-and-sniff stickers but hardly lingerie. Since hitting puberty at the ambitious age of 9 years old, I had refused to take off any clothes in public, and so my cousin placed her flimsy A-cups over my T-shirt.

“It doesn’t exactly fit,” she told me.

Yeah, but it would do. It would have to do! I wasn’t going to a mall to get groped by some silver-haired saleslady, tape measure draped around her wrinkled neck, smelling of powder.

I’ll sum up my early adolescence like this: I wore T-shirts in the pool. I showered alone. I learned that clever ruse of changing clothes but never being naked. I tried to be terribly quiet about all this, because if I was terribly quiet, then all of it just might disappear.

Which is the kind of magical thinking that got me to the age of 33, not knowing the size of my breasts. I don’t need an “Oprah” episode and a thousand women’s magazine articles and the cast of “What Not to Wear” to tell me I’m in the wrong cup size. My breasts spill out the top. (I was horrified to discover the tabloid press had a name for this: quadriboobage!) My breasts spill out the bottom. They spill out everywhere boobs can spill out, basically. But even if my breasts never fit what I felt inside, it seemed like at some point — at some point! — I should still have a bra that fit.

Most chain stores and mall department stores now offer bra sizing (thank you, Oprah and a thousand women’s magazine articles and the cast of “What Not to Wear”), but they won’t do me much good. Gap Body and Victoria’s Secret stock no larger than a double D. One of the most famous purveyors of women’s lingerie, Calvin Klein, makes selected bras as large as a size D but even those seem intentionally designed to fit only small-breasted women, a decision that is not only annoying but also downright bad business, like making jeans exclusively for tall, skinny people. (I once met a Calvin Klein executive, and when I told her I had a complaint about their bras, she grabbed my hand and said, “We know. We totally know.”) I was delighted, nearly clapping in the aisles, to find an Elle MacPherson bra at Bloomingdale’s in an E-cup. For one thing, it almost-kinda fit. For another, it was totally slamming.

But to find a bra that perfectly fit me — special me, wonderfully endowed me — I would have to make a journey to one of the boutiques for larger-busted women. A quick side note: I’m 5-foot-2, and I wear mostly medium-size clothes, and my foot is a 6, the size often chosen for display because it looks so damn adorable. I remember, years ago, my best friend complaining of the agony of having size 10 feet. Even if stores did stock her size, the shoes looked ungainly in a size 10. It was humiliating. It made her feel grotesque. At the time, I just thought, sheesh, what a bunch of wasted energy. So, OK: I get it now. “Grotesque” would be the word running through my mind as I headed to my first bra fitting. Grotesque, humiliating and also nervous.

Town Shop is located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, home of well-heeled housewives, which is exactly where I would imagine fussy boutique lingerie stores to be. Because this is one of the best-known lingerie boutiques in Manhattan, I expected a certain decorum, the whole fussy Russian grandmother with a look of disdain and a tape measure. But no one pulls out a tape measure. No salesperson appears over the age of 45. No one smells of powder, or examines the circumference of my breasts with a squinty frown. And can you believe I am actually disappointed by this?

I approach the counter and interrupt a group of young, attractive black and Latina women laughing behind the counter.

“I need to get fitted for, like, a bra or something.” Suddenly, I am in sixth grade again.

One of them takes me by the hand and leads me into a dressing room, where we stand there, staring at each other.

“What happens next?” I ask.

“Show them to me,” she says.

“How?” I wasn’t expecting a shrimp dinner and roses, but I wasn’t expecting this.

She laughs. “Take off your shirt. Come on, it’s a girl thing.”

So this is her approach, and it probably works for most women. It’s casual. Just us girls. You know, like all the slumber parties we had, when we hung out in our PJs, had pillow fights, and did exercises to increase the size of our chests, like those scenes in Judy Blume’s “Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret?” Except I didn’t go to slumber parties like that. I love Judy Blume, but when I read that book, at the age of 9, I wanted to throw it across the room.

But I take off my shirt anyway. She stares at me and brings back bras that she has guesstimated to be my size. (She is correct, as it turns out.) They look like I expect: Beige and giant, like you could parachute out of a plane with them. I try them on and she is surprisingly hands-on with me, running one finger along each seam, sticking a finger deep in the crevasse of my cleavage and rooting around, jiggling things unexpectedly. Even my boyfriend and my doctor aren’t this thorough.

I feel a sting in my eyes, and I feel bad — she is sweet and friendly, and it’s not her fault I came in lugging three decades of emotional baggage (plus a reporter’s notebook I never told her about. Sorry about that). But there is no way I can stand topless in a dressing room in front of another woman judging my breasts and not come close to tears. It’s an ancient ache formed of years spent hiding in the girls locker room, years spent undressing with men in total darkness. The ache did dull as I got older. I joined a gym a few years ago, and I found (it was, in fact, something of an epiphany) that the variety of body shapes, scars, stretch marks and cellulite on display there had somewhat relieved me of the anxiety of changing in public. I was modest with my towel, but I was not hysterical. It felt, for once, like we were all in this together, imperfect as we were.

Back in the bra store, the sales assistant steps back and looks at me. “Do you mind if I get a second opinion?”

I am all smiles. Of course! Feel free! (Goddamnit.)

The other woman walks in. “I used to have your size,” she says, squeezing her own breasts and laughing. “But I lost weight and mine deflated. I miss my boobs!”

I have heard this countless times before. And there is such an injustice in this, that women cannot swap breast tissue like a cocktail dress. (“Can I borrow your small boobs for this halter top?” “Sure!” “Can I borrow your giant boobs for some cleavage?” “No problem!”) It would make everything so much easier. I would know exactly what I was getting my girlfriends for Christmas this year.

“Ooh, mami, you look hot,” the woman says. “Don’t you think you look hot?”

I don’t. I think I look like I’m wearing a corrective body cast. “I guess so.”

I sometimes wonder how much of my own personal anguish is cultural. I grew up in an all-white town full of skinny, flat-chested white girls with straight blond hair, girls who were praying (literally praying) for their periods in seventh grade while I was crying over my frizzy hair and hiding my sanitary napkins at sleepovers. And it wasn’t until I got older that I realized my body shape wasn’t just common in other cultures, it was actually hot. That was mind-blowing to me. I love that other cultures aren’t so poisoned about their curvy bodies. It makes me happy, but also a bit envious. Maybe because I have been sitting here, drinking arsenic for so long.

Not all white women hate their knockers. In last year’s book “Stacked,” Susan Seligson wrote a kind of love song to her 32DDD’s. “They suit me now more than ever, at a time in my life when I feel confident and sexy but don’t take myself — or them — too seriously.” Uh, me? Not there yet. I’m more like the women in the British documentary “My Big Breasts and Me” (terrible title, great show), which airs on BBC America later this month (Sunday, Dec. 23, 10 p.m. ET/PT). The documentary focuses on three top-heavy British women made miserable by their large boobs. “I can’t stand up straight anymore,” says Jodie, a 23-year-old who, at 5-foot-1, is a 28K. “It’s almost like a disability.” I finished the documentary thinking nothing could be worse than being saddled with big tits. And then I watched the companion documentary, “My Small Breasts and Me” (Sunday, Dec. 16, 10 p.m. ET/PT), wherein three flat-chested women practically torture and mutilate themselves to inflate their assets, and I realized I was wrong. It’s hard to find winners in the women’s dressing room.

The saleswoman senses my disappointment at this dowdy, utilitarian bra. “You need that lacy Freya bra, the Arabella,” she says. “You’ll like that one. It’s sexy.”

And she’s right. I do like the Freya bra, enough that I spring for matching panties, the entire set in a sheer brown, with lavender embroidered on the delicate, lacy seams, in a size I am not ready to admit to you yet. It does not look grotesque. It is not something you could use to parachute out of a plane. It looks pretty. It is, to my relief, a totally reasonable $58. And get this? It fits.

“You goin’ out in style,” says the woman at the cash register, with a half-cocked smile. “Your man gonna be real happy when you get home.”

I didn’t see any men at Town Shop (other than the man who owns it, Peter Koch, behind the counter), but it has always been my not-so-revelatory suspicion that this entire industry — this luxurious, pink powder-puff, thongs-as-women’s-empowerment industry — is really just about pleasing men. Because let’s face it: I am much more comfortable in a jogging bra and cotton boy shorts, and those don’t run me $100 a set. It’s all well and good to find a bra that fits, but the truth is that I wanted a bra that not only fit but could also be seen in daylight by the man I’m in love with. Now, there is a time when my intention to please a man would have bothered me — and at that time, Tori Amos played loudly on my stereo — and maybe I’ve gone to the dark side. But all I can say is that this does make my boyfriend happy, and that does make me happy, and I don’t think that’s bad.

“This whole getting-fitted-for-a-bra thing,” my boyfriend says that night. “Is it like, ‘Turn your head to the left and cough?’”

“It is,” I say. “But it’s as if, after that, the doctor told you your penis size, and each time you came into a store, you had to announce it.”

That’s not how it would feel to most women. But that’s how it feels to me.

The following week, I go to another bra store; I guess you could call it a second opinion. But it’s more than that. I could buy lacy bras for a hundred romantic shrimp dinners to come, but it still leaves me just as helpless when I get dressed for work. When I run errands. I need a bra I can use to parachute out of a plane. In other words, I need a bra for me.

That’s why I head to Orchard Corset on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which couldn’t be further in aesthetic and atmosphere from Town Shop. The place, frankly, looks like somebody’s cluttered garage. The bras aren’t even on display; they’re stuffed in old shoe boxes stacked from floor to ceiling, which gives the unsettling impression that you are trying on bras in the Unabomber’s basement. When I tell him I want to be measured for a bra, Ralph Bergstein, the Hasidic man who runs the store with his family, guesses my size as if it were a question on “Final Jeopardy!” (Yes, it’s the same damn size. And no, I still don’t want to tell you what it is. I promise I will e-mail it to you sometime, after we’ve had a few drinks and/or you’ve sent me your weight and cholesterol.)

Orchard Corset is all elbows on the weekends, but on a Monday morning, I am the only customer. So a nice woman from Trinidad escorts me into a dressing room (a generous term — there is a curtain and a mirror and not much else) and says, “OK, take it off.”

I am delighted to find this does not traumatize me now. Not in the least.

“You want pretty or you want functional?” she asks.

Oooh, I want pretty. But I need functional.

She brings me a broad, sturdy minimizer from Wacoal. It is huge. The straps feel like seat belts. There is just an awful lot of shiny beige fabric. “What you think?” she asks when I put it on.

“I think it’s ugly,” I say.

She laughs. “It is ugly.”

I put on my shirt and turn to the side to see how it fits. No quadriboobage. No spillage, anywhere. Everything just kinda looks like it should, considering that it’s me.