licorice

Our brains know a cartoon isn’t real — be it a rascally rabbit, a culinary rat or a dragon with the same sheen as salt licorice — and yet our hearts gift it with life.

It’s the black licorice of dashes: Those who like it love it; those who don’t will loudly and repeatedly let you know.

Raw, it has a crisp bite, with a licorice flavor that is somewhere between anise and the effervescence of a lemon-lime soda: refreshing, cool, neutralizing.

They would identify the smell of bananas, garlic, licorice, fish and so on, while the researchers took recordings of the activity of individual neurons in their piriform cortex and medial temporal lobe.

The concoction was flavored with honey, sesame seeds, pine nuts, licorice and grapes, which were commonly used to make the beverage look like blood.