Pop quiz: What’s in a Coca-Cola, if it’s not ‘coca’ or the kola nut?

YOU PROBABLY HAVE tasted Coca-Cola. The ubiquitous brown soda with its red label is arguably the most recognizable brand in the world. It’s so deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness that most of us have never bothered to think about the fact that its somewhat odd name endures despite the fact that the drink no longer contains the two ingredients it references.

The “coca” part refers to cocaine, which, besides being quite illegal, is definitely too expensive to include, even for a megacorporation. But while most coffee drinkers know what a coffee bean looks like, and beer drinkers usually can tell you at a basic level what the drink is made of, most cola drinkers cannot tell you what the word “cola” refers to. I write about these things for a living, and until recently, I didn’t know, either.

The “cola” in Coca-Cola is actually the kola nut, the seed of the West African tropical evergreen tree Cola acuminata, which looks like a chestnut kissed by someone wearing Barbie-pink lipstick. This nut has long been used medicinally and recreationally as a stimulant by West Africans, as it contains caffeine and theobromine. And while the nut itself is bitter, when chewed, it apparently enhances the sweetness of whatever is consumed afterward (much like another West African fruit, “the miracle berry,” or Synsepalum dulcificum, which even had a moment on “Shark Tank”).

Kola nuts circulated through Europe and the Americas but did not find a widespread audience until the 19th century, when the craze for patent medicines encouraged entrepreneurs to bottle vigor wherever it could be found. The combination of cocaine and kola, already popular in Europe, was first bottled by chemist, Confederate Army veteran and morphine addict John Pemberton in Atlanta in the 1800s as a result of an attempt to develop a morphine-free painkiller. Pharmacies doubled as soda fountains in those days, and when the blend was combined with sugar syrup and added to carbonated water, the spark it ignited in the global palate continues to burn like wildfire today.

The strange new elixir, emerging at just the right time, appealed to Americans on many levels: Firstly, it was marketed as a temperance drink, so that gave it a built-in audience of enthusiastic teetotalers, and the — ahem — invigorating properties of its ingredients could not have failed to intrigue and then capture consumers, as they still do today.

Coca-Cola no longer contains cocaine or real kola these days (although what it does contain is still a closely guarded secret akin to military missile codes). It is mildly caffeinated, and one single-serving bottle contains about a quarter of the caffeine of a cup of coffee. But the really addictive ingredient nowadays is, I suspect, simply the sugar (although in the United States, even that has been mostly replaced with high-fructose corn syrup). Try to describe the flavor of any given cola, and you must resort to descriptions of other things: It tastes a bit like liquid caramel, perhaps, or carbonated molasses, with a slightly herbaceous, vanilla-esque, almost brackish undertone that keeps it from being too cloying to drink.

Coca-Cola remains the alpha cola drink, but it waged a memorable marketing war with Pepsi in the 1970s and ’80s, with celebrities as soldiers and a thirsty planet as a battlefield. And while many of us probably have at least sipped a generic supermarket-brand cola at a barbecue — usually without enthusiasm — in this age of artisanal everything, we now have a host of fancier colas to choose from, many of which actually do contain real kola extract, which is probably as close as you can get to experiencing Pemberton’s original formula without committing a crime.