Sarsaparilla Root Tea and a Touch of History

Woooo doggie! You heard me, SARSAPARILLA! The name alone conjures up many fantastic images for me, namely this:



So the other day when I went to The Spice Station (the apothecary-style, Secret Garden, grotto-fabulous tea and spice store in Silverlake), I flipped out when I spotted one of their small glass jars filled with a caramel colored, wood-chippy looking substance labeled, you guessed it, Sarsaparilla!

"Does it take taste like ROOT BEEEERR??!!" I happily panicked. "Oh my GAWD!"

My heart pounded in crowded sync with memories of brown glass bottles and cozy nights watching Young Riders with my sister eating "cowboy food". I used to be so into this shit. And I guess I still am!

So of course I bought a small stash and stored it away gleefully like a chipmunk in my purse, dashing home with fantasies of turning it into my very own Sarsaparilla syrup for my very own homemade brew.

I haven't gotten that far yet, but I DID just make some of it as tea (with a touch of honey, mind) and boy howdy, it was tasty. It wasn't as strong as I thought it would be, but it had a wonderfully faint, woodsy tone to it, almost like a wine cork ( in a good way) with a light, sweet punch of root beer-esque flavor lingering over the palate. (Listen to me, I sound like a Sommelier)

If you've ever had Pau D'arco tea, it reminded me a bit of that as well. I highly recommend it y'all.

And since I'm now getting all pumped up, I thought I'd offer up a bit of history as well. I looked up Sarsaparilla on that Google doo-hicky and here's what I found, thanks to Wisegeek.com and Wikipedia.com:

*The root of the Sarsaparilla vine is what is used for flavoring. The plant is natively found in Mexico, Central and South America.

*It was used for centuries for medicinal purposes, and in the 1800's when pharmacists distilled the normally bitter chemicals with sugar to make it more palatable, Sarsaparilla (the drink) was born.

*Sassafras - not to be confused with our hero Sarsaparilla - is another medicinal tree (found in North America) of similar flavor characteristics that was first used as the main ingredient in Root Beer, perhaps as a substitute for Sarsaparilla.

*For Sarsaparilla benefits and ailment information, check this page out.

*Root Beer is not interchangeable with Sarsaparilla, as I originally thought, but rather made up of a mixture of ingredients, one of which used to be Sarsaparilla. But that root is now more commonly replaced with sassafras and accompanied by birch oil, wintergreen, vanilla, cherry tree bark and licorice root, to name a few. Root Beer was also first used as a medicinal drink in the 1800's for "mouth complaints".

Now this comes to mind!



10 points if you know what movie this photo is from :)

I love that whacked out "travelling Doctor with his tonics" thing from the 1800's even more than cowboys I think. Time to make that Sarsaparilly soda!

Cowboy photo courtesy of Longhorndave on Flickr.