Sassafras
The root bark of an eastern North American tree, the original flavour of root beer, and — from its dried leaf — the filé of Louisiana cooking. Its commercial position changed completely in 1960, when safrole, its principal aromatic compound, stopped being permitted as a food additive in the United States.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Sassafras albidum
- Family
- Lauraceae
- Part used
- Bark, Root, Leaf
- Origin
- Eastern North America — from Ontario and Maine south to Florida and west to Texas, on woodland edge and old field
- Drunk in
- Appalachia, Ozarks, Louisiana, Virginia
Character
Sweet, rooty and strongly aromatic — the flavour most Americans read immediately as root beer — with a soapy camphorous edge if it is simmered hard or long.
Notes: root beer, anise, camphor, sweet wood
History
One of the first North American commodities shipped to Europe: sassafras was a cargo of the earliest English voyages to Virginia and New England and was briefly valuable enough to fund them. Root beer, sarsaparilla drinks and Louisiana filé all descend from that trade. The 1960 United States regulatory change ended the use of the natural extract in commercial soft drinks, and safrole-free sassafras extract is what flavours root beer now.
How it is drunk
In the Appalachians and the Ozarks sassafras root tea is a spring domestic drink with a continuous history and is still made from dug root. In Louisiana the dried leaf is filé, stirred into gumbo off the heat as a thickener — a culinary use of a different part of the same tree at a different time of year. Commercial root beer is a flavour assembled from other things entirely.
Production
Root bark is dug in spring, scraped from the woody core and dried; the leaf is picked in summer, dried and milled to filé. The two products come from different parts of the tree in different seasons and are not by-products of one another. Bark scraped clean of wood is the graded material, and root wood alone gives a much weaker drink.
Preparation
Decoction
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 15 min
What gets confused
Sassafras and sarsaparilla are different plants from different families and have been sold under each other’s names in the soft-drink trade for a century and a half; TeaHQ holds sarsaparilla (Smilax) separately, and Indian sarsaparilla is a third plant again. Root beer today generally contains neither.
Common mistakes
- A hard rolling boil, which turns the sweetness soapy.
Evidence for this page
This page is TeaHQ synthesis throughout. No external source stands behind any statement on it, including the botanical name. 132 of the 204 botanicals have had their names and distribution checked against a taxonomic authority and this is not one of them.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Sassafras is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.