Feelin' Sassy. Sort of.

Anyone who's hung out with me recently is well aware of my intense interest in homesteading skills. When I was a kid, back in the back-to-the-land days of the 1970s, the Foxfire books were something of a handbook slash bible for the cool skills needed when venturing off the grid and into a wild life.

I recently bought the first two books off Ebay, and was reading Foxfire 2's chapter on spring wild plant foods with great interest. Maryland's first spring forageables are just peeking above the ground, and I'm raring to start collecting -- and eating.

Old-time mountain folk valued sassafras tea as a spring tonic, saying that it thinned a person's blood made sluggish by a long winter spent indoors. I could certainly use a seasonal pick-me-up, and decided to make some sassafras tea while waiting for the dandelion leaves to get just a little bigger before I pick them and sauté them in an obscene amount of butter.

I uprooted a sassafras sapling while setting up my new compost heap, and making tea could not have been easier -- I scrubbed the three-foot long, fragrant taproot clean of mud, cut it into lengths, smashed those with a meat hammer, and boiled them in a big pot of water. The liquid turned a lovely deep red color and gave off a scent reminiscent of both licorice and shoe polish. I strained out the solids, sweetened the tea with honey (gathered from Baltimore county bees kept by a friend's 9 year old son!) and drank several cups. This might have been wishful thinking, but I swear it made me feel a little, well, tingly.

It's truly a delicious drink -- a complex, slightly sharp taste that reminds me of root beer, with a velvety mouth feel. (The mouth feel is very distinct, and I wasn't surprised to read later that sassafras leaves are dried to make filé powder, the Cajun seasoning that lends both flavor and especially thickening properties to gumbo). I poured the rest into bottles, one to give to a friend and brought the other as a beverage contribution for a pot luck following a Mid-Atlantic Primitive Skills Group workshop on emergency preparedness.

That batch of sassafras tea is all drunk up now, and I was basking in a fairly deep sense of coolness about having made it. I mean, talk about your back yard beverage! But then it occurred to me to look up the health benefits of sassafras tea, other than of course the traditional springtime blood thinning thing.

Distressingly, it turns out that sassafras used to be popular as a food additive and flavoring but was banned by the FDA in the 1960s after it turned out that safrole, the essential oil that gives sassafras its distinctive odor and flavor, caused liver cancer in laboratory rats. Grrreeeeaattt...It also turns out that the Cherokee, who used sassafras as a traditional medicine, also stressed that it should never be taken for more than a week at a time, so even back before laboratories and rats it was known that you shouldn't drink a whole lot of this stuff. One side affect of too much sass, too fast: profuse sweating and shakiness.

I feel a little bad that I foisted potentially carcinogenic sassafras tea on my friend Brian -- he's been under the weather for the past couple weeks, a guy in need of a spring tonic if ever I've seen one -- as well as my new MAPS friends, all without doing due diligence on the potential benefits or, ahem, pitfalls of the foraged food.

Further research shows that a few cups of sassafras tea isn't going to hurt anyone -- it's long term, high-dosage use that brings on the liver cancer. (Now, what was it that Euell Gibbons died of? Since in Stalking the Wild Asparagus's sassafras chapter Gibbons mentions his fondness for, and frequent quaffing of, sassafras root tea). So I'll probably limit my own sassafras tea consumption to a single, annual March spring tonic brewing, and certainly alert anyone I might ever offer it to in the future as to its potential lethality.

So I hereby apologize to Brian, and MAPS folks (especially Dan, who seemed to like it the most), and also to my liver. Happy Spring!