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An Excellent Summer Beer
One ounce burdock seed, two ounces dandelion roots, two ounces butternut bark, two ounces sassafras root bark; boil these in two gallons water for one hour, strain through fine cloth and stir in ginger one tablespoonful, molasses one quart, add one teacup yeast, skim off the skum that rises from the first working and cork up tight as soon as it is clear. Keep it in a cool place after it has worked. Drink as much as you like.
This is a home-fermented small beer of the sort brewed by the bucket in nineteenth-century kitchens. Two of its ingredients and one of its methods put it outside what can be recommended today.
- Sassafras root barkThe essential oil of sassafras root bark is largely safrole (commonly given as around 80 percent), and safrole was removed from the permitted food additive list in the United States in 1960 after it was shown to cause liver tumours in rodents. Commercial sassafras flavouring sold today is safrole-free extract, which is not what this recipe calls for. A long boil of whole root bark will carry safrole into the liquid.
- Butternut barkButternut (Juglans cinerea) bark was stocked by druggists as a cathartic and used deliberately as a purgative. It is not a flavouring ingredient in any modern sense.
- Corking tight while liveThe instruction to skim the working yeast and cork up tight as soon as it is clear seals an actively fermenting liquid in a rigid vessel with no pressure relief. In modern glass with a driven cork it is a burst hazard, and the recipe gives no gravity reading or timescale by which to judge that fermentation has finished.
- No control over the ferment"One teacup yeast" in this period would usually mean barm skimmed off another ferment — a mixed culture of yeast and bacteria of unknown activity. With no temperature, no sanitation and no measure of sugar conversion, the alcohol content and the microbial outcome are both unknowable.
- If you want the drinkRoot beers and small beers of this type are still brewed, and a current recipe with a named safrole-free flavouring, a measured sugar addition and pressure-rated bottles should be used instead.
- Reading the rest of itFor the record: burdock seed and dandelion root are both ordinary bitter botanicals still sold as tea, molasses at a quart to two gallons is the fermentable sugar, and "skum" is simply the yeast head. The problem is not the whole formula but specific components of it.
Recipes like this sit at the junction of two nineteenth-century household habits: the spring tonic and the small beer. Burdock, dandelion and sassafras were the standard "blood purifying" roots of American domestic medicine, dug in early spring and boiled into bitter drinks meant to correct the effects of a winter of salt meat; butternut bark belonged to the same shelf, as a mild purgative. Brewed with molasses and barm they became a lightly alcoholic table drink that a family made in gallons and drank all summer, well before bottled soft drinks existed. The same root list is often said to lie behind commercial root beer, which was being sold as a temperance beverage by the later 1870s (Hires, 1876) and which kept sassafras as its signature flavour until the safrole ban of 1960 forced reformulation. That this appears under "Supper" rather than among the medicines says something about how thin the line was between the two in a period kitchen and the closing line, "drink as much as you like," tells you the compiler considered it a beverage, not a dose.