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SASSAFRAS DRINK
Take the pith of sassafras boughs, break in small pieces and let soak in cold water till the water becomes glutinous. This is good nourishment, and much relished.
PEARLED WHEAT PUDDING-One pint of wheat, one half gallon new milk, sweeten and flavor to taste, bake one hour. This is a delicious and simple pudding.
Two items ran together in the original typesetting: a mucilaginous sassafras drink and a baked wheat pudding. The first should not be made at all; the notes below explain why, and then deal with the pudding.
- Why the sassafras drink is off the tableSassafras albidum owes its aroma to safrole, an essential-oil constituent shown to cause liver tumours in rodents and prohibited as a food additive and flavouring in the United States since 1960. Safrole is concentrated in the root and root bark, but it is present through the aromatic tissue of the plant and there is no reason to assume the soft central pith is free of it; soaking the pith in cold water extracts the mucilage the recipe is after, and offers no way to leave the safrole behind. Commercial "sassafras" root beer and tea are made from safrole-free extract, which is not what this recipe describes.
- Invalid nursing adviceThe claim that the slippery infusion is "good nourishment" is wrong on its own terms: mucilage from plant pith supplies essentially no calories or protein. It was valued for coating a sore throat and for being easy to swallow, not for feeding anyone. An invalid who can only take fluids needs a current medical or dietetic recommendation.
- Pearled wheatThe pudding calls for whole wheat kernels that have had the bran abraded off — the same treatment that turns barley into pearl barley. Modern equivalents are pearled or semi-pearled wheat berries, or farro perlato. Cracked wheat and bulgur are not the same thing; they cook far faster and will collapse.
- New milk"New milk" is milk fresh from the cow, unskimmed and, in 1877, unpasteurised. Whole pasteurised milk is the substitute. Half a gallon is 8 cups to 1 pint (2 cups) of grain — a very loose ratio, which is what allows the wheat to swell into the milk.
- One hour is optimisticUnsoaked pearled wheat will still be chalky after an hour in a moderate oven. Soak the grain overnight in some of the milk, or expect two to three hours of slow baking; the pudding is done when the kernels are tender and the milk has thickened to a loose custard. Stir once or twice in the first hour to keep the grain from settling into a solid raft.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A milk pudding of this kind wants a slow to moderate oven, 300–325°F; hotter and the milk skins and scorches at the edges before the grain softens. A shallow buttered dish, uncovered, gives the browned skin these puddings were prized for.
- Sweetening and flavour"To taste" is left entirely open. Sugar with nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon peel or rosewater are all flavourings common in milk puddings of the period; as a starting point, try 3 to 4 tablespoons of sugar for the full quantity and adjust, since the long bake concentrates it.
- YieldThe pudding makes roughly six to eight servings, a family quantity rather than a single invalid's portion.
Sassafras was one of the first North American plants to be exported to Europe, shipped as a supposed cure-all from the sixteenth century onward, and it stayed in domestic medicine chests for three centuries afterward. The pith of the young twigs swells in cold water into a clear slime, and that mucilage was the point: it was dropped into sore eyes, spread on burns, and given to fever patients who could not manage solid food. Its appearance in the "Food for the Sick" chapter of Buckeye Cookery puts it alongside beef tea, gruels, arrowroot and toast water, the whole nineteenth-century repertoire of thin slippery things intended less to nourish than to soothe and to be swallowed without effort. Work on safrole's carcinogenicity ran through the middle of the twentieth century, and the United States barred sassafras bark and safrole from food in 1960, which is why the flavour survives today only as a stripped extract in soft drinks.