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Saloop, Decoction Of
Saloop is highly valued for its stimulating and nutritious properties, and a decoction may be made from it, which will form a beverage to be drunk as a substitute for beer or wine at meal-times. Procure the saloop in powder. Boil sugar and water to a thin syrup, and flavour this slightly with lemon-rind. Add a spoonful of the powder rubbed to a smooth paste with a little cold water, stir this into the syrup, boil all together for a few minutes, let the liquor get cold, and serve. A little light wine may be added or not. Saloop is sometimes boiled with milk instead of water. Time to prepare, half an hour.
A drink recipe with almost no measurements, which is characteristic of the reference entries in Cassell's. The single thing that governs success is how the powder is introduced.
- What saloop isSaloop (more often spelled salep or sahlep) is the dried, ground tuber of wild orchids of the Orchis and Ophrys genera. It is almost pure starch and mucilage, which is why it thickens and why the book calls it nourishing.
- Sourcing itGenuine salep is scarce and expensive. All orchids fall under CITES Appendix II and Turkey, the main historic source, restricts export, so much of what is sold abroad as "sahlep mix" is cornstarch, sugar and flavouring. Check the ingredient list before assuming you have the real article.
- Do not substitute sassafrasIn eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London the street drink called saloop was frequently made from sassafras bark rather than orchid powder. Sassafras root bark contains safrole, which is no longer permitted as a food flavouring; do not read this recipe as licence to brew it.
- The quantities are missingNo proportions are given for sugar and water, and "a spoonful" is unspecified. Thin syrups are generally understood as something in the region of one part sugar to three or four parts water; as a starting point, work with about a tablespoon of salep to two cups of liquid and adjust, since salep varies in thickening power.
- The hinge: slake it coldRubbing the powder to a smooth paste with cold water before it meets hot syrup is the whole technique. Tipped in dry it seizes into lumps that will not disperse, and no amount of stirring afterwards recovers it.
- Boiling time"A few minutes" is enough to gelatinise the starch and no more. Prolonged hard boiling breaks the mucilage down and the drink loses the silky body that is the point of it.
- The milk versionMade with whole milk instead of water and served hot with cinnamon, this is Turkish sahlep, still sold from winter street carts. It is much the better drink; the cold, lemon-scented water version here is closer to a barley water.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities, so no yield can be read off it; at the proportions suggested above it would make roughly two to three cups, or two to four small glasses. It thickens further as it cools, so judge consistency cold rather than hot.
Saloop had two lives. The orchid powder came into English use from the Ottoman world, imported through Turkey and Persia, and was sold in coffee-houses as a warm, thick, faintly sweet drink credited with restorative and aphrodisiac virtues on the strength of the tuber's suggestive shape; the coffee-house and saloop-house trade is documented from the early eighteenth century. By the eighteenth century it had become a cheap London street drink sold before dawn to workmen and market porters, at which point sassafras bark was widely used in place of the costly imported powder, and the name attached to both. Charles Lamb wrote affectionately of the saloop stalls in his Essays of Elia. Coffee and tea had driven the trade out of the streets long before Cassell's was compiled, and the entry sits among reference material, its recipe noting only that the drink may be taken instead of beer or wine.