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Castor Oil and Sarsaparilla
Put a little soda water into the bottom of a glass, add two tablespoonfuls of sarsaparilla syrup, then two tablespoonfuls of castor oil. Nearly fill the glass with soda water using the syphon, and drink at once. Orange juice may be used in place of the sarsaparilla.
This is not a beverage in any ordinary sense: it is a measured dose of a stimulant laxative disguised in flavoured soda water, of the kind a druggist would mix at the fountain while the patient stood waiting. The points below explain the vocabulary and why the drink should stay on the page.
- The dose is the problemTwo tablespoonfuls is roughly 30 ml of castor oil, a full adult purgative dose. Ricinoleic acid acts directly on the intestinal wall, and a dose of this size can bring cramping, vomiting and significant fluid and electrolyte loss. Nothing about the soda water changes that.
- Not to be self-administeredCastor oil is contraindicated in pregnancy, in intestinal obstruction or inflammation, and for children at anything like this quantity. A period household hint offers no way to know whether any of those apply. Anyone who needs a laxative should use a current product at its labelled dose.
- Sarsaparilla syrupA soda-fountain flavouring syrup whose commercial versions were often built largely on sassafras, wintergreen, birch and licorice rather than on true Smilax root. Sassafras-derived flavouring was later restricted in the United States because of safrole, and modern sarsaparilla and root beer syrups are generally made without it.
- The syphonA charged seltzer bottle with a lever tap, standard equipment behind a soda-fountain counter and also sold for domestic use. Presumably the gas and pressure are meant to break up the oil and hurry the glass down, though the recipe itself says only to fill from the syphon and drink at once.
- Why oil floats and why it says at onceCastor oil is thick, insoluble and slower than water to move; suspended in charged soda it separates within seconds. The instruction to drink immediately is the whole technique, and it is the only part of the recipe that is purely a matter of craft rather than pharmacology.
Before flavoured capsules and emulsions, the hardest part of giving castor oil was getting it swallowed, and a great deal of nineteenth-century domestic and pharmacy literature is devoted to masking it: in coffee, in beer, floated on brandy, whipped into orange juice, or, as here, driven down in a fizzing glass at the soda fountain. That fountain was itself often part of the drugstore rather than a separate business, so a syphon of charged water and a rank of flavouring syrups could stand within arm's reach of the dispensing counter, and the same sarsaparilla syrup served both a fountain drink and a dose. Sarsaparilla was a natural partner: it had a long career as a blood-purifying tonic before it became a soft drink flavour, so it tasted, to the period palate, appropriately medicinal.