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Candied Sweet Flag
Clean the roots of the sweet flag and cut crosswise into thin slices. Parboil these in one or two changes of water until the root has become less bitter.
Make a syrup of 1 cup sugar and 1/2 cup water, and boil the slices of flag in this until almost all the syrup is absorbed. Stir often.
The plant at the centre of this recipe is no longer considered food. The points below explain what changed and why candied calamus should be read rather than cooked.
- The plant"Sweet flag" is Acorus calamus, a pond-margin plant whose aromatic rhizome was once candied as a confection and chewed as a digestive. It is not a substitute for ginger or angelica, though all three were candied by the same method.
- Beta-asaroneCalamus rhizome contains beta-asarone, a compound shown in mid-twentieth-century feeding studies to cause tumours in rats. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration prohibited calamus and its oil as food and food additives in 1968; it remains barred. European authorities set strict limits on beta-asarone in food and drink for the same reason.
- Parboiling does not fix itThe changes of water called for here are meant to draw out bitterness, not toxins. Beta-asarone sits in the volatile oil of the root and is not reliably removed by boiling; the aroma that survives into the syrup is evidence the oil is still there.
- The dangerous look-alikeSweet flag grows in the same wet ground as blue flag iris (Iris versicolor) and yellow flag (I. pseudacorus), whose rhizomes are strongly emetic and purgative. The leaves are near-identical at a glance; the reliable distinctions are the smell and the crimped midrib of the Acorus leaf. A misidentified root here would make someone genuinely ill.
- If you want the sweetCandied angelica stem or candied ginger occupies the same place on a cake or a plate of sweetmeats, and a current recipe should be used for either. No adjustment to the method below makes calamus fit to eat.
- Reading the syrupThe one piece of technique still worth noting is the instruction to boil until the syrup is almost absorbed and to stir often — the standard method for any candied root, and the point at which sugar concentration in the pan tips over into scorching.
Candied sweet flag belongs to a long line of European and American sweetmeats made by simmering an aromatic root in heavy syrup: angelica, eryngo, ginger, orris. Calamus rhizome was a staple of the colonial and nineteenth-century apothecary, sold as a stomach remedy and chewed for the throat, and children in rural districts pulled the sweet-smelling roots from stream banks well into the twentieth century. What the entry cannot show is the reversal that came later: calamus went from a familiar candy and tonic to a prohibited food additive in the United States in 1968, one of the clearer cases of a traditional ingredient failing modern toxicology.