What goes into Old West favorites sarsaparilla, sassafras and root beer
June 14, 2023 at 7:00 am Updated June 14, 2023 at 7:00 am
Sarsaparilla was a popular drink during the 19th century in America, widely available at almost any saloon. These days, you can sip Bedford’s Root Beer from Port Angeles, or Earp’s Sarsaparilla from Orca Beverage in Mukilteo. (Tantri Wija)
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By Tantri Wija
Special to The Seattle Times
The Old West
THE COWBOY STEPPED through the swinging saloon doors and dragged his dusty boots over to the bar. A sheen of grimy sweat coated his face, both from the sun, and from a rumbling in his gut from whatever critter had crawled into the stewpot the night before.
The bartender reached for the whiskey, but the cowboy shook his head; either he was a teetotaler — rare in those parts — or he was a little saggy in the saddlebags, digestively speaking. Either way, the remedy was the same: The bartender handed the cowboy a brown bottle with a label covered in ornate promises of health and vigor restored, hair regrown, even tuberculosis arrested in its tracks, so it was guaranteed to cure whatever ailed him, or at least slake his thirst.
Because in the bottle was the favored beverage of the health-conscious in the 19th century: sarsaparilla. Though ironically, what the cowboy was drinking night not have been sarsaparilla at all.
The name sarsaparilla comes from the Spanish term zarzaparrilla, referring to the plant itself (the etymology of the word is probably a combination of Arabic and Basque terms and essentially means “bramble vine”). A true sarsaparilla drink is made from the dried root bark of any of several plants in the genus Smilax (Smilax ornata or Smilax officinalis, for example), vivid green climbing shrubs with Christmas-y berries. Smilax plants are found worldwide in the tropics and subtropics, and medicinal teas utilizing their rhizomes are found from China to Mexico and everywhere In between.
Sarsaparilla was widely consumed all across 19th-century America, easy to find in the local saloon if the one-road town one rode into had no dedicated apothecary or pharmacy, and was supposedly quite popular with cowboys and ranchers looking to tame a rumbling tummy or put a little pep in their step, much as people use kombucha today.
Our theoretical valetudinarian in a 10-gallon hat might well have bellied up to the bar at the local watering hole in search of medicinal relief, as access to doctors was scattered among the raw-wood settlements of the Old West. Like most patent medicines, sarsaparilla was credited with far more talent than it possessed; aside from remedying all the usual headaches, stomachaches, tumors and general “wearinesses,” it also sometimes was believed a cure for various STIs (herpes, syphilis and gonorrhea). Which of these ailments our cowboy suffered from is immaterial, as it would not have cured any of them.
But here’s the thing about the drink our cowboy ordered: What was called sarsaparilla in the Americas often contained no actual Smilax root at all. It often was made instead from birch oil and sassafras, the dried root bark of flowering trees in the genus Sassafras, of which there are several, native to East Asia and the eastern United States. And while many of these sarsaparilla-free drinks still were called sarsaparilla, sometimes that sassafras drink was simply called “root beer.”
It’s an open question as to why sassafras root came to replace sarsaparilla in most root beer recipes, but it might have to do with sarsaparilla’s strong, somewhat bitter flavor profile. Sarsaparilla drinks often were made with only sarsaparilla, instead of the mélange of flavors common to root beers, making it perhaps taste a bit more medicinal than refreshing. But sassafras is also medicinal; it induces sweating, and was used to treat hangovers and morphine addiction.
You won’t find it in your can of IBC these days, however, as sassafras oil (safrole) is now banned for commercial use in America due to evidence that it might be carcinogenic. Many of the root beers of today still taste like sassafras, however, from artificial sassafras flavoring or extracts without safrole. And because this is not confusing enough, there is an unrelated plant called German sarsaparilla, aka Carex arenaria (sand sedge), a tufty, grassy plant that grows out of sand dunes but also happens to have a medicinal rhizome sometimes used to treat gout.
Popular since the 1840s, root beer, which, like so many of America’s sodas, straddled the line between patent medicine and soothing nonalcoholic libation, was enjoyed as a hot beverage or as a carbonated soda. Made by combining molasses and water with the rhizomes and other flavorings (wintergreen, vanilla, caramel, licorice, etc.), it is fermented slightly with yeast and thus can be made alcoholic if one so chooses (traditional root beer was very slightly alcoholic, just like kombucha).
The first mass-produced commercial root beer from sassafras was sold by Charles Hires, a teetotaler who marketed his nonalcoholic root tea as “root beer” to suggest it to working-class customers as a replacement for actual beer. However, as early as 1898, competing Barq’s root beer was made from sarsaparilla, so the terms became readily interchangeable, especially since many root beer recipes actually use both.
Prohibition and the temperance movement (which began long before Prohibition, and thus was relevant to those classic cowboys) made root beer and sarsaparilla popular in the United States.
Root beer remains a summer barbecue and ice cream shop staple in America, but sarsaparilla soda is still available and popular in countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia and Singapore, like Baldwins Sarsaparilla Cordial (in production since 1844!) and a Smilax-based soda called Sarsi that is popular all over Asia.
Thus, most Americans probably never have had real sassafras root beer or sarsaparilla, but have a vague collective reference for the term sarsaparilla specifically from its association with the Old West, partially because it shows up so much in movies. There are sarsaparilla references in Doris Day’s “Calamity Jane,” John Wayne’s “Westward Ho,” the underrated “Back to the Future Part III,” “The Big Lebowski” (Sioux City Sarsaparilla!) and, of course, Yosemite Sam himself was a big fan of “sasparilly.”
So if you want a taste of the Old West out here in Washington (which is about as far west as you can get before you fall off the edge of the continental states), you can sip local, with Bedford’s Root Beer out of Port Angeles; a company called Orca Beverage in Mukilteo produces Earp’s Sarsaparilla, an appropriately sepia-toned, western-themed soda that our cowboy friend probably would not have recognized, but still might have enjoyed. Carbonated beverages in general, after all, tend to be good for tummies.
Tantri Wija is a Seattle-based freelance writer. Reach her at scratchtheblog.com.
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