Roots 
The leaves, bark, and roots of the sassafras tree 
were believed to have medicinal properties 
by Raymond Sokolov 
Some years ago, I passed through 
New Orleans and the French West In- 
dies investigating their Creole cuisines. 
Like the word Creole itself (derived 
from a Portuguese word meaning “cre- 
ate”), so-called Creole cooking was a 
complex notion, too complex, in fact, to 
talk about as a single phenomenon. In 
Louisiana, Creole food was one thing; 
in Martinique and Guadeloupe, it was a 
very different sort of adaptation of Eu- 
ropean food ideas to New World condi- 
tions, to products of this hemisphere, 
and to exotic methods and ingredients 
brought by black slaves from Africa. 
Certainly, no kitchen shelf in Fort de 
France could boast any of the green, 
powdered spice I had bought in New 
Orleans and stashed in my suitcase. 
Distracted by such Antillean delica- 
cies as blaff the pungent fish stew, I 
forgot about the powder I was carrying 
and about the New Orleans gumbos 
it is frequently used to thicken. In the 
French West Indies, gumbo (in French, 
gombo) does not refer to a thick stew 
served over rice. Gombo is okra, reflect- 
ing the original name for that green pod 
(the source of my green powder) among 
the Kimbundu-speaking people trans- 
ported from Angola by slavers. Our 
word okra, now the common name for 
Hibiscus esculentus in the United 
States, comes from another West Afri- 
can language, Tshi. “Gumbo” survived 
in our vernacular only as the name for 
the stew because in some recipes, okra, 
which turns ropy when cooked, is used 
to thicken the gumbo broth. 
These intricacies were entirely lost 
on the United States Customs agent 
who extracted the bottle of green pow- 
der from my luggage at Kennedy Air- 
port, beaming as only a Customs agent 
can beam when he is sure he has caught 
someone smuggling marijuana. 
“What might this be?” he asked with 
a twinkle. 
“File,” I said pointing to the label. 
“Oh, is that what they call it in 
French?” 
“Yes, it means ropy, because it turns 
viscous and ropy when you cook with 
it. I bought it in New Orleans, where 
they use it in gumbos when they’re not 
using okra for the same purpose.” 
The man took the bottle and went 
away to an office. Perhaps he gave it to 
a specially trained, marijuana-detecting 
bloodhound to sniff. I devoutly hope he 
tried to smoke some. Whatever method 
of analysis he used, it convinced him I 
was not trying to import a potent drug. 
He returned with the bottle and waved 
me back into the country. 
Ironically, it was as a drug that file 
first came to prominence in the world. 
File is prepared from the leaves of the 
sassafras tree, Sassafras albidum, 
whose aromatic bark and leaves and 
roots were highly sought after in the 
early days of exploration for their sup- 
posed medicinal properties. Gerard’s 
Herbal (1597) asserted that “The roote 
of sassafras hath power to comfort the 
liver, and to dissolve oppilations, to 
comfort the weake and feeble sto- 
macke, to cause a good appetite, to con- 
sume windiness, the chiefest cause of 
cruditie and indigestion, stay vomiting, 
and make sweete a stinking breath.” 
Gerard had much more to say about 
the beneficial qualities of this native 
American tree, which explorers found 
growing from southern Maine to Flori- 
da and west to the Mississippi. There 
seemed to be almost no human ill it 
would not cure, from plague to syphilis. 
Prices for this new-found panacea sky- 
rocketed, and it rapidly became one of 
the chief early American exports to Eu- 
rope. Annals of late-sixteenth-century 
exploration are full of excited accounts 
of discoveries of stands of sassafras. 
Walter Raleigh did his best to claim a 
monopoly on East Coast sassafras 
trade; in 1602, he confiscated a cargo 
brought back to England by an inde- 
pendent expedition to Cape Cod. 
Indians had helped the men on that 
voyage harvest sassafras on Cutty- 
hunk Island off what is now New Bed- 
ford. They were already convinced of 
the curative powers of sassafras tea, 
and their British visitors were given 
concrete proof of its benefits when one 
of them took it to relieve a bellyache 
brought on “by eating the bellies of 
Dogfish, a very delicious meate.” 
Eventually, as Thoreau wrote, sassa- 
fras “lost its reputation.” That is, it was 
no longer prescribed for infectious dis- 
eases, and the bottom fell out of the 
market. But even today, sassafras tea is 
sold in health-food stores. I recently 
brewed some and found it mild, appeal- 
ingly red in color, and unremarkable in 
flavor. On the other hand, sassafras 
trees are quite remarkable. They reach 
a height of ninety feet in the Great 
Smoky Mountains and may live for 
1,000 years. They produce three kinds 
of leaves, some lance shaped and entire, 
some three lobed, and some that are 
mittenlike with an oblique lobe on ei- 
ther side. Old trees have deeply fur- 
rowed, reddish brown bark, tinged with 
ash gray. The wood itself is reddish. 
Branches spread almost at right angles 
from the trunk and support smaller ver- 
tical branches. 
Not only did the Indians teach the 
settlers to use the various parts of these 
magnificent trees for teas and gumbo 
thickening, but the settlers quickly be- 
gan adapting sassafras to a recipe they 
had brought with them from Europe. 
With the bark, they brewed beer. 
In colonial days, sassafras beer was 
only one of several “root” beers decoct- 
ed from things growing in the woods. 
Birch beer, spruce beer, and sarsaparil- 
la beer were all common early Ameri- 
can beverages produced with roughly 
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