the.com/sassafras
the tree that flavored root beer until America found out it might kill you
means A North American tree with mitten-shaped, aromatic leaves and a fragrant root bark once prized for flavoring root beer, tea, and tonics, now largely banned in food because its key oil, safrole, is a suspected carcinogen.
from Borrowed in the 16th century from the Spanish sassafrás, a name early Spanish explorers and physicians attached to the tree's medicinal root in the Americas. Its deeper source is uncertain — it may be a reshaping of an older botanical word for a stone-breaking plant (Latin saxifraga, literally 'rock-breaker'), or possibly an attempt to capture an Indigenous name; honestly, the trail goes cold in the New World, where the tree was already valued by Native peoples long before Europeans bottled it.
- root beer
- Original flavoring, banned by FDA in 1960
- safrole
- Its oil is carcinogenic and a meth precursor
- three leaves
- Grows mittens, ghosts, and oval shapes on one tree
- gumbo file
- Ground leaves thicken Louisiana Creole cooking
- name origin
- Likely Spanish botanists slurring an older word
sassafras tea — traditional appalachian beverage made from sassafras root bark, popular in american folk medicine for centuries
sassafras albidum — native tree species found in eastern north america, produces distinctive mitten-shaped leaves and safrole-containing roots