Opinion & Comment

Sassafras Tea, Poke Salet & Ramps For Health

APPALACHIAN NOTEBOOK - Steve Oden

Drink sassafras tea in the month of March, and you won’t need a doctor all year long.”

The old mountain folks swore by this saying and the efficacy of boiled sassafras as a spring tonic. Whether or not types of “root medicine” actually work is open to debate. What’s important was that the people who dosed themselves with sassafras or spicebush tea had faith that it would do them good.

A friend of mine, folklorist Juanita Canada, digs sassafras roots. She scrubs and peels the roots, ties sassafras bundles together, and decorates the aromatic packages with dried flowers to present as gifts in the early springtime. It’s an announcement to all who know Juanita that she has at last spied harbingers of the change of seasons: swallow scouts checking the gourd nests, buttercups pushing through the soil, and dandelions blooming in the frost-nipped lawn.

I love the smell of boiling sassafras tea but not the taste. Sweet iced tea is my drink of choice all year long, although many folks have become interested in hot teas, herbal teas, and chai. Chai is simply an old British naval terms for tea, but clever marketers have adopted the word and associated it with medicinal values.

My maternal grandmother brewed spring tonic tea from the new leaves of dandelion plants. It was a horrible-tasting concoction, but she claimed it helped prevent ring worm. She also cooked young dandelion leaves and mixed the greens with spring nettles and green onions. This dish supposedly had tonic qualities, but Granny just plain hankered for the taste of fresh stewed greens after a long winter.

Several mountain folks of my acquaintance, including a Baptist preacher friend, praise the healthy virtues of ramps. Ramps are in the wild onion and garlic family. The plants, which resemble leeks but have broader leaves, are tipped with an edible but very pungent bulb.

“Got to have me a mess o’ ramps every spring,” says Preacher, who claims these wild plants thin the blood. At least one Saturday in April, after he has finished writing his Sunday sermon, Preacher wanders the woods and hills with his eyes on the ground, searching for a patch of emerging ramps. He prefers to fry his ramps in bacon grease, seasoning the dish with salt, pepper, and a little vinegar.

“Fine eatin’… mighty fine!” he brags after opening all the windows in his kitchen to let the odor of cooked ramps dissipate.

Next morning, the first two rows of pews at the front of his small country church are always empty. No one can stand to sit in front of Preacher where he might breathe on them. Despite the nutritional value and tastiness of ramps, the plants produce a severe case of halitosis for several days. Therefore, the true medicinal value of ramps might be attributed to bad breath. People with cold germs or flu viruses will keep their distance from a ramp eater.

My father’s favorite spring tonic is poke salet greens.

Tall, purple-berried poke plants, growing in fence rows, on trash heaps, and along old railroad tracks, make a tasty dish when the young, tender leaves are collected early in the year. A mess of poke salet must be boiled several times, with the water poured off and fresh liquid added, before the leaves can be fried.

Dad prepares his poke salet in much the same way as Granny’s dandelion greens and spring nettles. He fries bacon, removes the crisp rashers from the pan, then briefly cooks the boiled poke leaves in the grease while adding green onions, salt and pepper, and vinegar. His last touch is to scramble eggs in the middle of the greens.

Imagine my surprise recently to see on a grocery store shelf cans of ready-to-cook poke salet! “Allen’s Poke Salet Greens” is the brand. I never knew my father’s favorite spring tonic had gone commercial. On the shelf underneath was a row of canned creecy greens from Betty Ann Foods. Creecy is wild mustard, also known as dryland cress, another type of green cited on lists of spring tonics.

I’ve been eating spring greens for years. In fact, I enjoy green-leafed vegetables of all types. The best poke salet I ever ate, however, came from a café in Arab, Ala.

Located along the Sand Mountain chain of the southern Appalachians, Arab was home to the Alabama Poke Salet Festival. (The Arab Chamber of Commerce Web site apparently had not been updated in some time, so I can’t guarantee that the festival is still held.)

Back in the mid-1990s, the Poke Salet Festival was a big deal, and the El Rancho Café in downtown Arab was the place to go for a bowl of poke salet, pinto beans, and a wedge of cornbread.

Ramps also are celebrated with festivals across the eastern U.S. The Richwood, W. Va., Ramp Fest, the International Ramp Cook-off and Festival (I’d hate to be one of the judges…) in Elkins, W. Va., and the Polk County Ramp and Tramp Festival at Greasy Creek, Tenn., are annual events held in April. Flag Pond, Tenn., celebrates its ramp festival in May.