FOOD SPECIAL...Nannari syrup with soda makes for great root beer

Nannari syrup with soda makes for great root beer

Reading American comics like Archie and Dennis the Menace as a kid required an ability to isolate items that seemed to make no sense. These American kids played cricket with a thick stick — OK, whatever.
And they ate peanut butter with jelly — how did they get the quivering dessert which was what I knew as jelly to stick onto a slice of bread, and did the peanut butter really help? But, fine, it was their taste. And they washed this down with root beer — huh? American kids drank beer? Made from roots?
I finally got to try it when I visited the US and it was a surprise. I had learned by then that, sadly, commercially made root beer no longer contained alcohol, but this dark fizzy liquid looked like a cola. It was, in fact, one of a number of drinks first concocted in 19th century USA for medicinal purposes, which, with the addition of soda water and much sugar, found even more popularity under names like Coca Cola (which originally contained cocaine and cola nut extract) and Pepsi Cola (meant, as the name indicates, to help with dyspepsia).
Root beer was based on two very different plants which shared a similar herby sweetness — the sassafras tree and the sarsaparilla creeper. Both were used by Native Americans as medicinal herbs, and were enthusiastically taken up by Europeans who presumably felt that something so strong tasting must have benefits. They were both used as medicines in their own right, and to flavour other, more bitter tasting medicines, which is probably why they became less popular over time.
When the association of a taste is with something strongly medicinal, you're likely to take against it (Coke and Pepsi avoided sarsaparilla flavours for more citrusy ones, which is why they don't seem medicinal). India too has sarsaparilla flavours in its herbarium. There are again two herbs with similar tastes and both were known to ayurveda before the British discovered them and, confusingly, named them both Indian sarsaparilla for their similarity to the American herb.
One is a forest creeper called Crytolepis buchanani, but the more common one is Hemidesmus indicus, a shrub with slender leaves that grows across much of India, and which is known by names like anantamulor nannari. Dominik Wujastyk's The Roots of Ayurveda, a selection of famous ayurvedic texts, lists both types of Indian sarsaparilla as being the ingredients used at the start of making a preparation known as the Great Good Luck Ghee.
As seems to be common to such traditional medicines, these herbs are credited with a bewildering range of benefits. One text I found online described Indian sarsaparilla as being "aphrodisiac, antipyretic, alexiteric, antidiarrhoeal, astringent..." and that's only the As. I am no expert on the validity of any of this (though I didn't notice anything in particular relating to the first term), but the one thing I can say for sure is that Indian sarsaparilla also tastes pretty good.
In fact, it tastes rather better than American sarsaparilla, which has a certain bitter intensity that presumably American kids have got used to while drinking root beer, but which can come as a surprise to first time tasters. Indian sarsaparilla (meaning Hemidesmus indicus) takes the basic herby sweetness of sarsaparilla, but eliminates the bitter notes and adds on a wonderful aroma, part woody, part vanilla. When you try it you first get the intense herbal taste, but after a couple of seconds a secondary aroma unfurls across your palate and up your nose.
It is like smelling vanilla cookies, rum cakes and gingerbread being baked in an old bakery with a wood burning stove. There is a parallel here with the class of perfumes known as gourmand aromas for their spicysweet food smells, of which Thierry Mugler's Angel is the best known. They are fiercely polarising perfumes with some people adoring them and other people unable to understand why anyone would want to smell like a bakery. If you're in the first category, then Indian sarsaparilla is for you.
As an ayurvedic herb Indian sarsaparilla is known across the country, but as a beverage, known as nannari syrup, it only seems to be popular in South India. Even here it is something of a vanishing taste, with people remembering it from their childhood, but rarely having tried it recently.
It does take getting used to -the woody note, in particular, is almost too weird, but it is also intriguing, so you keep trying it again and again to figure out if you really like it, and before you know it you are hooked. Nannari syrup is one of those things which you aren't entirely sure you like, and then before you know it you've finished most of the bottle.

To find it you have to go to places like Matunga in Mumbai where South Indian stores stock items you will get nowhere else in the city. (In Chennai itself I couldn't it find it in most regular stores, until I went to Triplicane in the old part of the city). A few stores may stock the syrup, but if you want the roots you will have to go to Kannara Stores, a shop that has a distinctly witchy air, with its boxes of dried roots, berries and barks. The syrup is easiest to use, but I find is often made too sweet, so it's not a bad idea to buy some roots and try making a more balanced syrup yourself.
Nannari syrup is great to drink when it's hot, since its woody notes are cooling. If you add it to soda you have root beer better than any American kind, and I've also made a great cocktail by adding a shot to sparkling white wine. But I also find it is good to drink warm — brewing the roots into tea or adding the syrup to warm milk. The warm, spicy vanilla smells are wonderfully soothing, good to drink when even a monsoon as meagre as this one leaves its full complement of colds and chills. Perhaps all those multiple health claims for Indian sarsaparilla might be true, and this is the one medicine that is really as good to drink as it is good for you.

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